Drug Ethnography in the United Kingdom Briggs, D. (201 3). Crack users: High society and low life in South London. London, England: Routledge, 214 pp. $26.95 (paperback edition), ISBN: 978-0-415-87050-4.For most people, when the word cocaine is mentioned, the image that immediately springs to mind is that of a young African American living in a deprived inner urban area in the United Crack use in South London is not what we can imagine immediately. In fact, given the recent interest in drugs and the nighttime economy in the United Kingdom, we might be more inclined to think about ecstasy or concerns with legal highs. But by reading Daniel Briggs' study of people who use crack cocaine, these images will certainly begin to alter. In charting the lives of people who use crack in South London, Briggs sets out to correct our understanding of the crack scene which remains limited to the United States. His book is a very detailed and readable, albeit disturbing, account of one group of crack users in the United Kingdom. In the tradition of previous drug studies by ethnographic researchers as well as other ethnographies of the economically deprived sectors of the U.S. cities (e.g., Bourgois, 1995; Maher, 1997; Sterk, 1999; Williams, 1989), Briggs has produced a finely nuanced ethnography of drug use among a highly marginalized group of people. Such an understanding of crack users, their social relationships, and their identities is important for an overall understanding of contemporary drug use in the United Kingdom and also for providing a slight corrective to the current interest in alcohol and other drug use among mainstream youth.Not only has Briggs produced an important study to continue the vital tradition of alcohol and other drug ethnographies, but he has done so in spite of a number of obstacles. As qualitative researchers, many of us are fully aware of the many difficulties in conducting ethnography and gaining the confidence of our respondents, but Briggs started facing the difficulties even before he began his fieldwork. These obstacles did not pertain to the rigors and difficulties of doing extended fieldwork but instead were those increasingly faced by qualitative researchers in gaining permission from university ethics committees, or, as they are called in the United States, Institutional Review Boards. Such committees decide whether the proposed work is too risky to be conducted and if they believe that it is, then the approval is refused. Unfortunately, as writers such as Jock Young and his colleagues (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2008) make clear, such decisions are taken not on the grounds of academic excellence but are instead guided by concerns of university liability. As Young notes, Thrasher (1927), Anderson (1923), Becker (1963), and Polsky (1967), to name just a few, would have had severe problems attempting to conduct their research today. Fortunately, Briggs, having failed to gain approval from two universities, was able to gain support from a drug treatment agency in South London, although he was forced to sign an insurance liability waiver.The overall aim of the research was twofold, that is, to fill a gap in the available literature by examining the life of people who used crack and, more specifically, to examine why they dropped out of drug and other services. Over the course of 9 months, Briggs conducted fieldwork in Rivertown, a region of South London. In that time, he made contact with 85 people who used crack, of whom 54 agreed to one-on-one interviews. His sample comprised 64 men and 21 women, with the majority of them in their 30s. Although he does not provide detailed demographic information on national data for crack users, Briggs does provide sociodemographic information for users in Rivertown. On the basis of these data, the gender ratio of his sample (3:1 male to female) is similar to that of Rivertown's. Using data from his fieldwork and interviews, Briggs explores the day-to-day lives of his research participants, the ways in which they make their decisions, their daily interactions, their social, physical, and health problems, and the structural constraints that shape their lives. …