Philippe Bourgois on the Lives and Thoughts of Inner City Drug Dealers

any type of drug. One of the most popular episodes the Psychoactive to date has been the one where I invited my friend Julie Holland to service my co host and answer questions with me from you the audience. So we're going to record another one of those episodes, and we need your questions. Leave us a voicemail with a question as detailed as possible at one eight three, three, seven, seven nine sixty, or you can record a voice memo and send it to Psychoactive at protozoa dot com. I'm

sure it's going to be a great second go with this. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today we have as our guest Philippe Bougua, who is one of the more distinguished professors in the United States looking at issues around drug users drug markets.

He's an anthropologist and ethnographer. Whereas many scholars and anthropologists will just kind of jump in and we'll go and they'll do their interviews and come back and I'll take a year or two, Philippe has actually spent almost a decade or more in three different communities of either drug sellers or drug users in a really deep sort of immersion and produced these incredible books, one called In Search of Respect, one called Righteous Dope Fiends, as well as

dozens and dozens of articles. He's been a distinguished professor at San Francisco State University and University California, San Francisco, and University of Pennsylvania, and now he's currently at u C l A where he continues to do this work. So Philip, thank you for joining me on Psychoactive. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Well, thanks, thanks, Ethan. I wish I was everything that you said I was. He

made me sound terrific. Actually, I'm just an obsessed ten whatever ten twelve years of field work at all my sites. But it's actually even twelve, twenty years or thirty years and now sometimes forty. In your first book in Search of Respect, which was about the seven years I guess you lived from five to ninety two in East Harlem. That was exactly the period when the War on drugs was going into hyper speed and crack cocaine was becoming

a major phenomenon. And then here we're talking about the Upper East Side of New York right where you you know, have some of the billionaires of New York living in the East seventies and eighties and up into the low nineties, and then things change radically as you move into East Harlem. It's kind of a more gradual shift on the Upper west Side of New York with the Upper east Side has been sort of almost infamous for that great divide.

Yet that time back when in my day Street was it was literally called the demilitarized zone, and it just if you were on the subway, that was where all the whites got out got out of the subway. It was just a caricature of apartheid. So, Philip, if somebody asked you your book of Search of Respect, what's it about, and you've got all of an elevator conversation to say it,

what's the answer. It's the phenomenon of what I call us inner city apartheid, which is the fact that every single large and even small American city has a phenomenon of a of a racially and class divided set of aggregated poverty, and that that is not normal. I wanted to show what what its effect is on the people scrambling to survive and scrambling to search for a sense of humanity and dignity, because that's what they're They're just universal,

They're they're they're the same as everyone else. They want a job that pays them decently, that gives them respect. And so that's what I wanted to convey, that the tragedy of the crack epidemic was about energetic, charismatic youth whose lives were getting damaged by racist and classist policies of America, of the US that has set up the phenomenon of segregated inner cities in every single large city

and even small city of the United States. You are living in East Harlem with your wife and your young child, who is maybe a couple of years old at that time, and you described walking around this neighborhood, one of the one of only white people living there, and sometimes with your little kid on your on your shoulders, and in a way it was almost offering a form of protection in as you pursued your ethnographic work in your relationships in the community. So I really marveled at your I

guess bravery to some extent in doing this. Well, Actually it was really fun, and that was That's the strange thing about ethnography is that if you like to hang out and chit chat with people, and if you like to make new friends and also cross boundaries that are forbidden, you actually get paid to do that. You're supposed to do that as an anthropologist. So it was fun. It

was simple too. I just got an apartment. And the weird thing was that that's sort of the nature of racism and how it gets enforced in the United States, is that as a white person at that time going into Harlem, you felt like a kuk for doing it. So as long as you didn't care about being seen as a kuk, people were thrilled that you were there. They were curious, they wanted to talk to you, and they said, oh, wow, white boy, what are you doing here?

I guess with the cops were seeing you and saying, yo, white boy, what were you doing here? Was a little different. Well, they were. They profiled me, and that's the that's, of course, what we know. The story of the war on drugs is based on racial profiling. It's the simplest, cheapest way for for police officers to operate. And so no matter what laws we passed saying that that's racist and they can't do it, that's what they do. So that was what was happening to me. And they could only see

me as a drug addict. And it was interesting because the sellers at first site could only see me as a cop. Because the undercover cops at that time in New York City were sort of better paid, higher status and so forth, then they were almost all white. The police sports is notoriously white all the time. All the New York's is slightly less or considerably less, but the

undercovers were white. When I would walk down an active street selling block, including my own block, you know, at first people would scatter, but then in the in the micro neighborhood where people learned to recognize me as a neighbor, then I was just assumed to be harmless. There were a few elderly white Italians still living in the neighborhood, so people also, you know, assumed I had come back

to live with my grandmother or something like that. I know that before you did this, you had done maybe your graduate work in a first book doing well. A lot of anthropologists do. They went to a foreign country. I think you worked in banana plantations Central America. But I'm curious. You know, you come back to New York East harm You're living not far from you grew up, So just to take you backwards, at what age did you realize that this is what you wanted to do

for your adult life? And in what ways were you impacted growing up on the Upper East Side living just blocks from this, And did you ever imagine you would come back to study this community that was just ten or twenty blocks north of you. You know, it's strange, but I sort of did. Because the only way wealthy people in my neighborhood could go out of the city was to drive right through the heart of East Harlem.

So we would take Madison up to a street and take a right, or go over to Lexington, right in the absolute heart of Puerto Rican East Harlem and make it to the Tribe ro Bridge to get out to Long Island, which is the pretty place and play land of the rich. So my father was French and he couldn't stand American racism, and you know, he was basically a social democrat. He was a progressive guy, and he would say, this country is disgusting. Look how it treats

its citizens. And he would tell me he was worried because he could see that I was becoming a gring going American and and so he was like telling me, son, this is not normal. Don't think this country is normal. This isn't how a state should be run. This is an outrage. So that moved me. And then my high school would bust us out because there aren't any there hardly any parks and playgrounds where we would go to.

Soccer practice was out in Rikers Island, Randall Island. There you go, you you're in New York or legit, legit. So the you know, kids in the neighborhood would see us rich kids in the bus going out to have fun, and they would throw rocks at us, and it would be humiliating because you'd realize that it was normal for them. To be angry at us, you know. So there'd be a few, you know, Latino and African American kids and they would try to go out to the window and say,

don't don't, please, don't throw rocks my people. I remember, poor guy did that, an African American kid, and boom a rock hit him, and you know, you really felt the reality of the inequality and how painful it was for people who are suffering on the side that's oppressed. And then I was getting mugged. So this these were the These were much more violent years, and so the kids who were poor would come downtown and and look for rich white kids to grab the change they had

in their pocket. And we didn't know how to fight. I've never swung a punch at anyone in my life, so we were easy targets. So maybe a half dozen times I was mugged, and you would get mildly beaten up. I learned to run fast, so I would ushould be able to run away fast. I used to joke with the guys that I did field work that they had probably mugged me. And then they would tell me stories

of mugging little white boys. You know. They sometimes say, you know, a conservative as a liberal who's been mind you've got mugged half a dozen times, and and yet you become somebody who becomes very left in your perspective and analysis and intrigued and better understanding the community. You know from where young guys would coming amog you. This whole project began as a procrastination from writing my dissertation.

So I had done my field work for my pH d and anthropology on a United Fruit Company plantation that spanned the borders between Panama and Costa Rica, and I was looking at how the corporation, the United Fruit Corporation literally did a divide and convert manipulation, you know, of the ethnicity of the diverse workers that it would import start a union. They would just bring in a different

ethnic group. They would bring in Afro Caribbeans from St. Kitts And then when this St. Kittsians would organize the union, they would bring in Negabay and er Indians from the lowlands of of Panama and and break each union. So the workers were pitted against each other into virulent racism. And so it was just a classic divide and conquer her. I wanted to try to figure out who is making money off of this, because you could see it on

the banana plantation that racism was profitable. And that's what's always interested me. Why do these cruel systems and these irrationalities of such overwhelming cruel racism persist for so long? And I really do think that on some level it's because they do make money for rich people. I know that sounds a little conspiratorial, but it isn't. It's just the natural law. Even people who aren't rich try to

make money. You know, it's sort of more or less any which way they can within some limits of ethics, but a lot of the time they forget their ethics, and so corporations more easily forget their ethics and can do it on an industrial scale and more cruelly than individuals can. So that's what I wanted to try to apply to the phenomenon of the inner city. I was.

I was. I. I wanted to take up, in a sense, my father's challenge to try to show my fellow Americans, so to speak, um, because I am hopelessly American despite my name, culturally and personally, and you know whatever, baseball is my favorite sport, so um, you know how you know, what a weird thing for someone with a French name. So that I wanted to show that the inner city didn't make sense and shouldn't be taken for granted. So when you come back, I mean you obviously you start heating.

You're already living here, and you have to start insinuating yourself into this and people are suspicious that you might be an undercover cop. And how do you break through that? I mean, what was it like to break through into Well, luckily I had a very cheap, lousy car for Galaxy whatever. It was four hundred or some you know, clunker like that,

and so it was constantly broken. So I would just do mechanical work on it, which I didn't know how to do, And so people would feel sorry for me making all these mistakes and and and would come and help me. And that was literally how I got to meet a whole bunch of people. Right in the beginning. The first people to befriend me were the little kids who were playing in the street. They cross racialized boundaries super super easily, and they're thrilled to talk to anyone

who's nice and friendly to them. So that was basically how it began. And and then I basically just made friends with my neighbors, and and then my wife got pregnant and so forth. So I was just a normal person doing what normal people do. And she was Latina, and so basically it was easy. When I wandered off my block, everyone thought I was a cop. You know, New York is so huge, your your neighborhood recognition doesn't

extend much further than the block you're on. Practically, my my son tells me not to feel guilty about it, but I used to go to new blocks carrying my son because then people knew that I wasn't a cop. I was probably a white addict looking for heroin because there were a lot of white addicts coming up. I mean, that's a big part of the market right there. The whites have a lot of money, and and so that was what in some sense drove the market, because that

was outside money coming in, you know. And then I would explain, no, I'm not I'm not actually using I'm just just hanging out here. I live around the corner and I wanted to see how things were. It was the moment of crack coming in, which was first the basically it's that story of of the perversity of enforcements. So it was the US War on Drugs in Florida,

you know, was targeting marijuana. So the cartels in the various importers in the Caribbean and and Colombian and other parts of Latin America shift to more profitable, lower volume product, which was cocaine, which is what they the other thing they produced, which is what I mean. You were looking for an apartment in New York, Did you want to live in that neighborhood? You know? On the on? Oh yeah, yeah.

So I had already experienced as an ethnographer by then, having worked in in Nicaragua and the Mosquitia, basically an indigenous territories, and so I knew that the first thing I had to do was become normal. And the only way to become normal is to live where you're gonna work. Right. But but a question I'm asking is, could you just have easily landed up in Washington Heights, which was maybe a more Dominican neighborhood, or in or in Central Harlem,

or more black neighborhood, that sort of thing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was one other person doing ethnography at the exact same a little bit even before me, at the exact same time. He was a friend of mine, Terry Williams, who's a sociologist. He's I think he's now at the New School, and he was right in Washington Heights. He was he was married at that time to a Dominican woman. So, and that the whole structure of the takeover from the

traditional Italian mafia was was a Dominican takeover. So that's why it hit that part of the city, which was their neighborhood. Did you think you're gonna land up spending seven years, No, no, no, no, not at all. That's because it was too much fun and it's so hard to write, right, So you procrastinate on your writing by saying I need to do more field work. That's the anthropological sin. And you know it's not exactly laziness, because

you also have to take fieldwork notes. If you don't take fieldwork notes when you do your you know, participant obposit what we call we call it participant observation ethnography, you your mind ends up playing tricks on you. So I did have the discipline to take notes because I sort of enjoyed writing a diary. So I just turned them into a more sort of social science description of my daily life, and then around specific themes. And you carried a tape recorder. Yeah, yeah, you know. I've always

found popular language gorgeous and and exciting and poetic. And the guys I happened to make become best friends with were street geniuses, and they we became close friends. If they had grown up in another neighborhood, they would have been professors like me, or doctors or horrible corporate executives. But I was lucky. I mean, this was also you forget, this was the moment of hip hop, and we we didn't even know what we were seeing, but it was.

It was just spectacularly beautiful and so much energy. People would put up barricades, and the barricades would be huge speakers and just start beatboxing and playing music and rapping, and then they're you know, there'd be duels that the contests, and and you'd be watching it and and it was just so exciting. We'll be talking more after we hear this ADM. Well, fully, let me ask you what I mean.

You can see as I read the book In Search of Respect and other things you've written, you know, you're basically willing to delve into all sorts of challenging areas. But I wonder if there were some questions you never pursued, for example, not asking about the sources of cocaine higher up to chain, the sorts of things that an undercover agent might want to find out with, Like, were there

certain things you just avoided wanting to know absolutely? You know, I was close enough even to the head guy, you know, I could I could ask Ray about that. But Ray just bought it from a Dominican, so he didn't really know that much more. I knew that much, but it was just impossible. I never talked to a kilo supplier, you know, he would buy a kilo or a half a kilo. But that was that was the high is

that I got right? But fully, do you describe a moment in that book where you accidentally dishim not realizing that he is illiterate, and he you start I mean, you describe moments in the book where you're a little worried that he might in the wrong mood, wake up on the wrong side of the bed and decide he

wants to hurt you or kill you. And there are some other moments in the book where you find some situations there's gunshots going around all the time, and there are sometimes straight bullets, and there are bystanders getting killed, and there's different gangs, and there's people who are not part of the world that's accepted you are one step removed, who don't trust you. I mean, weren't you living with an incredibly high level of anxiety and sometimes fear while

you're doing this research? Sort of yes and no, in the sense that when it's certainly now when I look back at the statistics, you can see the graph they just go through the roof right. Homicide, Yeah, yeah, shooting, shootings and homicide sides, especially at in the middle of my field work, you know, around they just spike up. I mean, homicides is what they keep the best records on because there's a body they can count tragically. But so that was all around, and I still have all

my tape recordings and they're just riddled with gunshots. So it wasn't like it was necessarily every night, but it was almost every night that there would be, if not close, gunshots, at least they would be audible from five six, you know, blocks away. So that was bad, but it was I mean, that's the nature, I guess of life. You naturalize it. Plus, the guys I hung out with scared people, so they were protecting me. And they didn't go out alone either.

They didn't like to go out alone either, even though they knew how to fight super well and had fought all their lives. But they would go out in pairs and they would never, you know, walk the money home alone. They would walk with each other and and take care of each other. Well. You know, I was curious because I noticed that in your second research project, which is from six where you're doing a project with San Francisco homeless heroin addicts, and in that case you have a

partner working with you, a graduate students photographer. And then when you moved to Philadelphia and you spend over a decade once again in a Puerto Rican community and a drug dealing community there, you seem to be part of a team. And I'm wondering that in terms of your own evolution, did you find as you got older that you felt more comfortable sort of managing the risk, or that that that that one of the advantages of working with a second person or a team was to reduce

that sense of vulnerability. That's certainly true. Objectively, you're so called positionality. What you look like to people, that's what we call positionality and anthropology. It affects what you have access to and how people see you. So and I was starting the field work initially. I think I was twenty four or twenty five, twenty six at the time, and I have a baby face, so people don't take

you serious. You know, you can only be up to no good if you're that age, basically, and so older people wouldn't talk to me that much or take me that seriously. Now you know, as a frankly a sixty five year old, people treat me with respect because I'm an elderly person who is polite and friendly and and and and a professor. So people you know, say, oh, professor and so forth, and they're they're they're nice to me.

So you get access to different things. That next project, Righteous Dope Fiend was precisely because I hadn't been able to face and deal with whatever the meaning of the term addiction is. And and that was because my best friends were basically dealing with chronic consumption that they couldn't control,

and and that wasn't their experience of it. Their experience was it was of being twenty something early twenty something year old, at the height of their life, you know, making all kinds of money, selling drugs, having all kinds of of people think they were important and so forth. And so I coded my notes and I was going to write a chapter of it on it on quote unquote addiction in in in Search of Respect, and just cut it out of the book because I didn't know

how to deal with it. So Righteous Dope find is about the experience of the buyers rather than the sellers, even though many of the sellers can't control their habit and get destroyed by what they're selling. And so that was why I went to people that basically were completely homeless, cut off from their families, outcast pariah's who were injecting heroine and smoking crack. Quite a bit older, right, yeah,

they were a little bit. They were about ten years older than me on average, because that was the original

generation that got swept off their feet by crack. I mean, my generation was the generation selling it to them, and they were the heroin injectors that then, wow, all of a sudden, the price of cocaine has gone to almost nothing, started injecting powder cocaine, and then the next thing they knew there was this new product even more fun than powder cocaine, which was the same product but converted into

a base form that you can smoke. That they considered as much fun as injecting cocaine, but easier to do because it's complicated and it hurts to, you know, pierce your veins. There's a limited number of times that you can inject, right. But I mean also in terms of the impact on the brain and the feeling of it, right that basically smoking a substance or injecting it, the

quickness of the onset is roughly the same. Actually, according to my colleagues at all the medical schools where I've taught, it's actually even faster when you inhale, because the the vascular system that goes from your lungs to your rain is faster than the one that travels through your veins. It has to go through your heart and then out again and so forth or wherever it goes. But it's a matter of a few seconds of difference often times,

right between smoking or injecting. Right. But that's what the whole fun is. That's the problem. Right, that's what you become obsessed with when you can't control it and you're just craving that. Yeah, and that's that industrialization of drugs. That is the tragedy of prohibition, is that what happens is the drug goes into its most you know, it's most sort of dangerous and toxic form, because the milder forms or whatever beer compared to alcohol, you know, are

considerably less dangerous. When they get integrated culturally, people learn how to control them. There's an article that I've quoted on a few of these episodes. It was a classic piece by Joe Westermeyer in the Archives of General Psychiatry called the pro Heroin Effects of Antiopium Laws, and it just showed the transition from smokable, eatable, drinkable opium to heroin.

You know, for all the reasons that it's more discreet, it's easier to traffic, it's easier to hide, it doesn't smell as much, and similing with alcohol prohibition, you see the shift from beer and wine to hard liquor, both bootleg liquor and smuggled hard liquor. So, you know, that does seem to be a general phenomenon in terms of

this transition. But you know, Philip, the tension that is just palpable through everything you write, right, is that on the one hand, you're befriending these people involved in selling drugs and Philly or Ease Tarlem or in the drug using you know, hero injecting scene in San Francisco, and you're befriending them, you're getting to know them. You're also becoming aware that they're engaged in types of behavior and ways of thinking which you are almost anybody would find

absolutely reprehensible. They're hurting people, they're killing people. They're racist, they're mass soogynist, they're involved in gang rape. I mean, these are the people you're hanging out with, and I can hear you sort of you know, but these are your friends. And then there's this other part of you which is saying, but let's look at this from a moral structural perspective. Let's understand the conditions that can lead people to be this way, and that tension going back

and forth. If you could just expound a bit on what it was like living with that tension and encountering when you realize that the people you see as your friends kind of would joke about gang rape. That was the worst track. You know, the worst violence was was was obviously the gang rape, and that was the hardest to deal with. They would argue with me about it, that that's the way it manifested. By the time they started telling me about gang rape, we were already close friends.

I knew them as human beings, and I could tell them what I thought. They didn't call it rape. They didn't conceive of it that way. That's the perversity of rape is. They were saying, that's what the girl deserved because she was hanging out with us, and girls shouldn't be out at at night, the classic language of rapists

and hyper masculinity. So I would argue with them, and it was interesting because the guy I called Primo, who's who I still stay in touch with, who was really my best friend, he came around and he started feeling guilty about it. But the guy called Caesar would just argue back at me. And I didn't want to sweep it under the rug. I wanted to confront it, even though it's hard for a man to write about that, and it was very hard for me to get women

to trust me enough to tell those stories. And so I write about it, mostly from the perspective of the perpetrators. This this other moment, I think we're the filu call Caesar, right, it's just kind of joking around, having beat up on a kid who who you know, probably a cerebral palsy, and he's telling you the story. It doesn't realize that this is just after you'd found out that your own

son had been diagnosed with that. And you say in the book like, I could never forgive him for this, and do you actually forgive him or oh, yeah, yeah, that makes me sad, yeah, remembering that moment. Yeah, because my my wonderful son, who's great, he was born with cerebral palsy and it got diagnosed in a free clinic in East Harlem. My wife and I were just completely freaked out and and we couldn't tell yet cerebral palsy

because he was a happy baby. He just didn't crawl and it made him a lot easier baby, and it made him much more sociable. But Caesar was one of the jerk bullies who was beating up the kids with special needs at his school, and so that really really made me angry a sad basically, but yet yet on some level, you still regarded them as friends, and you invited them with to your mother's home on the Upper

East Side, and Trimo was my friend. Caesar I would tolerate because I recognized his genius and there were dimensions to his humanity. He was also an abused child. He had been in special needs classes all his life, so that was part of what threw him into that perverse hierarchy of beating on the other kids with special needs who were lower on the totem pole than him or more visible than him. And he was raised by a grandmother who beat the crap out of him, and so

he had a hard life. So I could understand and set him in context at the same time. And they were talking so honestly to me. They were pouring out their lives, you know, and sometimes we would cry so that I think I probably censored that out because for my own hyper masculinity. Right, But that is the nature of the contradictions, right. A victim can be a perpetrator, and a perpetrator can be a victim, and that's the

complexity of it, and they often go together. When you go to San Francistico, then you moved to Philadelphia, take the job in City, Pennsylvania, and you get involved right in studying this community of drug dealers, Puerto Rican drug dealers in Philadelphia, And were there significant differences between what you saw in Philadelphia and which you saw in East Tarlem. That may have just been about the change that one that this was now twenty years later, or that it

was the locality, or that's exactly what I wanted to study. Yeah, yeah, no, you've what what you're asking was the reason, and that was the exact reason for the project. I had been away for twenty years, and I wanted to see how it changed, and I wanted to go to a very similar neighborhood. The Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia is just a poorer, even poorer version than the poorest sections of

the Puerto Rican neighborhood in in New York City. It's smaller as a proportion of the city, has less political power, and it's a more recent rural migration. But it's also the drug clear in ground for retail sales, and it's the most hyper policed neighborhood or one of the most hyper police neighborhoods, because police tend to be even more racist against more segregated African American neighborhoods and more Puerto Ricans are rainbow colors, so that the white customers have

a much easier time coming into Puerto Rican neighborhoods. They're ferociously racist too, because they're just normal, tragically normal Americans, which means they're racist. Both would get beaten up when they went into black neighborhoods to buy drugs, because people don't want a white guy breaking into cars on on his way into your neighborhood to buy drugs from the local sellers in your neighborhood. They were also racist and

didn't like going in those neighborhoods. So they they could deal a little bit more, and they could also pass slightly. They weren't harassed as much by the local population that was angry about the drug dealing and and that it didn't want people burglarizing on their way to get drugs. You know, you describe I mean this intense I don't know if you want to call it racism or ethnic hostility between the Puerto Ricans and the blacks, or between the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans, and as well as

between the between all of them and the whites. Right, And you also describe this thing where where you're talking to them and you're saying, don't you realize this is the old pattern, just like you saw in Central America of the powerful playing marginalized groups off against one another, and they kind of look at you and barely know

what you're talking about. Right. And the same thing you describe in looking at a homeless heroin addics in San Francisco, Right, this intense kind of interracial racism, right, blacks and white white splacks and all of that sort of stuff. I mean, you put it in a structural context, But when you're looking at them and these are once again your friends expressing these hyper bigoted racist views, how do you deal

with that? Is it just in the context? I mean, they're obviously expressing things that you would never find acceptable if being expressed by people who came from the middle class background, came from the group that should technically theoretically

no better, right. Right. And you know it was precisely against Caesar that when I was explaining that to him, the dividing conquer thing, and how he was just naively reproducing racism to his own detriment, he completely understood it and then started making fun of it, and I put fun of me for being you know what. His critique as, oh, Philippe, you make us sound like such sensitive crack dealers. So so he was. And then and then he goes, I'm

not sensitive at all, I'm tough. And so he just went off on a riff like that, which I had to to to counter my argument in some sense. But at the same time he's also just highlighting it and in some sense making it clearer for the reader and to some extent to himself. You know, it's sort of a psychotherapeutic process. You know, he was made more self aware of that idiocy in some sense. Let's take a

break here and go to an ad. It's just interesting because when I think of most anthropologist ethnographers, right, they're going in, they're doing interviews, they're spending some time hanging out, but not with the intensity I think that you did. Did you ever take any criticism from colleagues for getting so deeply a mesh that you had lost object had

a ton a ton. Yeah, So there was an initial reaction to the book that was criticizing it for too much dirty laundry is coming out and then there was a set of readers who said, no, that's not true. I'm from the neighborhood. This needs to be talked about. So there were people defending me, and I was worried. I didn't know if I had done it in a way. Maybe America was too racist for this book to present

all this material. But in fact, what I see now over time is the and and it disappoints me to some extent is the only professors who use my book are progressive professors. It doesn't get used by the right wing. They can't stand the book. They can see that the book is against racism. So so it's it did quote unquote stand the test of time in that sense. But I was worried about it. And that is the worry.

That is the difficulty of ethnography. You want to tell the truth, you want to set the truth in context, and you don't know how the reader will understand it. You can't control the reader. You know, it's a fundamental contradiction of ethnography, the danger of the seduction of a pornography of violence, and and the temptation to, you know, want to sell a best seller by doing a pornography

of violence. And and there there are some classic works that suffer from that, and so for so that was definitely a worry that I had and have and and that I was trying to write. And that's why I structured the book the way I structured it. So I start with, you know, what I think of as the political economy or the Marxist analysis of the book, which is the d industrialization of the U s inner cities that occurred after World War Two, accelerating even faster after

the end of the Korean War. That's what created the the extraordinary levels of unemployment and left the vacuum that

got filled by the you know, narco industry. And I also start with their accounts of having dropped out of high school to work in the sweatshops and the factories that were disappearing at the time, and their job, literally one of their first jobs was to carry out the sewing machines that were being taken away to be sent to some other part of the world where a factory was going to go up, or or we're being taken

for scrap metal. So that the reader could really see those structural forces and see them getting expelled from the labor force into the into the drug economy. I mean, the one thing that I couldn't see ethan was mass incarceration. And that's really interesting because this, like you say, is the moment when you look at the curve. This is when that you know, bell of the curve is zooming, zooming,

zooming up. And it goes from I think fifty thousand people locked up on drug charges in to five hundred thousand people locked up just twenty years later, and the overall prison population. What kind of a country could do that. It's like the stupidest thing a country could do. It's extraordinary. But you just to go back to that thing about Philadelphia.

So you come to Philadelphia twenty years after he's tar alam and and in terms of of the scene, I mean, these are once again young Puerto Rican men by and large. Two things surprise you. As one was that Moose to the people you're hanging out with this East Harlem who are zealing crack land up never go into prison. And another thing that surprises you is that after you leave, at least half of them land up getting legal jobs

for sustained periods of time. Right. But I wonder, so now you were in Philadelphia twenty years later with a generation of young men. What are the fundamental similarities and differences between which you see there among the cohort you're you're spending time with and the group that you've spent with time Within New York in the eighties, the police got more efficient and the system got more brutal. You see it very clearly, even just in the families of

the sellers from East Harlem. Is that the first generation, the guys I made friends with Primo and Caesar and so forth, they would go in for short, very very short stints in jail. Their kids got locked up for a long time. What the US did was it started revving up the sentences when you look at how the

sentencing laws operated. The judges started in forcing it, you know, using the non discretionary laws to to to sentence even more draconian sentences, you know, and throwing less things out of court for the lack of evidence, because the judges still have quite a bit of leeway even with the rules and so forth. And American judges are for the most part reactionary, progressive thinking you're leading out the prosecutors in all this, the police get more efficient, yeah, well yeah,

they're even worse. But judges should know better, right, because we trust the judges, we know the prosecutors against us. Every now and then you get a judge who's a decent human being, or momentarily they're decent human being, but often they're just they just want to throw away the key and punish. Well. It seems like when you were talking about East Harlem gang you had numerous references to a liberal judge who let somebody offer whatever. But in the in the Philadelphia group, as far as I can

tell you, you don't see that as well. Philadelphia is more is more conservative, uh than New York, and it's a more tough, working class city with all of the contradictions of that. So it's more ordinary America. There's no there's no tougher rust belt, arguably than well Detroit maybe, but barely than Philadelphia. Philadelphia, of all the large cities in the United States, has the highest murder rates often not not every single year, but it's always in the

very top tier of the largest cities murder rates. One can really see what gets called the carcerol management of inner city poverty, and carcero means both jail and prison, all those kind and even the release with an electronic device around your ankle that then follows you for another five,

ten years and so forth. So it's that huge expansion of the criminal side of the of the criminal justice process that waste its energy and money on the punishment side, completely neglects the preventative side, and completely neglects the rehabilitation and and and and reintegration side, which you know, other countries aren't that way. Other wealthy countries don't mistreat their poor the way the US does. It is not a

normal thing. Americans are clueless about this. It seems like part of what's going on in Philadelphia is that people are much more likely to get arrested and to get a sent away for many years. So that sort of disrupts things in the drug marks in Philadelphia. Yeah, there's better technology to monitor them, right, There's all that stuff is the use of of horrific violence and of and

of guns. Are are drug dealers even more quick to do that in Philadelphia in the period you were there in the last ten fifteen years than with two and these tarlem in the late eighties early nineties. That's a good question. I can't tell you absolutely statistically, but ethnographically, it didn't feel that different except that I guess what it is now is that the guns were cheap, so there were so there's so many hot guns, guns that have been used for a crime or murder or shooting

that get dumped in the inner city. They don't dare hold onto it anymore because if they get caught on another crime, they'll they'll be able to trace it back to that gun. So they just sell it to someone who sells guns. So the guns are actually at cheaper than the production cost on inner city streets. And that's a real, real, real tragedy. And it's just a recipe for disaster. You give a teenager a gun, put a lot of drugs and alcohol in them, and give them

some crazy money that's easy to make fast. Well, what do you think is going to happen? But what are the surprising things? Right? I mean, you admit surprising almost every surprise if you look at a place like New York and the same things happens in many other cities. Is that homicides which peak at around over two thousand a year in New York right just at the period that you're sort of winding up your in the early nineties, right.

I mean, now we see homicides jumping dramatically in New York in the last couple of years, but even so, the number of homicides is less than a quarter what it was back then. I think it went from homicides in the early ninety and New York has gentrified. New York City has gentrified. You know what is New York. It's a global, cosmopolitan city of pure finance, capital and just play land of the rich. It's not what it

was when we were growing up in it. You used to phrase the moral economy of violence that crack dealers who are better and employing the moral economy of violence, I think, you know, turn out to be more successful.

And then you also put into a broader context of the culture of terra and the ways in which the violence committed by a relatively small part of the community, typically by the crack dealers who you were getting to know, has this humongous effect on the communities in which they're living,

the immediate communities. And I wonder if you could has the moral economy of violence changed any fundamental away When you compare East Harlem in the nineties to Philadelphia, when you think more broadly about what's going on, or is it still the same basic variable that operates whether you're talking about drug dealing their cities or whether you're talking

about surviving, you know, in an incarcerated setting. Yeah, well, thanks for asking about the moral economy of violence, because it reminds me to shout out to my team, my colleagues, who did more of the field work even than I did. So we did it as a team of four people, and two of the people, George Karen Dinos, was basically, you know, a super super young undergraduate who lived full

time in the neighborhood. And Fernando Montero was basically the same age as him, but had gone He was, you know, such a genius that he'd gone through college too fast, so he was taking some time off. And they lived full time in the neighborhood. And they never never, hardly ever even left the neighborhood. I paid for the apart it's that they lived in, you know, and I had a bed in their in their apartment, so I would

stay over and hang out a lot with them. And then my wife, who's also an anthropologist, Lorie Hart, we developed that concept of the moral economy of violence to try to um understand what gets called the culture of terror, because when you say culture of something, you no longer

have to explain it. For some reason, the word culture becomes a mysterious black box that just everyone takes for granted as the way things are, and has nothing to do with structural forces, has nothing to do with complex dynamics that need to be set in historical context. Yes, so that the actual theoretical term that the moral economy

theory of violence that that we developed comes from. Is this wonderful British historian E. P. Thompson he coined it actually to refer to the bread riots at the beginning of way back even before, when all of a sudden people started making money off of bread, which used to be seen as a human right to have access to by the small farmers who were producing it back then. And then all of a sudden capitalism comes around and you can make money off of bread. The prices go up,

people starve when there's a bad harvest. So he would call those moral economy riots and moral economy of violence around the price of bread and around the development of capitalism as a market profit making. So they were trying to discipline the local shopkeepers into being decent people with a sense of ethics towards their community. We wanted to apply that to the drug dealers. The neighborhood did have

some power over the drug dealers. They could snitch on them, they could inform on the police on them, and they did. And so the drug dealers, no matter how up they were, were terrified of offending the local population too much so that people would get too outraged and would no longer tolerate them, or the intimidation of those big shots. They're they're actually called beauty is in the neighborhood. That's a

Spanglish for big shot. And it's also a play on words because it's a it's also a term for phallus, a slang term for phallus, you know, it's classic Puerto Rican beautiful, poetic slang, and that means the head drug dealer. And so those guys had to try to at least pretend to care about the neighborhood. You know, they would flamboyantly pay for the heating bill for one of the well liked elderly women who was freezing in her house

in the winter. Here's a great example. They would regularly buy little plastic swimming pools for the kids on the block, you know, in the scorching hot Philadelphia's summers, to be able to swim, fill up with a with a hose

from one's from from the fire hydrant. So we were proposing that if one understands violence as being part of what gets seen by its perpetrators as a moral economy, So the person shooting you actually often thinks that they are enforcing and this is a weird thing, that they are enforcing morality by shooting you, That you deserve to be shot because you violated something they considered an ethical rule, and that when you look at it from the perspective

of the guy shooting you started selling on his territory, of course you were going to get shot. Why wouldn't you be shot. You shouldn't just violate someone's territory. When you can go to a judge and get the judge to say no, you have to close down your copycat sales of that person's software whatever it is, you know

you don't have to shoot the person. But when you don't have a criminal justice system, and that's the problem with drugs being illegal, is that they become more violent because there's no way to regulate disputes and and that that's the recipe for disaster. And that's why the US pathetically has the highest rates of murder of any comparable wealthy finance industry cultures. And the culture of ka I mean, so, yeah, the culture of terror. So the culture of terror is

something that you actually see. But when you use that term, people then start using it the way they would use sort of ethnic discrimination and or racism. It becomes oh, that's because someone is trapped in the culture of terror. No, they're trapped in the perverse American political system. The state is not doing its fair job. It regulates the disputes of rich people and doesn't regulate the disputes of poor people.

That's not fair. So instead of calling that a culture of terror, call it an unfair, unjust criminal justice system, and then you can start making sense of it. So that the first thing we wanted to also do is show that perpetrators could be reached out to, perpetrators could be weaned away from violence, perpetrators can be punished in certain ways that makes sense to them. They recognize when they do something bad and when they deserve punishment. Sometimes at least and so so that is what we were

trying to open up in detail. And the tragedy of it is that you see the most charismatic, charming little kids getting seduced into the moral economy of violence, because that's that's what's cool as an adolescent or as a pre adolescent, as an elementary school kid, because the guy or the girl who fights well is all of a sudden popular because you want her protecting you, you don't want her fighting you, so you want to be her friend, and so you start fighting on behalf of her so

she can or he can start mobilizing other people to fight for them. And we started seeing that as a conscious thing. In Philadelphia, they actually have a word for it. Philadelphia is a wonderful city because it's got such a it's such a working class city that has a beautiful, beautiful slang, you know, a rich poetic slang. And the term they use in Philadelphia is writer and it's a verb.

It can be a verb, it can be now, and it can be I'm a writer means I'm someone who will fight for the people that they are faithful to and you can count on me to be a writer for you, or we're going out writing so you can round up your your faithful and go out and wreck moral violence on someone else. And the only way to do it is to do it by actively fighting. So

it promotes perversity. And the person who first first saw it was George Karandino says his as his undergraduate thesis, he wrote a wonderful undergrad adgate thesis at University of Pennsylvania. That was what we were trying to explain in a way that would be accessible. Basically, it's accessible to academics. I don't know how how, but it also makes sense when you when you try to explain it to someone.

And so as an applied thing for policy, let's figure out how one can intervene in the moral economy to stop it from having to resort to violence and instead mobilize it for cleaning up the street, for mobilizing people to do good things for your community, because you would also see sometimes these same charismatic people leading cleanups, you know, of the block and do and starting all of a sudden a school lunch program for the kids on the

I mean yeah, school after school program because they didn't have access to daycare for their kids after school either, so they would wouldever figure out ways of doing it, and their kids wanted to play with other kids, so you could see positive things. They were integrated into the neighborhood and and and there that that it's not hard even to figure that out. If you just have to have a society that wants to take care of its

of its people, it's even stupider. You have to have a society that's smart enough to realize that they're gonna go out and get mugged or shot unless they do something about social inequality in their in their in their country and stop promoting the need for a culture of terror quote unquote, and stop making the moral economy of

violence be violent. Yeah. But Philip, let me just push you on this a bit, because you also describe sort of the most heartbreaking element of when you're living in East Tarlem is what you see happening with the children of the crack dealers and the children of the crackheads, right, And you talked about when you first moved there in

eight five. These six seven, eight year olds, nine year olds who are befriending you, and as you said at the beginning of our discussion, you know, they're just fascinating to meet you and all of sort of stuff, and by the time they're ending analysts and some of them are landing up being in very landing up in sex

worker getting addicted themselves. And you also describe that the tradition of of some of the coraculs priding themselves like their fathers and grandfathers did back in the Old Country in terms of how many kids they have. But whereas there was a functional value of having lots of kids when you're living in a rural Puerto Rico, here they're having multiple kids by all sorts of women and almost priding themselves on not taking care of them. In many cases,

there's a positive story to this ethan as well. Certain guys become, I forget what the term is, baby pops, who are like a mom's pops. So, for example, Primo bless his heart, he he actually really cared about his sons, and so he had started out by doing the hyper masculine thing, having multiple girlfriends, having kids with different people and so forth, and then all of a sudden he woke up and started taking care of them, and his

kids actually came out beautifully. They didn't go into they didn't go into drug dealing, and one of them started a website, and and and you know, Philip, I wonder because if I remember about Primo, one of the things about him was that he had grown up with three sisters, all of them turned out more or less okay, where Caesar had had his sister brutally murder and his mother

had killed somebody or something gone to prison. And so there may have been something about having grown up in a kind of more stable, semi stable family at least

maybe inspired a greater sense of printal responsibility. But you also talk about the difference between the daytime and the nighttime, and at the daytime is still a time when kids can play in the streets and all this, but that the nighttime is owned by the small minority of the community who exercised the moral economy of violence, where this stuff where people can live in an element of terra and a fear of walking around in their streets and

all of this. So I sometimes wonder how people in the community, most of the people living in East Haarlem, if they were to read your book In Search of Respect or the or the stuff you're writing about Philadelphia, you know, they would obviously recognize it. But I wonder would they share much of your perspective, And if not, is it just that they have bought into the kind of dominant frame that's imposed by mainstream society about how we interpret this and and blame the victim and blame

the people without looking at the brother structural forces. You know, I get lots of comments from people over the years, because the book has been out since I forget when it came out, forget five or something, and so I've got I get lots of comments, and people actually usually thank me for writing the book and then tell me their particular story and and often it's a story of success,

because that's who writes you to some extent. But people write me from jail also that and they they're very moving, either emails or letters when they're coming from jail, their handwritten letters. It's very moving. So there is a lot of people who recognize themselves. There's a there's a pattern of kids saying thank you for helping me forgive my crummy father. And that's the most moving for me, because you don't, like, you know, having to live in anger

and resentment at your father. So when you can achieve a level of of of forgiveness for the father who abandoned you, or brutalized your mother or brutalized you, or or or just disappeared from your life and neglected you. It's helpful and and when you can humanize it and understand it as part of a larger force, it can be helpful. So I I appreciate that. But but yeah, I mean, obviously there's gonna be people that just want

they just want to just so story. They just want everything to be rosy and beautiful, and that's not the way life is. Poverty is painful. Poverty doesn't necessarily make you stronger. It often makes you tougher, but it can also, you know, also make make you traumatized. So that those are the realities. Humans are fragile people, whether they're rich or poor. That's our nature is to be fragile. We

need to coddle each other. Sorry to sound like such a liberal, but that would be Caesar would make fun of me for that. Yeah, we maybe wonder if you're ever tempted to go and do a research project down in Puerto Rico. Oh absolutely, I've done. I've done feel work there. I love Puerto Rico. It's a beautiful place

and it's it's just amazing. Yeah. Well, but when you think also about you look at the ways in which we look at what's going on a Central American now, which leads the world and levels of violence and homicide, and where it seems to be connected in all sorts of ways, not just to socio economic and political conditions down there, but also to basically Central American migrants to the US being sent back or going back to those countries and bringing a kind of true cultural street life

back there. And I wondered, Puerto Rico, it must there must be elements of something similar going there. Right, it's worse than the Puerto Rico is a colony, right, it's a formal colony. It's not that's not a that's not whatever euphemism or metaphorical term, or whatever the term would be. It's legally economy. It doesn't have the right to make

its own policies. It gets supervised by the US. It doesn't have the right to have an armed force, you know, it doesn't have the right to pass law and for gun control laws, and that's really an outrage. Puerto Rico passed strong gun control laws and the US federal government forced them to obey US federal gun rules because they get driven by federal law and as a result, Puerto Rico and this is truly the tragedy and cruelty of of of colonialism. Puerto Rico has the highest level in

the world of fire arm caused violence. And firearm caused violence is the most tragic one because that's the most spontaneous one. That's the one that was easiest to prevent. Right. It's because you know, you get suicide firearm with when there's a lot of guns around, the first thing that goes up as suicide you get depressed. Graham, you've got to you've got a gun hanging there, you grab it impulsively and blow your brains out. You you have an

argument with your spouse, you know, boom, boom, boom. Without before you know what you've done, you shoot them. Right, that's the tragedy of be having guns forced on you. And that's why there needs to be gun control and and because there it's an industrial way to kill. And Puerto Rico had that imposed, has it actively imposed on itself now and it doesn't want to have so many guns, but the US federal government forces it to have so many guns because it's a colony of the US government.

Uh huh uh Well, Lusen, I wanted as our readers to take a look at your books and even buy them in search your respect and righteous dopines are still in print. Okay, thank you very very much. Okay. Thanks. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear

from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Naedalman. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's

produced by noha'm osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geeseus and Darren Aronofsky. From Protosoma Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and especial thanks to a Bio s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BB. Next week, tune in for

part two of my interview with Philippe Bougoi. When we moved from East Harlem to San Francisco, I wanted to find out useful things on how diseases were being transmitted in a practical way. And also, you know, anthropology doesn't tend often to force itself to try to be humbly useful.

I wanted to be humbly useful, useful to the people I was studying, so that there would be more information on what could be done to reduce you know, how obviously devastating um their their use of heroin was on them, and the way they were being policed, and the way that services were mismanaging them and mistreating them even when it wanted to help them. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't miss it.