Comprehending Drug Use: Ethnographic Research at the Social Margins (Studies in Medical Anthropology)

Comprehending Drug Use, the first full-length critical overview of the use of ethnographic methods in drug research, synthesizes more than one hundred years of study on the human encounter with psychotropic drugs. J. Bryan Page and Merrill Singer create a comprehensive examination of the whole field of drug ethnography-methodology that involves access to the hidden world of drug users, the social spaces they frequent, and the larger structural forces that help construct their worlds. They explore the important intersections of drug ethnography with globalization, criminalization, public health (including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, hepatitis, and other diseases), and gender, and also provide a practical guide of the methods and career paths of ethnographers.

J. BRYAN PAGE is a professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Miami. He is a leading ethnographer studying the use of particular drugs in different cultures. The author of dozens of articles in major journals, he has also contributed many book chapters in the fields of medicine and anthropology, especially drug research.



MERRILL SINGER is a professor in the department of anthropology and a senior research scientist at the Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention at the University of Connecticut. He is also affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale University and the Global Center on Health in Central Asia at Columbia University. Having authored or edited more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book chapters, he is also the recipient of several distinguished awards.