Discovering why drug dealers and users are all victims of poverty

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Philippe Bourgois Johns Hopkins University Press €37.15

IWAS in my mid-20s and was in Bluebell in Dublin, developing the drug services there. A colleague and friend, John Bisset, recommended this book to me. He told me it was about drug dealers in America, so I didn’t know what to think at first. But he thought I’d get something out of it, because the tone was quite similar to the way I talked and looked at things. At the time, I was being encouraged to look into studying anthropology, particularly by a friend of mine, Fiona O’Reilly, who was great to me. So, the timing of my reading, was perfect really.

In Search of Respect tells the story of Puerto Rican immigrants selling drugs in a neighbourhood in New York. The author, an anthropologist named Philipe Bourgois, actually moved his wife and young child right into the heart of El Barrio, in East Harlem

and lived there for four years. He got to know these street-level drug dealers and lived beside them. He earned their trust and, as a result, got a much deeper understanding of what made them tick; much more than just going in and getting a small sample and gathering statistics. He delved into the whole idea of class, ethnicity, race, displacement and the reality of people’s lives in certain sectors of society. I don’t think you can capture the idea of that in just numbers.

I just devoured it. It was the first time I felt a kind of physical movement when I was reading. There was a shift in my brain. I was self-taught when it came to addiction, but I was always interested in the reasons for the way things are; the cause and effect. Why drug dealing existed in the first place and why society was the way it was.

I learnt a huge amount from it. It was very informative. It wasn’t overly theoretical or abstract. It’s written about real people and real lives and things began to make sense to me, in terms of the whole economy of the drug trade. What came through for me was the fact that the legal economy and the illegal economy kind of mirror each other. They are all entrepreneurs, all businessmen, but one sector never had the opportunities to be businessmen in the legal sector.

It gave me a greater understanding of the people around me. Groups can become demonised which, when you’re surrounded by drugs, is usually the drug dealer in most cases but what this book showed was that users and dealers are all victims of the same thing. Poverty.

People don’t become criminals or drug dealers because they feel free to do what they like, they become those things because they’re not free to do what they like because the social floor is so low for them. In El Barrio, not being able to reach your potential meant drug dealing was the next best thing in exercising some power and gaining respect.

We can’t address the drug problem, or poverty, without building relationships with those who also sell drugs so it becomes a much more holistic approach to solving the problem.

Senator Lynn Ruane’s new book ‘People Like Me’ is published by Gill Books, €16.99