Summary Of Righteous Dopefiend

Righteous Dopefiend by Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg is an ethnography on the community of homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers on Edgewater Boulevard in San Francisco, California. Their fieldnotes and photography offer intimate but grim glimpses into the lives of a population that are largely ignored. The homeless addicts are presented as humans with histories with a story worth telling, revealing accounts of abuse, trauma, violence, and family breakdown.

Throughout the reading, the homeless outcasts are shown to follow a certain ethic of requiring reciprocal gifts of heroin, as well as the coping mechanisms and interdependence on one another; supportive and yet destructive. Because they are addicts, they are viewed as social