Righteous Dopefiend Quotes

“Recognition of the political-economic forces that impose patterns of suffering is the foundation for an applied critique of policy and services that persecute oppositional, marginalized populations in the name of morality”
― Philippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend

“A wide diversity of treatment and social support models needs to be made available to drug users, ranging from one-strike-you’re-out abstinence to harm reduction, methadone maintenance, buprenorphine detox, heroin prescription, and subsidized employment initiatives. Treatment programs also need to take advantage of the moments of life crisis that drive long-term injectors to seek treatment. Most of the spur of the moment, crisis-driven windows of opportunity for changing the lives of street addicts are missed because underfunding, exacerbated by neoliberal audit culture, forces treatment programs to exclude risky patients.”
― Philippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend

“why the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, has emerged as a pressure cooker for producing destitute addicts embroiled in everyday violence. Our challenge is to portray the full details of the agony and the ecstasy of surviving on the street as a heroin injector without beatifying or making a spectacle of the individuals involved,”
― Philippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend

“righteous dopefiends.” They have subordinated everything in their lives—shelter, sustenance, and family—to injecting heroin. They endure the chronic pain and anxiety of hunger, exposure, infectious disease, and social ostracism because of their commitment to heroin. Abscesses, skin rashes, cuts, bruises, broken bones, flus, colds, opiate withdrawal symptoms, and the potential for violent assault are constant features of their lives. But exhilaration is also just around the corner. Virtually every day on at least two or three occasions, and sometimes up to six or seven times, depending on the success of their income-generating strategies, they are able to flood their bloodstreams and jolt their synapses with instant relief, relaxation, and pleasure.”
― Philippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend

“Without substantial institutional resources, it is difficult for long-term chronic users to figure out how to pass the time of day. They have to construct a new personal sense of meaning and dignity. Instead, they often fall back on their more familiar and persuasive righteous dopefiend ways of being in the world, and they seek out old drug-using friends and acquaintances.”
― Philippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend

“The valence of violence around gender and generational authority becomes especially charged when avenues for asserting hierarchy and achievement are limited by poverty, chronic drug and alcohol use, and social marginalization—all of which shape lumpen reality at the everyday level in the United States in the early twenty-first century.”
― Philippe Bourgois, Righteous Dopefiend