White Chicks On Dope: Heroin and Identity Dynamics in New York in the 1990s

BACKGROUND

Research and writing about women's illegal drug use has focused primarily on poor women and women of color - women often depicted as deviant and pathological for reasons other than their drug use. These are the women who have been accessible to researchers through jails, prisons, drug treatment facilities, welfare offices, foster care agencies, medical providers, and other institutions where the recruitment of people who use drugs has typically occurred. What we know about women who use illegal drugs comes from rounding up the usual suspects in the usual places; we know most about those who have had problems with drug use and who have been unable to prevent the state from intervening in their lives. Popular representations of women who use drugs come in the form of deviance "stories" of ruined identity, stories that women themselves tell as a cultural performance (McCoy, 1998a), partly as a product of the institutions we put them through, and as strategies for coping with, within, and beyond them (Gubrium & Holstein, 2001).' It has often been noted that mass media present the most extreme cases of drug use as typical (Reinarman & Levine, 1997), but drug researchers have to actively work to avoid this tendency as well.

At one level, the problem of misrepresentation begins with recruiting study participants. The institutions mentioned above are logical places to easily find women who use drugs and will likely be willing to talk about it with strangers - women whose daily lives do not otherwise intersect with most researchers. Typically, the women recruited in these venues are poor women of color. In the only published academic paper on White middle-class women who use heroin, Friedman and Alicea (1995) recruited women from methadone maintenance clinics, interviewing them retrospectively about their heroin use. Rosenbaum (1981) wanted to avoid recruiting women from jails and treatment centers, so she recruited women who use heroin with flyers and then through referrals from women recruited with the flyers. While Rosenbaum's research team was able to recruit women from the streets, so to speak, and not rely on the institutions that came into contact with heroin users most often, their sample was still limited to lower-middle, working, and lower-class women in San Francisco. She notes the limitations of her sample:

I suspect... that a greater proportion of addicts fall into the upper classes (for example, entertainers, physicians) than are represented by the population surveyed. These addicts are better able to hide their addiction, ...

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