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When the War on Drugs Hits Home: Bentley Professor Offers Personal

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Narratives of A Hurting Generation George Grattan December 19, 2017

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Associate Professor of Sociology Miriam Boeri’s new book, Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation (University of California Press), tells the stories of drug users from the “Baby Boomer” generation, whose teenage years and adulthood coincided with the punitive “War on Drugs.” Boeri shares their stories, including that of her own brother Harry, with an eye toward the influences of law, race, gender, and class on the lives of drug users.

The book is drawn from field interviews with 100 drug users conducted by Boeri and her research team

over several years with support from the National Institutes of Health and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. All the book’s subjects were born between 1946 and 1964, and all continued using “hard drugs” (heroin/opioids, methamphetamine, cocaine/crack) past the age of 35. Boeri and her team conducted the interviews in Atlanta and its suburbs.

Thirty-eight narratives, along with Harry’s story, weave through the book, which upends the traditional “maturing out” hypothesis of drug use. Based on research in the 1960s, the maturing out theory contends that drug users typically stop using hard drugs around age 35 as they gain the life skills and resources to manage the underlying problems that led them to heavy drug use in the first place.

Boeri’s research suggests that the punitive approach taken by the “War on Drugs” during these users’ lifetimes, however, led to increased rates of incarceration and criminalization, which led in turn to ongoing drug use.

The narratives in Boeri’s book illustrate a generation of drug users who were unable to “mature out” of hard drug use due to the criminal justice system’s response to their earlier drug use. Cycles of drug use, arrest, incarceration, treatment, release, unemployment, drug use, arrest, incarceration, and deepening criminalization and drug use are common in these narratives.

“Hurt challenges common assumptions and provides a sociologically grounded, paradigm-shifting analysis of heavy drug use,” said Utah State University Sociology Professor Leon Anderson in his review of the book.

Claire E. Sterk, president of Emory University, called Hurt “an important resource for experts in public health, addiction, social and health services, and public policy,” as well as “for anyone interested in drug users and solutions for their own health and that of society.”

Boeri’s work looks at the cultural influences of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” as well as examining the punitive response to addiction. The inclusion of her brother’s story of drug abuse and incarceration gives the book a personal touch and is, as Boeri notes, the inspiration for the work.

Boeri’s current research, including grant support from the National Institutes of Health, continues to build on the work done for Hurt. Now studying opioid use in the suburbs of Boston, Atlanta, and New Haven, Boeri and her colleagues hope to better understand which life experiences tend to lead to drug use or to recovery in order to improve recommendations for treatment and society’s overall approach to the opioid epidemic.

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