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

Abstract

We examined heroin use among 15 White middle-class women using data from in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic observation between May 1996 and April 1999. These women represent a subsample of a diverse group of 550 in an ethnographic study of heroin use and dealing in New York City. Our analysis is organized into four sections: (1) a demographic sketch, (2) the first time, (3) mode of administration and patterns of use, and (4) heroin in the medicine cabinet. Heroin use among these women was not related to poverty or lack of opportunity, social disenfranchisement, defective or addictive personalities, childhood trauma, or seeking membership into deviant subcultures. While some of these discourses of adversity and thrill seeking may have surfaced in individual stories, the dominant theme that emerged from the data was that of active struggles around identity, struggles over who and how one does and does not want to be.