Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless—culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and related fields.

Professor Page specializes in studying the consumption of drugs in urban, street-based settings. His 42-year career in the anthropology of drug use has focused on the consequences and impacts of various patterns of legal and illegal drug use in a wide variety of cultural settings. Among his funded projects supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health are studies of: poly-drug use in the Seminole Tribe of Florida, poly-drug use among Cuban immigrants, prescription drug use among women, HIV risk and disease progression among injection drug users (IDUs) in Miami, response to the HIV epidemic among Haitian Women, Haitian youth and gang activity, and needle-cleansing behavior among Miami IDUs. These projects have resulted in the publication of over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, plus two books co-authored with Merrill Singer: The Social Value of Drug Addicts and Comprehending Drug Use: Ethnographic Research at the Social Margins (Rutgers University Press, 2010).