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To expand understandings of conflict, this chapter offers a detailed assessment of how exchange is enacted within local heroin markets. Addressing drug dealing and heroin users’ buying drugs for their peers (i.e., brokering), this research expands how illegal drug markets are commonly understood. A generalized framework is presented that highlights patterns of exchange.

Findings come from a 36-month study of a demographically diverse sample of 38 heroin users in Cleveland, OH. Methods involved open-ended, semi-structured interviewing and participant observation, conducted by the author and a team of graduate students.

Instead of framing exchange as either an economic or social act, this chapter shows how trade in heroin markets is often both. Here Gudeman’s (2001) dialectic between market and community is embodied in inter-subjectivities of traders, promoting both trust and conflict. In this context, conflict is the result of perpetual ambiguity all market participants can experience.

Applying a blended notion of exchange as both social and economic offers new insight on conflict and expands its orientation beyond narratives of political economy. Here, in addition to the economics that often promote conflict, the social elements of exchange (e.g., reciprocity) are emphasized.

Research has understood conflicts in drug market operations through trader characteristics (e.g., poverty, race, class, privilege). This chapter emphasizes opportunities for conflict irrespective of individualized characteristics by outlining structural elements of exchange.

Therapeutic communities (TCs) are one of the existent social responses in helping drug users overcome addiction and pursue social reintegration. The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the general characteristics of about 200 drug users and their addiction and those of addicts abroad treated in a TC and clinically discharged. The analysis now presented is the first empirical approach to capture social regularities and singularities that are present in these individuals’ reintegration strategies.

The data have a ten-year range – from 1999 to 2009 – and were statically analysed.

They show a group of individuals with low qualifications reflected in their professional occupation, from which family is an essential support. These data also show a significant prevalence of heroin, alcohol, cocaine and polydrug uses, highlighting the need to consider new use patterns and new synthetic substances.

TC have been little studied, mainly in Portugal.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on comparing background characteristics, self‐efficacy, and family support of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and of veteran Israelis who join therapeutic communities in Israel, and their adjustment to these communities. The aim of this research was to examine whether therapeutic communities are an appropriate rehabilitative setting for immigrants who come from a different cultural background.

The study sample consisted of 213 people with addictions, who were being treated in therapeutic communities in Israel: 110 were Israeli‐born and 103 were immigrants from the FSU. The data in the present study are based on questionnaires, which the participants completed upon their arrival into the communities: socio‐demographic data; perceived self‐efficacy in resisting the temptation of drugs; and family support. The dropout rates from the therapeutic communities were also examined.

The findings indicate that the addicts who immigrated from the FSU had lower self‐efficacy in resisting high‐risk drug situations as well as lower levels of family support, whereas the dropout rate from the treatment program was considerably higher among the Israeli‐born participants.

The findings suggest that the therapeutic community is an appropriate setting for addicts from the FSU, and that they had a lower dropout rate than did the Israeli‐born addicts. Thus, the main value of this research is that it suggests that the communities are an appropriate rehabilitative setting for the immigrants.

Purpose – Reality TV shows that feature embodied “transformations” are popular, including Intervention, a program that depicts therapeutic recovery from addiction to “health.” The purpose of this chapter is to address the ways whiteness constitutes narratives of addiction on Intervention.

Methodology – This analysis uses a mixed methodology. I conducted a systematic analysis of nine (9) seasons of one hundred and forty-seven (147) episodes featuring one hundred and fifty-seven individual “addicts” (157) and logged details, including race and gender. For the qualitative analysis, I watched each episode more than once (some, I watched several times) and took extensive notes on each episode.

Findings – The majority of characters (87%) are white, and the audience is invited to gaze through a white lens that tells a particular kind of story about addiction. The therapeutic model valorized by Intervention rests on neoliberal regimes of self-sufficient citizenship that compel us all toward “health” and becoming “productive” citizens. Such regimes presume whiteness. Failure to comply with an intervention becomes a “tragedy” of wasted whiteness. When talk of racism erupts, producers work to re-frame it in ways that erase systemic racism.

Social implications – The whiteness embedded in Intervention serves to justify and reinforce the punitive regimes of controlling African American and Latina/o drug users through the criminal justice system while controlling white drug users through self-disciplining therapeutic regimes of rehab.

Originality – Systematic studies of media content consistently find a connection between media representations of addiction and narratives about race, yet whiteness has rarely been the critical focus of addiction.

Work has historically been an important basis of identity, but the sharp decline in the availability of stable attachments to jobs, organizations, or occupations jeopardizes paid work’s capacity to sustain identity. If available work opportunities are increasingly precarious and short-term, can the same be said for identities? Analysis of the efforts of members of an unusual occupational group – stage actors – to support an identity based on unstable work provides insights into the variability and indeterminacy of responses to structural employment uncertainty. Despite manifold identity threats, actors struggle to maintain identity as actors both in others’ eyes and in their own.

Injectable opioid therapy (prescribing heroin for heroin addicts to inject) remains a highly controversial and expensive option. Recent research has shown significant benefits for this therapy in otherwise refractory patients. The aim of this paper is to assess the public opinion regarding heroin prescribing to addicts and to determine what effect the cost of this might have on their opinions.

Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire after reading a vignette which described current opioid maintenance therapy. Two vignettes were generated and the experimental group was randomised to receive the additional information that the cost of heroin prescribing was £15,000 per addict, per year.

Questionnaires were received from 187 subjects (response rate 74 percent). For the control group, 23 percent agreed and 58 percent disagreed with prescribing heroin to addicts (23 vs 62). For the experimental group, where the additional cost of £15,000 per addict was introduced into the vignette, 10 percent agreed and 75 percent disagreed (10 vs 71). The difference was statistically significant (p<0.05; χ²). In total, 58 percent of people were opposed to the idea that heroin should be prescribed to heroin addicts on the National Health Service but this rises to 75 percent when the annual cost of prescribed heroin (£15,000) is included.

This study supports an earlier survey that showed over 80 percent of the general public opposed the prescription of diamorphine to addicts even to reduce crime. Heroin prescribing remains controversial and lacks public support.

This article was commissioned to gain an insight, from a service user's perspective, into residential rehabilitation and the treatment system in general. Andy Green, who has been through residential rehabilitation a number of times, poignantly highlights its benefits and drawbacks in this self‐reflective piece based on his experiences from 2000 to the present day.

Based upon evaluations conducted over three years, this paper examines the implementation, effectiveness and purpose of public street CCTV systems. The usefulness of local CCTV evaluations is discussed and also the extent to which they can provide insights into the working of local community safety and crime reduction partnerships. This research suggests that at this stage during the continuing nation‐wide expansion of schemes, there is a pressing need for a re‐appraisal of practice based on the accumulating evidence. The benefits and opportunity‐cost of CCTV should be subjected to more open and realistic scrutiny than has hitherto occurred.