Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada.
Soc Sci Med. 2020 Nov;265:113329. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113329. Epub 2020 Aug 27.
This article sets out a political economic framework to understand South Africa's dramatic upsurge in heroin use in the 2000s. Drawing on interviews with users and their families, it shows how the opioid gained influence among men in their twenties living in apartheid-engineered townships marked by chronic unemployment. Giving particular attention to histories of work, it documents the ways that men hustle to generate an income to buy heroin, showing their relationship to families who support them and community members who may employ them. The article challenges the view that heroin users' income comes primarily from criminal activities, an assumption that feeds into punitive approaches to drugs. Instead, it insists that heroin hustlers must be seen as part of a large group of "laboring poor" who undertake low-paid work that does not enable desirable futures. As such, the article develops a framework that can contribute to understanding the political economy of heroin use in high-unemployment regions of the Global South.
本文构建了一个政治经济学框架，以理解 21 世纪南非海洛因使用急剧增加的现象。本文通过对使用者及其家人的访谈，展示了阿片类药物是如何在 20 多岁、生活在种族隔离设计的、以长期失业为特征的城镇中的男性中获得影响力的。本文特别关注工作历史，记录了男性为赚取购买海洛因的收入而采取的各种手段，展示了他们与支持他们的家庭和可能雇用他们的社区成员的关系。本文挑战了这样一种观点，即海洛因使用者的收入主要来自犯罪活动，这种假设助长了对毒品的惩罚性方法。相反，本文坚持认为，海洛因贩子必须被视为“劳动穷人”的一部分，他们从事低薪工作，无法实现理想的未来。因此，本文构建了一个框架，可以帮助理解全球南方高失业率地区海洛因使用的政治经济。
