Do you ever wonder about the actual lives of people who sell illicit drugs – their fears and aspirations, their family lives, their business models and moral codes, and their fates once their drug dealing days are behind them? Philippe Bourgois is a distinguished anthropologist, currently teaching and directing the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities at UCLA. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he befriended and gained the trust of street-level drugs dealers in East Harlem, New York and wrote an award winning book about it, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Years later, from 2007 to 2018, he embarked on a similar project in Philadelphia. His ethnographies are unparalleled in the depth and intimacy of their analysis of inner city drug dealers and markets. This is the first episode of a two part interview, in which I was also curious to understand how Philippe managed the inter-personal and moral challenges of becoming so deeply involved in these worlds.

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