ABSTRACT
On the evening of 24 March 1969, seven young men from the fictitiously named community of East Highland sat in my field office and listed the various substances with which they and their friends had experimented as a chemical means of getting high. The conversation had the animation of a reunion of baseball old-timers, each eager to contribute some mutually remembered segment of intoxicated glory or some sequence of drug-related error, now laughable in retrospect. The thirty-three substances they mentioned as triggers to autobiographical remembrances had become the core materials of many street activities among young men in the Italian working-class community of East Highland since drugs had been discovered as an alternative to alcohol some twelve years before.
