ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intersection of individual biography and political economy, the critical link that unites the innermost experiences of the individual with the widest kinds of social-historical phenomena. Sufferer experience is treated as a social product, one that is constructed and reconstructed in the action arena between socially constituted categories of meaning and the political-economic forces that shape the contexts of daily life. Using narrative material from life history interviewing with a young man called Carlos as part of Project COPE, tHe chapter presents his troubled life and experience within the encompassing contexts of the working class Puerto Rican community in the United States, the street drug scene, the health crisis of the urban poor, and the encompassing American socioeconomic structure. Between 1980 and 1990, because of a shortage of new syringes in the drug underground, injection commonly involves either direct needle sharing or indirect sharing of a previously used needle.
