Playing a Cold Game: Phases of a Ghetto Career *

This chapter describes some aspects of drug involvement as it is woven into a career line emerging out of the urban ghetto. The initial source of evidence for my account was gathered in the course of ethnographic fieldwork as part of a larger study of youthful drug use in predominantly black ghettos of the San Francisco Bay Area. ¹ Apart from numerous informal conversations, extensive participant observation and life-history interviews with key informants, central figures, those who were recognized by their peers as most knowledgeable about their world, were brought together in “panel sessions.” As panel members gathered for group discussion 192and critically examined each other’s experience, it was possible for me to separate individual experiences from those more collective in nature and to check the validity of my own observations.