ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the story of a marginal social research epistemology in a sea of positivism and the policy consequences of neglecting the kind of information. It describes how a heroin habit forced a person out of socially desirable mainstream roles. Heroin made a "schoolboy neglect his books" and a "world famous beauty neglect her looks". The research results suited the chemical scapegoating role that "drugs" played in American ideology of the time. Nixon's war on drugs was motivated politically by the use of "drugs" to explain college protests, failure in Vietnam, and rising crime rates in the cities. "Epidemic" is just the name for a mathematical curve that you can find in lots of other places, like the takeoff of a consumer product, or a sudden increase of any kind. An illegal drug epidemic was poorly served by a metaphor of one person catching a disease from another.
