ABSTRACT
This book is essentially about the form of being that emerges out of close proximity to economic necessity (poverty, dispossession and so on) and that, in many cases, results in crime and drug use. It is therefore about ‘problematic drug use’ rather than ‘recreational drug use’, which is only analysed insofar as it precedes the former. My motivations for writing this book are twofold but interdependent. First, the form of post-modern thinking that is driving welfare policy (especially crime and drugs policy) is based on an unacceptable level of intolerance towards the practitioners of these activities and needs to be challenged. Second, social science epistemologies that have conventionally been used to explicate the relationship between crime, drugs and urban deprivation conceptualise the phenomena in the same inadequate way as policy makers and therefore run the risk of exacerbating the intolerance and prejudices propagated by the dominant mode of policy thinking in this area. I will now address these two issues in turn.
