The challenges of street research on drug use, violence, and AIDS risk

Violence is a regular and consequential event in the lives of street drug u sers, commonly beginning at an early age and continuing throughout their dr ug careers. Growing evidence indicates that involvement in violence, of var ious kinds, including as victim, perpetrator, and witness, is a factor in t he initiation and continuation of drug use, as well as in AIDS risk behavio urs associated with illicit drug consumption. As a result, improving our un derstanding of the role that violence plays in drug use is critical to drug research, prevention and treatment initiatives, and the development of eff ective public health efforts designed to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS and other drug-related diseases. Paying closer attention to violence in qualita tive research, however, raises a number of methodological and other problem s for drug researchers. This paper, based on an ongoing ethno-epidemiologic al study of the relationship of violence to drug use and AIDS risk among no t-in-treatment Puerto Rican street drug users in Hartford, Connecticut, exa mines ethical, methodological, human resource, and related issues encounter ed in studying the intersection of these intimately linked epidemics. Speci fically, the paper examines the challenges presented to ethnographic resear chers by the everyday violence in the lives of study participants. In other words, this paper is concerned with the study of violence among at-risk dr ug users and the ways in which a focus on violence challenges our personal, intellectual, emotional, and ethical capacities to undertake this research .