Beyond deviance and disease: Drug users as subjects at the Institute for Scientific Analysis

Abstract

A distinctive genre of research on drug use developed at the Institute for Scientific Analysis (ISA) in San Francisco beginning in the early 1970s and continuing into the present. This article first provides a brief history of the Institute in order to situate its drug research in historical, institutional and biographical context. Second, it sketches an ideal type of the style of research generally used by ISA scientists to explore drug use, abuse, addiction, sales, treatment and policy. Four core elements characterize ISA's approach to research on drug use: Symbolic Interactionism as a theoretical framework, which attends to the subjective and adopts an appreciative rather than a correctional standpoint; inductive or Grounded Theory as an analytic strategy of discovery and hypothesis generation; qualitative methods such as ethnography and depth interviewing, which afford thick description of the people and worlds being studied and Labeling Theory, which sensitized ISA researchers to the possible effects of criminalizing and pathologizing discourse.