Meth Cooking as a Job: Identity and Dirty Work

Abstract

People who engage in dirty work manage the stigma of their jobs by employing various narrative techniques that allow them to diminish the work’s negative attributes. Doing so enables them to maintain a positive sense of self and to explain continuation in the work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 33 participants, we examine how people who cook shake methamphetamine make sense of their behavior as an occupation in order to distance themselves from the stigma of meth use and manufacturing. We find they emphasized the rewards of cooking in the context of the hedonistic lifestyle they desired. They enjoyed a perceived status increase, a sense of belonging, and developed pride and satisfaction in cooking. We propose that methamphetamine users’ marginalization coupled with experiences cooking combine to create a draw to continued production of methamphetamine fostered by positive elements of an occupational identity that lingers despite great cost.

Keywords:

• Crime as work
• dirty work
• identity
• methamphetamine
• persistence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Jacobs (1999) for a similar assessment of the lifestyle valued by people who deal drugs in urban setting.