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“War Stories”: AIDS Prevention and the Street Narratives of Drug Users

2001; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 11; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/104973201129119325

1552-7557

Merrill Singer, Glenn Scott, Scott Wilson, Delia Easton, Margaret R. Weeks,

HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk

The day-to-day discourse of illicit drug users is replete with stylized narratives of street experience. These “war stories,” as they are popularly known, are shared among drug users as they hustle for money, purchase drugs, get high, and hang out in diverse street locations. Drug-user narratives, which describe complex adventures and grave suffering, are primary ethnographic sources of information about patterns of drug consumption and risk behaviors. Importantly, in the time of AIDS, street narratives provide a much-needed window on the generally hidden lives of socially marginalized street drug users. As part of an effort to put the analysis of drug-user war stories to use in HIV prevention, in this article the authors analyze a corpus of street narratives told to members of an HIV-prevention research team in Hartford, Connecticut.