HEROIN: A WAY OF LIFE IN SMITH STREET

For the past two years Dr John Fitzgerald has spent countless hours on Smith
Street, asking questions about heroin to a whole raft of people who
generally don't take kindly to strangers asking questions about heroin.

He has interviewed users, dealers, people who do both, local traders and
police officers.

Ask him if he ever felt threatened or vulnerable during his research, and
the pause before he answers stretches long.

``Yes and no,'' he responds at last. ``I suppose I've always felt in danger,
doing this research. I don't know. To me, when you know about the danger
then you're relatively safe. It's the danger you don't know about that's
going to get you.''

Not that Dr Fitzgerald, 32, imagines himself to be engaged in some great
feat of daring. He's just doing his job as a member of the criminology
faculty at the University of Melbourne.

His research into the heroin trade on Smith Street was under the auspice of
VicHealth and the resulting study, Regulating the street heroin market in
Fitzroy/Collingwood, was released this past week.

The report contains a lot of hard statistical data on syringe disposals,
overdose rates, estimates of usage and so on. But its author is more
concerned with intangible subjects: the perceptions that attach to drug use,
the vocabulary used to describe aspects of the drug markets - what he terms
the stories and narratives that condition society's views.

``When I approach drug dealers, I don't see much of a difference between a
person selling a drug, a person selling a hamburger, a person selling a
quality breakfast at a high-quality cafe,'' he said.

``They're all engaged in economies. Sometimes they're illegal; sometimes
they're violent. But sometimes language is also violent.'' Dr Fitzgerald
realised the gulf that often lies between different concepts of reality
while he was working on his doctoral thesis in 1993.

His area of study was not crime, but pharmacology. He was researching
ecstasy and noticed that his laboratory studies were producing notably
different types of results to those of social science studies into the drug.
He adapted his thesis to reflect the two types of research.

``From that point on I've continued with social science research into drug
use,'' he said.

One of the conclusions he has drawn from his studies is that the meaning of
heroin in people's lives is conditioned by many different, specific, social
and historical factors.

He said he had interviewed a whole family of dealers, for instance, where
dealing was simply their primary method of generating income. Another family
had been set in their ways of using heroin for at least two generations.
Other users might take heroin only once a week, perhaps as an adjunct to
beer and videos.

``This is not because they're desperate and victims. It's just part of
life,'' he said. ``I actually don't buy the idea that heroin is about a
broader social movement towards hedonism or toward broader social suffering.
I think it's about desire and desire is multiple. Desire is located in
individuals, but desire is always already social.''

Notions of society and social responsibility tend to become more sharply
focused as abstract principles give way to day-to-day living in one's own
community. This is very much the case for Dr Fitzgerald, who decided to
focus his research on Smith Street, rather than any of the other heroin
hotspots, because he lives in Fitzroy ``and get asked three times every 500
metres whether I want to get on (buy heroin)''.

``In a sense it's about taking responsibility for your own patch,'' he said.
``You can't just do research that satisfies your academic audience. You've
also got to make a story that is sensible for other audiences.''

Part of that story involves trying to put the street heroin trade in
context, and discussing it with people in the neighborhood.

Dr Fitzgerald sees the emergence of vigorous heroin street trading on Smith
Street as a logical extension of demand from a generation conditioned to
being able to get almost everything takeaway, from hamburgers to banking
services.

``I'm not going to talk about post-modernism to shop owners,'' he said.
``But I will talk about issues of difference. I'll talk about conflict. I'll
say there are a lot of people who do things differently here and it's better
if we all get along.''

Not surprisingly, perhaps, he is wary of neat solutions to the heroin
problem, preferring to suggest a wide range of social and attitudinal
changes as well as legislation.

One strategy he certainly does not favor, however, is that of legalising the
drug - at least, not in the most obvious way.

``If we're forced to think of the world as a liberal place, then if we open
it up to the free market it's a good thing,'' he said. ``I actually don't
believe that. I don't believe the free market frees us at all. I think the
free market ties us into a form of regulation that is linked to
profiteering - and that's just off the list as far as I'm concerned.''