In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Philippe Bourgois says early on that he was forced into crack based on his need for inexpensive housing when he decided to research the underground economy in East Harlem. Even though his friends and family thought he was mad, he wanted to write about—and immerse himself in—the poverty and segregation that had amassed in what is known as El Barrio or East Harlem, in the state of New York, the most expensive city in the world at the time. Although he wanted his research to involve the drug trade, he initially had a wider subject that included other facets of the underground market like licensed betting and drug culture. When Bourgois first hit the streets of East Harlem, mainstream society didn’t know what cocaine was, as it was relatively new and not accessible on the mass market. When it was transformed into the more accessible form known as "crack" and sold, especially to the underprivileged who didn’t have access to more expensive drugs, cocaine became infamous. Bourgois goes on to say that heroin, which had once lost a lot of its market share to do crack’s inexpensiveness, has begun to regain attraction now by cutting prices, thereby adding heroin to the dealer’s market of crack and cocaine in East Harlem.