Social Networks, Drug Injectors’ Lives, and HIV/AIDS

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Introduction

   Pages 1-12

3. Learning from Lives

   Pages 13-51

4. The Drug Scene and Risk Behaviors in Bushwick

   Pages 53-86

5. The Very First Hit

   • Katherine A. Atwood

   Pages 87-106

6. Network Concepts and Serosurvey Methods

   Pages 107-117

7. The Research Participants and Their Behaviors

   Pages 119-124

8. Personal Risk Networks and High-Risk Injecting Settings of Drug Injectors

   Pages 125-141

9. Syringe Sharing and the Social Characteristics of Drug-Injecting Dyads

   Pages 143-156

10. Sexual Networks, Condom Use, and the Prospects for HIV Spread to Non-Injection Drug Users

    Pages 157-180

11. Sociometric Networks among Bushwick Drug Injectors

    Pages 181-200

12. Networks and HIV and Other Infections

    Pages 201-215

13. Prevention and Research

    Pages 217-238

14. Appendix

    • Gilbert Ildefonso

    Pages 239-253

15. Back Matter

    Pages 255-277

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Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS recognizes HIV as a socially structured disease - its transmission usually requires intimate contact between individuals - and shows how social networks shape high-risk behaviors and the spread of HIV.
The authors recount the groundbreaking use of social network methods, ethnographic direct-observation techniques, and in-depth interviews in their study of a drug-using community in Brooklyn, New York. They provide a detailed documentary of the lives of community members. They describe drug-use, the affects of poverty and homelessness, the acquisition of money and drugs, and social relationships within the group.
Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS shows that social networks and contexts are of crucial importance in understanding and fighting the AIDS epidemic. These findings should revitalize prevention efforts and reshape social policy.

• AIDS
• HIV
• infection
• infections
• prevention
• infectious diseases

`This is an interesting, important, and well-written book. It contains a great deal of useful new information about the risk behaviours of drug injectors and how they respond or fail to respond to those risks... The book provides detail about how individual drug injectors understand and try cope with these immediate risks. It stands as a considerable achievement and one from which all who work in this field can learn.'
Addiction, 95:8 (2000)

"This book represents the culmination of a decade's work by consummate researcher-advocates who are not content to disseminate their findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals but who wish to build on research findings to improve the lives of the people they have studied. Pragmatism and the desire to produce change permeate all 13 chapters of this book."

(Karen McKinnon, Psychiatric Services, April 2001)

• National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., New York

  Samuel R. Friedman, Alan Neaigus, Benny Jose

• John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York

  Richard Curtis

• Beth Israel Medical Center, National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., New York

  Don C. Jarlais

• Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York

  Don C. Jarlais

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