The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver (Medical Anthropology)

$37.95
by Danya Fast

Shop Now
In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related analogs in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver , Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis. "Wow! A gripping ethnography of the everyday ecstatic emergency and boredom of methamphetamine, fentanyl and failed relationships that cuts short the lives of Canadian youth—often indigenous—desperately seeking community, meaning and survival. Documents the dysfunctional meshes of care/jail/gentrification/predatory narcotics markets and human betrayals that betrays their persistent universally recognizable dreams/hopes against all odds for a better futures that never arrives." -- Philippe Bourgois ― author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and co-author of Righteous Dopefiend DANYA FAST is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Customer Reviews

No ratings. Be the first to rate

 customer ratings


How are ratings calculated?
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Review This Product

Share your thoughts with other customers