No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing

Given the way news is reported these days, the image of the inner city many of have is that of drug-infested ghetto plagued with crack houses and roaming addicts. Waverly Duck is here to tell a different story and give us a new image of the inner city. He conducted fieldwork in a medium-size East Coast city where the drug scene is controlled by a local group of black men who sell cocaine to white suburbanites. In this community, located outside Philadelphia, the drug dealers are not outsiders, but long-term residents, integrated with their neighbors (a diverse lot, some old, some young, some long-time homeowners, many working-class families, but many others without jobs or external social support). Duck considers their survival strategies, living in a place where they feel accepted and which they understand, like no other place. They have no way out. Duck shows us the kind of social order and morality that holds sway on Lyford Street, and that enables people to survive. He introduces a cast of characters in Bristol Hill, his city s pseudonym, highlighting the viewpoints of these residents and their codes of interaction with each other. That code ensures a daily life lived in relative safety, despite risks from the embedded drug trade (and Duck also shows us the particular pathway by which young men become drug dealers). Duck himself grew up in poverty (in Detroit), and his own life story contrasts rather dramatically with that of Alice Goffman, the well-heeled young white woman whose account of drug dealers on the run from police created a sensation, and with that of Scott Jacques, the coauthor of our forthcoming book on drug-dealing in the suburbs (in an all-white milieu). What emerges in "No Way Out" is an important new perspective on the culture of the urban poor, comprehensive in the range of issues it considers and revelatory in the interaction orders it uncovers."