CWU Exhibit: Inside the Life of a "Righteous Dopefiend"

In San Francisco, during the dot-com boom of the '90s, homeless drug users were dispersed and dislocated throughout the city due to gentrification. The 2009 book, Righteous Dopefiend by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, is an urban anthropological project that took place over the course of 12 years. The results force us to confront those people, the ones in the street that we walk past everyday.

. . . In an act to shed some light on this invisible world, Mark Auslander, director of Central Washington University’s Museum of Culture and Environment, picked up Righteous Dopefiend as a museum exhibit. "The book is extraordinary," said Mark. "But the exhibition reaches a lot of people who wouldn't actually look at the book and they bring their own stories where, very passionately and beautifully, they recount to friends what their own experiences were."

Read more of the story here.

Photo by Jeff Schonberg