U.S. Embassy Policy Specialist fellow Jennifer Carroll writes a guest blog about her experiences conducting ethnographic research among individuals seeking treatment for a combination of opiate addiction, HIV and TB in Ukraine.
“This isn’t American heroin!” he laughs. The joke is on me. This methadone patient has told me many times during our interview that I am asking questions like an American. I listen intently as he explains how I’ve got it all wrong. “This is Ukrainian smack,” he says. “We’re chemists. We extract the stuff ourselves from poppies and solvents… In America, you don’t do this kind of thing.” He is not the first person to remind me that foreign researchers have a lot to learn about what it is like to be a Ukrainian drug user.
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