Drugs, Stories, and Social Worlds: Remembering Terry MacDonald, 1950-2021
Drugs, Stories, and Social Worlds:
Remembering Terry MacDonald, 1950-2021
I recently learned that Patrick Terry Macdonald died on July 1, 2021, at the age of seventy-one. I simply hadn't known. Graduate school creates intense friendships and intellectual companionships, and then scatters people in different directions. Someone who was once a vivid presence in your everyday world gradually recedes from view. Decades pass. Then one day you type a familiar name into a search box and discover that the person whose voice and laughter you can still summon so easily has been gone for five years.
I met Terry in Santa Barbara in 1983. I had moved into 625 Bradbury Avenue, next door to Maureen Harrington de Vivas, another graduate student in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Maureen was about five-foot-five, Canadian, with bright red hair, an enthusiasm for cannabis, and by then something approaching legendary status as a graduate student: she had already been at UCSB for roughly a decade.
It was at Maureen's house that I encountered Terry.
Terry was difficult not to encounter. He was a big, burly man with an enormous personality to match. He was irreverent, opinionated, endlessly curious, funny, occasionally outrageous, and one of the great storytellers I encountered during my years in sociology. Terry did not merely tell you something. He inhabited the story. There were characters, voices, detours, suspicious circumstances, improbable events, and usually something about human behavior that didn't quite fit the official explanation.
There was something of Hunter S. Thompson about him.
I don't mean that Terry practiced Gonzo journalism, much less that he was impersonating Thompson. But they shared an attraction to the places respectable accounts didn't quite reach. Terry liked the margins. He liked strange characters and underground worlds. He was suspicious of explanations that became too tidy. And it seems wonderfully appropriate that one of his former students later remembered Terry lending him Thompson's Hell's Angels and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. These were books about worlds usually described from outside, written by people determined to get closer.
Terry liked getting closer.
The Drug Sleuth
What Terry knew about drugs seemed inexhaustible.
He was interested in cocaine, certainly, but also cannabis, alcohol, psychedelics, pharmaceuticals, heroin, and seemingly anything else human beings had discovered could alter consciousness. His curiosity was catholic and relentless. He wanted to know what a substance did, but pharmacology was only the beginning.
Who used it?
Why?
With whom?
Where did they get it?
How did novices learn to use it?
What did experienced users know that novices didn't?
What combinations did people seek out or avoid?
What pleasures were they pursuing?
What rules did they develop?
And why did some people use drugs heavily for years while maintaining jobs, relationships, and ordinary lives, while for others drug use became destructive?
There was something of the sleuth in Terry. He followed clues.
That may be the quality I remember most vividly now. An anomalous case wasn't an inconvenience to be discarded because it complicated the theory. For Terry, an anomaly was a clue.
If the official account said a drug necessarily caused a particular behavior and Terry knew people whose experiences contradicted it, he became interested. If public discourse collapsed very different kinds of users into a single category, Terry wanted to pull them apart again. If users possessed practical knowledge that researchers, physicians, police officers, or journalists didn't have, Terry wanted to know what they knew.
Long before I had the language I now use for these matters, Terry was teaching me a fundamental sociological lesson:
Don't confuse the official description of a social world with the social world itself.
A Quantitative Dissertation Written by an Ethnographer
There is a wonderful contradiction in Terry's scholarly career.
His doctoral dissertation was quantitative.
Terry completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at UCSB in 1986. His dissertation, Cocaine Use and Abuse: An Empirical Test of Two Competing Theoretical Models, drew upon a large sample to compare two major criminological explanations of cocaine use: differential association and control theory. His subsequent article, “Competing Theoretical Explanations of Cocaine Use: Differential Association Versus Control Theory,” reported data from 1,517 respondents, including 1,091 cocaine users.
Differential association won.
That outcome would not have displeased Terry's mentor, Donald Cressey.
Cressey was one of the great figures in twentieth-century American criminology and an intellectual heir of Edwin Sutherland, with whom he coauthored successive editions of Principles of Criminology. Differential association—the proposition that criminal and deviant practices are socially learned through interaction with others—was central to that tradition.
There was also something wonderfully old-school about Cressey. He was an ethnographer and storyteller as well as a criminologist. He had gone into prisons to understand embezzlers. He was interested in how people themselves understood questionable conduct: their vocabularies, rationalizations, associations, situations and practical reasoning.
Terry resembled him.
That resemblance, I now think, mattered at least as much as theoretical inheritance. Terry learned from Cressey not simply a theory of deviance but something about how to be a sociologist.
Because despite all the numbers in Terry's dissertation, the Terry I knew was an ethnographer.
Not necessarily an ethnographer by declared methodological allegiance. He was an ethnographer by temperament.
He watched.
He listened.
He hung around.
He investigated.
He followed leads.
And above all, Terry collected stories.
Drugs as Social Worlds
Terry's published work confirms more of the man I remember than I expected it would.
Before completing his dissertation, he was already studying how drugs and crime were represented in popular culture. In 1983 he published “The ‘Dope’ on Soaps,” examining portrayals of alcohol, tobacco, tranquilizers, amphetamines, marijuana, LSD, cocaine and heroin on daytime television. With his wife, sociologist Rhoda Estep, he studied representations of crime and drugs on television in several additional articles.
Rhoda was enormously important to Terry. They had met as graduate students at the University of Minnesota before Terry eventually finished his graduate work at UCSB. She became a professor at California State University, Stanislaus. Their marriage lasted for the rest of Terry's life.
And Terry drove.
My memories of him seem to involve almost absurd amounts of driving—between teaching jobs, Santa Barbara, the Bay Area, and wherever else his complicated academic geography required him to be. Apparently he never entirely stopped. After retiring from teaching in 2010, he jokingly described his second career as chauffeur to Rhoda, driving her between their home in Orinda and CSU Stanislaus in Turlock.
Some people have a home institution.
Terry sometimes seemed to have Interstate 101.
But the most consequential turn in his research brought him into the remarkable Bay Area network of drug researchers that included Dan Waldorf, Sheigla Murphy, and Craig Reinarman.
Reinarman himself was part of the extended UCSB intellectual family. He received his doctorate in Sociology from UCSB in 1983, the year I arrived in Santa Barbara, and later became a major figure in critical sociological studies of drugs and drug policy.
Terry became part of this research world as well, working with the Alcohol Research Group at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. With Waldorf, Murphy, and Reinarman he participated in the Cocaine Cessation Project, which studied the actual careers and experiences of cocaine users.
In 1988 Terry was first author, with Waldorf, Reinarman, and Murphy, of “Heavy Cocaine Use and Sexual Behavior.” The study was based upon intensive, face-to-face, tape-recorded interviews with 228 heavy cocaine users.
There is my ethnographer.
The man whose dissertation tested theories using more than a thousand questionnaires was now sitting across from cocaine users and listening to them describe their lives.
Before “Critical Drug Studies”
Today I would describe what Terry introduced me to as critical drug studies.
We didn't necessarily call it that in 1983. The contemporary field had not yet cohered under that label. But its intellectual ingredients were already present.
Howard Becker had demonstrated in “Becoming a Marihuana User” that even experiencing a drug's effects involves social learning. Norman Zinberg was developing the enormously consequential framework of drug, set, and setting. Researchers were demonstrating that patterns of drug use could not be deduced simply from pharmacology. Waldorf, Murphy, Reinarman and others were studying people who used illicit drugs naturalistically rather than treating hospitals, prisons and treatment programs as the only legitimate windows into drug use.
This changed the question.
Instead of beginning:
What is wrong with these people?
one could begin with the much more elementary sociological question:
What is going on here?
That difference is enormous.
“The drug user” ceases to be a self-evident kind of person. Cocaine users, cannabis users, heroin users, psychedelic users and drinkers inhabit social worlds. They acquire vocabularies and techniques. They develop rituals and relationships. They teach one another. They distinguish good drugs from bad ones, appropriate occasions from inappropriate ones, acceptable quantities from excessive ones. They sometimes construct elaborate systems of self-regulation.
Some flourish.
Some suffer terribly.
Some move between flourishing and suffering.
Some eventually find that drugs have colonized almost every other meaningful activity in their lives.
And some people use psychoactive substances throughout long and otherwise ordinary lives without becoming the characters imagined by America's recurring drug panics.
Terry helped teach me that all of these people have to be investigated before they can be explained.
Storytelling as Sociology
Terry's storytelling was therefore not incidental to his sociology.
I didn't understand that when I was young.
Academic sociology teaches us to separate anecdote from evidence. There are excellent reasons for doing so. Stories can mislead. Colorful cases can overwhelm representative patterns. The unforgettable person isn't necessarily the typical person.
But there is another danger: sociology can become so afraid of anecdote that it loses sight of experience.
Terry's stories restored the people.
A Terry story usually contained a character, a predicament, some improbable behavior, perhaps an institutional absurdity, and eventually a sociological problem. Often the person who wasn't supposed to exist was precisely the interesting person.
The heavy drug user who remained employed.
The supposedly deviant person with a highly developed moral code.
The user who knew more about using a substance safely than the professional supposedly treating him.
The person whose experience contradicted what everyone “knew” the drug inevitably did.
Terry wanted to know about that person.
So did Cressey.
So did Becker.
And, although I couldn't have known it at the time, eventually so would I.
What We Learn Through Association
There is an irony here that Terry might have appreciated.
His dissertation demonstrated the explanatory power of differential association: roughly speaking, the proposition that conduct and the definitions supporting it are learned through interaction with others.
But perhaps intellectual life operates through differential association too.
We become sociologists partly through the people with whom we associate.
Certainly I read Garfinkel, Sacks, Goffman, Becker, Marx, Nietzsche and eventually many others. I had extraordinary formal teachers at UCSB. But intellectual formation doesn't occur only through books, seminars and dissertation committees.
It happens next door.
It happens in somebody's living room.
It happens when a big, funny, irreverent graduate student starts telling you about cocaine research.
Someone hands you a book.
Someone tells you a story.
Someone says, in effect, That's what everybody says. But have you actually talked to the people who do it?
And a little piece of your intellectual world moves.
I can see Terry's influence more clearly now because of where my own life eventually took me. Ethnomethodology taught me to distrust analysts who substitute their categories for members' practices. Years of fieldwork taught me the importance of getting close to social worlds. Homeless outreach taught me how catastrophically institutional descriptions can differ from people's lived circumstances. Harm reduction taught me to begin with what people actually do rather than with what authorities believe they ought to do.
And my own encounters with drugs and people who use them have made me increasingly resistant to the binary categories through which American culture understands psychoactive substances: abstinent/addicted, clean/dirty, healthy/sick, responsible/deviant.
I would never attribute all of that to Terry Macdonald.
Intellectual genealogies aren't that simple.
But looking backward across more than forty years, I can recognize something I couldn't recognize at twenty-five:
Terry opened a door.
The Big Man in the Room
The obituary his family published confirms something else I remember vividly. Terry became a beloved teacher. He taught at CSU Stanislaus and UC Davis and spent much of his teaching career at San Jose State. One former student described him simply as “the best thing that ever hit the classroom.” His classes were remembered for laughter, argument, controversy and stories.
Of course they were.
Another former student remembered Terry and Rhoda taking younger students under their wings, sharing barbecues, adventures and “wild and crazy stories.” He described Terry as “a firecracker, a rocket into space.”
That sounds like Terry.
But perhaps the memorial comment that moves me most is the simplest one. Years after taking Terry's summer course at UCSB in 1985, a former student discovered his obituary and wrote that Terry had been a great professor.
I understand the delayed discovery.
I found Terry again the same way.
And perhaps that is why I wanted to write this. Academic lives are usually memorialized through institutions: appointments, books, articles, awards, citations. Those things matter. Terry produced serious scholarship. His work belongs to an important moment in the development of naturalistic research on cocaine use.
But citations don't measure all the ways one scholar enters another person's life.
Terry entered mine through stories.
I can still imagine him: the enormous man holding court, laughing, following some improbable thread through an underground social world, knowing far more about drugs than anybody reasonably ought to know, delighted because he had discovered another fact that complicated the conventional wisdom.
There was always another question.
Another character.
Another lead.
Another story.
And somewhere underneath all the humor was a serious methodological lesson:
Get closer.
Listen.
Don't assume you already know what kind of person you're looking at.
Find out what they know.
Follow the anomaly.
The official story is only the beginning.
I don't remember the last time I saw Terry Macdonald. That's one of the strange cruelties of ordinary life. We almost never recognize a last encounter while it is happening.
But I remember the first.
Santa Barbara, 1983.
Bradbury Avenue.
Maureen next door.
And this enormous, funny, curious man telling stories.
I didn't know it then, but Terry was teaching me how to become curious about the world.
More than forty years later, I'm still following his leads.
Patrick Terry Macdonald
May 25, 1950 – July 1, 2021
For Terry—the storyteller, the sleuth, the ethnographer hiding inside a quantitative criminologist, and one of the people who taught me that the most interesting sociology often begins when the official explanation stops working.
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