Drawing on six years of ethnographic engagement with people who use drugs in San Francisco, Brothers has woven together an empirical and theoretical contribution to STS particularly around trust and expertise, namely bodily risk and uncredentialed expertise. The paper is written with an authoritative medical voice which brings an understanding of street injection to another set of expert readers. The paper makes a further contribution to the relation of gendered bodies—whose body injects another and is unflinching in its descriptions. While it’s writing is readable it is not an easy read, but an important one in helping to reshape our understanding of street drugs in society and has implications relevant to urban marginality concurrent beyond the US.
