The social structure of a heroin copping community.

We have been studying heroin addicts in their natural setting in an effort to understand the factors contributing to the spread and maintenance of this disorder. In previous studies (Hughes, Crawford, and Barker, 1971; Hughes and Jaffe, 1971) 'we reported that (1) the majority of active street addicts in our urban area appeared to be organized for purposes of heroin distribution into neighborhood "copping communities," (2) an epidemiologic field team located at the local drug-distribution sites, called "copping areas," can obtain demographic and other epidemiologic data on the majority of copping community members, and (3) the field team can remove special samples from the copping community through experimental treatment projects.