When we first heard about Valdemingómez, it was difficult to believe that a place with such multifaceted social problems had only received piecemeal academic interest: a sign, perhaps, that the methods we used to do this study are becoming defunct in the neoliberal era, and that our discipline is disappearing into the internal ideological politics of satisfying our seniors by getting shit loads of money for university coffers and publishing in high-impact journals to gratify our own sense of importance. Or maybe not. There is an alternative, and in this book we show that if really we want to get to the heart of a social problem, we simply need to get out of our offices and abandon standardised ways of researching, moulding ourselves to some degree to the realities under investigation.

This is what we have done in this book, which is based on two years of self-funded ethnographic research in Spain's principal drug market, Valdemingómez, on the outskirts of Madrid. We tried to play the research funding game but were rejected three times from formal state research mechanisms on the grounds that our methods were too risky. Nevertheless, we did the research, and this resulting book is about how various forms of structural violence produce mass degradation across swathes of the urban populace; it is about how these very processes crush the cultural outlook and everyday lives of drug users in the urban peripheries of Madrid. It shows how global processes, coupled with market economics, have hollowed out these people's livelihoods, to the point that many invert and internalise their own suffering into a fatalistic form of drug use that only makes them visible as a threat to the urban dream, thus making them easy fodder for criminal justice institutions. Having developed an almost irreversible drug dependency, as a consequence, many simply end up between prison, the street and Valdemingómez, a place politically imagined where they will not poison the aesthetics of the city, and just die quietly among the rubbish and the waste.