Abstract
This paper examines the methods of qualitative research of drug use in terms of its rationality, especially with two research in the School of Symbolic Interactionism. One is research on opiate addiction done by Alfred R. Lindesmith (1938, 1947, 1968), and another is on the world of drug users done by Herbert Blumer and his assistants (1967). Lindesmith's work used his own observations, interviews with addicts, and many documents which describe addiction in order to analyze the process whereby people become addicted. He adopted the analytic induction to formulate the theory of addiction. This procedure is approved as scientific and rational, because the analytic induction is not a genuine induction but a hypothetico-deductive method, the standard method of the positive science. Blumer's work also used interviews with drug users to analyze several careers of drug users, but the accounts in his work are revealed as non-rational as a result of the re-analysis of the data which he shows in his work. Finally this paper suggests that we can adopt the methods of Discourse Analysis to guarantee the rationality of the analysis of the drug users, especially with interview data.
