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Drugs and the City An author looks at the lives of two African American teenagers who live and sell drugs in Detroit by Jennifer Guerra Ann Arbor, MI When Luke Bergmann was a grad student in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, he got an internship at Detroit's Juvenile Detention Facility. The first day, he showed up in his green dockers, orange button down, Doc Martens, "looking like the bewildered, naïve white boy that I was," says Bergmann.

Bergmann wasn't exactly sure what kind of project he wanted to work on while he was there. But then, he stumbled into one of the classrooms in the facility. Everybody in the room was African American: kids, teachers. At first they talked about hip hop, and hip hop culture. And then the conversation turned to drugs and Detroit's drug trade. Here's how Bergmann describes it in the book:

"Johnson and the other teachers had been following the conversation closely, but not saying anything, when Paley interrupted: you all think this is the only way for black folks to make money, but look at who you're selling to: your dads, your moms, and your aunties. You all are destroying the black community. Without raising his hand, Rodney disagreed. Yeah, we doing some of that. But we selling to a lot of people who ain't black. And anyways someone gonna be selling this regardless. Regardless. And whoever's doing it, going to be doing it. And whoever be smoking it, going to be smoking it. Regardless. Why are we gonna let someone else get that money? The other students grunted and nodded in agreement.

For the next 300 pages Luke Bergmann takes us on a journey through some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city to try to better understand how and why Detroit's huge drug trade came to be.

The book, which is called Getting Ghost, follows the lives of two African American teenagers as they make their way in and out of the juvenile detention facility. Both names are pseudonyms. There's Rodney Phelps. He's 17 and sells drugs on Detroit's west side. And Dude Freeman is 16 and sells drugs on Detroit east side.

Rodney lives with his Mom and younger brother in an abandoned house. Dude's whole family sells drugs and he sort of floats from house to house with various drug dealing friends. Bergmann describes both neighborhoods as "almost post-apocalyptic at first blush. They are so, at this point, bereft of any structure."

Over time, Bergmann becomes really close to Dude and Rodney and so through Bergmann we get sort of an eye-witness account of what goes on in their worlds. We watch Rodney and Dude sling drugs on the corner, we see them eat dinner with their families, we see them get in fights, make mistakes, run from the cops, hide. And sometimes we see them scared.

"I see it as neither a positive nor negative portrayal. What I was wanting to do, particularly around questions of morality and ethics, I was wanting to leave those questions very open really to see that the moral conundrums aren't simple. That there aren't simple answers to the questions that life presents them with every day."

Bergmann says, if Detroit's policy makers take that into account when they're ready to build a new Detroit, it could make a difference in the lives of young people like Dude and Rodney.

To find out what has happened to of the teenagers in the book since it was published click here.