The Chronicle: 10/25/2002: Crossing the Line: A Heroin Researcher Partakes and Pays the Price Hitting the Jackpot



It took years for Ansley Hamid, or "Andy" as everyone calls him, to hit the big time. He wasn't unknown, but he wasn't a star either. The professor, who earned his Ph.D. from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1980, came to John Jay in 1985, carving out a niche as an ethnographer of drug users and dealers and developing theories on the life cycles of drug markets.



John Jay was a strange fit for Mr. Hamid. The college is home to many former and future law-enforcement officers and policy makers. Mr. Hamid doesn't look the part. His dreadlocks long ago disappeared from his now-balding pate, but his beard is white and frizzy, like Santa Claus if he were an East Indian from the Caribbean. One former student says she loved it that, unlike so many of her strait-laced professors, Mr. Hamid was a "wack-job hippie."