The Temporal Lag of Competence by Wayne Martin Mellinger

                                 The Temporal Lag of Competence: 

Paco, Fentanyl, and the Obsolescence of Street Knowledge

Wayne Martin Mellinger

"I got this."

Paco said it often.

He said it when people worried about his drinking. He said it when outreach workers encouraged him to apply for housing. He said it when friends expressed concern about fentanyl. He said it when someone suggested treatment.

Sometimes he said it directly.

Sometimes it appeared as a shrug, a joke, a change of subject, or a smile.

The message was always the same.

He could handle things.

I thought about those words after he died.

When you spend enough years doing outreach in Santa Barbara, you learn that appearances can be deceptive. Some of the people who look most vulnerable are surprisingly resilient. Some of the people who appear strongest are hanging on by a thread.

Paco belonged to the second category.

He was twenty-eight years old, originally from Goleta, about five-foot-six and perhaps 130 pounds. Tattoos ran up both arms and across his neck. He was small enough that larger men occasionally pushed him around. Yet there was something about the way he carried himself that discouraged pity.

Paco had style.

Not casual style. Intentional style.

The clothes mattered.

The shoes mattered.

The haircut mattered.

The swagger mattered.

Every so often Paco would disappear and return wearing an entirely new outfit. Brand-name shoes. A fresh jacket. A coordinated color scheme. Sometimes red. Sometimes black. Often both. The look carried traces of gang culture, street fashion, and Southern California style. He looked less like a homeless man than someone on his way to a concert or a party.

Out on the street people call it boosting.

A jacket lifted from a store.

A pair of shoes acquired through informal means.

A carefully assembled appearance created from fragments.

When I complimented him on an outfit, his entire face lit up.

"Man, you always keep your style tight," I told him once.

"I gotta look right," he replied, smoothing the sleeve of a new jacket. "Can't be looking busted out here."

The statement revealed more than fashion preferences.

Style was armor.

Life on the street is filled with small humiliations. People stare. Security guards follow you. Businesses ask you to leave. Possessions disappear. Sleep is interrupted. Public space becomes a workplace of constant vigilance.

For Paco, appearance was one way of resisting that process.

Looking good allowed him to preserve a version of himself that homelessness constantly threatened to erase.

The same pattern appeared elsewhere.

Although Paco spent most nights outside, he resisted describing himself as homeless.

Every couple of weeks he spent several days with his mother in Goleta.

Those visits mattered.

Technically they did little to change his housing status.

Socially and psychologically they meant everything.

Paco still had family.

He still had somewhere to go.

He still had another story available.

He was not simply a homeless man sleeping outdoors.

He was a son who happened to spend a lot of time on the street.

The distinction may sound minor. To Paco it was enormous.

The same logic shaped his relationship to social services.

Housing was always something he might pursue later.

Benefits were something he might eventually apply for.

Treatment was something he could consider when the time was right.

What he resisted was not necessarily assistance itself.

What he resisted was becoming the kind of person who needed assistance.

Many outreach workers would describe Paco as service resistant.

The phrase never seemed quite right.

Paco was not resisting services.

He was protecting competence.

Competence was central to who he understood himself to be.

That competence extended into the world of drugs.

Paco drank heavily.

His hands sometimes trembled in the morning before alcohol settled his nerves.

He carried the restless alertness of someone whose body had spent years preparing for danger.

Without alcohol he often appeared anxious.

With alcohol he appeared calmer.

"Just helps me chill out," he would say.

Fentanyl occupied a different place in his life.

Unlike alcohol, fentanyl carried a growing aura of uncertainty.

By the time fentanyl became common in Santa Barbara's homeless community, overdoses had become a routine feature of street life.

Narcan was everywhere.

Outreach workers carried it.

Shelter staff carried it.

Friends carried it.

Stories circulated constantly.

Someone overdosed behind a store.

Someone collapsed in a creek bed.

Someone woke up surrounded by paramedics.

Someone never woke up.

What struck me was that many of the people using fentanyl were not inexperienced users.

They were veterans.

People with twenty years of drug experience.

People who had survived heroin.

People who knew withdrawal.

People who knew intoxication.

People who believed they understood risk.

Conversations among older users often sounded like conversations among craftsmen.

People discussed quality.

They discussed tolerance.

They discussed dosage.

They discussed techniques.

They shared stories about mistakes and close calls.

They exchanged practical knowledge.

The underlying assumption was simple.

Experience mattered.

Paco shared that assumption.

He trusted experience.

He trusted judgment.

He trusted what decades of survival had taught him.

When concerns about fentanyl emerged, his response was often familiar.

"I got this."

"I can handle this."

Those statements were not expressions of ignorance.

They were expressions of confidence grounded in lived experience.

And that is what makes Paco's story so tragic.

The knowledge was real.

The competence was real.

The experience was real.

The environment changed.

What heroin had once rewarded, fentanyl increasingly undermined.

Under heroin conditions, practical knowledge often improved one's chances of survival.

Under fentanyl conditions, the relationship between experience and safety became increasingly unstable.

A user could encounter radically different concentrations from one purchase to the next.

The assumptions that guided earlier forms of expertise no longer worked as reliably as they once had.

Yet the confidence remained.

The habits remained.

The methods remained.

This is what I mean by the temporal lag of competence.

People continue to rely upon knowledge learned under earlier conditions because that knowledge once worked.

The danger lies not in ignorance but in obsolete expertise.

The most dangerous lessons are often the ones that were true.

Looking back, I do not think Paco died because he underestimated danger.

I think he died because he reasonably trusted forms of competence that had helped him survive for years.

The old drug world taught him that experience mattered.

The new drug world offered no such guarantee.

Paco's story reminds us that overdose is not merely a pharmacological event.

It is also a social event.

People encounter drugs through identities, histories, habits, relationships, and practical forms of knowledge accumulated over years of living.

Sometimes those forms of knowledge continue to work.

Sometimes the world changes first.

And sometimes a man who has spent years proving he can handle things discovers that the rules have changed without telling him.

The most dangerous thing about obsolete knowledge is that it was once true.

Notes

This research note was inspired in part by reading Waverly Duck's doctoral dissertation, A Study of African American Men's Beliefs About Masculinity and the Impact of These Beliefs on Health (Wayne State University, 2004). While the argument developed here differs substantially from Duck's, his work prompted me to consider how locally organized beliefs about competence, autonomy, self-reliance, and masculinity might shape vulnerability among homeless substance users living in the age of fentanyl. Duck's central question—how beliefs about manhood influence health outcomes—provided an important starting point for the reflections developed here.

The argument concerning the social organization of drug use draws heavily upon Howard S. Becker's classic interactionist study Outsiders (1963), particularly his analysis of marijuana use as a learned social practice. Becker demonstrated that drug use involves the acquisition of techniques, meanings, and interpretive frameworks through participation in social worlds. The present essay extends that insight to the practical knowledge historically acquired within heroin-using communities.

The concept of "street knowledge" and the ethnographic treatment of homeless substance users owe much to the work of Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, especially Righteous Dopefiend (2009). Their attention to the moral worlds, adaptive strategies, and embodied suffering of homeless drug users helped shape my understanding of Paco's life and the broader social ecology in which he lived.

The discussion of changing drug environments was influenced by the work of Craig Reinarman and other sociologists of drugs and drug policy who have consistently emphasized the historical and social context of drug use. Reinarman's work reminds us that drugs do not exist apart from the social worlds in which they are consumed and understood.

The broader interactionist framework underlying this essay draws upon a long tradition of ethnographic and qualitative sociology, including the work of Howard Becker, Eliot Freidson, Anselm Strauss, Erving Goffman, and other scholars associated with symbolic interactionism and the study of everyday life. The essay's concern with practical knowledge, competence, identity, and situated action also reflects the influence of ethnomethodology, particularly its attention to the methods through which ordinary actors make sense of and navigate their social worlds.

Readers familiar with my ongoing work among homeless populations will recognize connections to my larger concern with institutional recognition, vulnerability, and survival. Whereas much of that work examines the interaction between homeless persons and institutions, the present essay focuses on a different question: how practical forms of knowledge learned under one set of historical conditions may persist after those conditions have changed.

The phrase "temporal lag of competence" is my own attempt to describe this phenomenon. It refers to situations in which practical skills, understandings, and methods learned under one social or material environment continue to organize conduct after the environment itself has been transformed. In the case discussed here, competencies developed within a heroin-based drug ecology persist within a fentanyl-based drug ecology where they may no longer provide the protection they once did.