Keywords

Agnes and I talk about the positive effects that drugs can have. She describes what it is like to use amphetamines:

And then, it’s this hit of pure happiness, yeah. Extreme energy, for a pretty long time. But the best effect is probably that it makes you feel so natural and confident. I would say. Music can sound a lot better too, I feel.Footnote 1

That drug use can lead to experiences of happiness and other positive feelings may not surprise anyone. It is, after all, an implicit purpose of drug use in general. But when these feelings of happiness are put into words, something happens. The feelings described contrast with stories about drugs as dangerous and destructive, their inherent unhappiness.

Most of the research that has been conducted on drug use has focused on unhappiness rather than happiness. Drug-use-related unhappiness is also a well-established cultural image, including the assumption that any happiness one might experience when using drugs is temporary and false. Ulf Ellervik—chemist and author of popular science books such as Evil Chemistry (2011) and Pleasure (2013)Footnote 2—describes in a lecture how amphetamine use “tricks us into thinking we are happy” (My notes, 18 January 2017) by mirroring dopamine, which he identifies as “the molecule of pleasure”, one that rewards us when we engage in survival behaviours, such as eating or having sex. According to Ellervik, getting high on amphetamines is a kind of (self-)deception, because it rewards us for unnecessary behaviours in the same way as for necessary ones. The reasoning then includes the feelings to which these behaviours give rise: they are genuine when linked to evolutionarily necessary practices, and false when they are not. From such a perspective, biological responses are aligned with normative conceptions of how happiness is achieved. Ahmed calls such beliefs promises of happiness (2010, pp. 27ff.). Approaching the right objects and keeping one’s distance from others implies an underlying promise that the path leads to happiness. Approaching unhappy objects thus equates to turning towards unhappiness. This is an image of the perceived relationship between happiness/unhappiness and objects which, in the case of drugs, is widespread in society. Multiple Swedish municipalities provide similar information about drugs on their websites, cautioning against their use. The municipality of Grums, for example, writes: “Abuse becomes a shortcut to false happiness, a happiness that does not stem from having done something good”.Footnote 3 In these texts, too, a false emotional experience is linked to bad actions, namely drug use, which is contrasted with good actions and genuine happiness.

In this chapter, I examine how the women in the study relate to drug-induced happiness and theorise how this form of happiness can be understood in comparison with normative understandings of what happiness is and the relationship between happiness and unhappiness.

There are risks in doing so. Sara Ahmed writes that happiness and unhappiness are perceived to be contagious and, in the same way as someone may keep their distance from a person who is unhappy to avoid becoming infected, they may seek to get close to a person who is perceived to be happy, with the hope of experiencing happiness themselves (Ahmed 2010, pp. 39, 97).

Linking drug use to unhappiness or happiness is, therefore, not just a neutral statement of fact, but a figure of speech that can influence people’s directions. If drug-use-related happiness is perceived as being just like any other form of happiness, there is a risk that people will move closer to both drugs and the people who use them. This in turn increases the risk of exposure to the negative effects associated with drugs.

1 Distance and Closeness

The women describe difficulties in communicating drug-related happiness in different ways. When Katy says emphatically that “it’s not something you talk about, and it’s not something I talk about, either, anywhere”, this secrecy stands in stark contrast to her descriptions of wonderful and easy-going parties where she uses cocaine with friends. Her silence is partly out of consideration for others who might be unhappy to hear about drug-related happiness. Katy’s parents, for example, would feel sad rather than pleased if they learned about her drug happiness, she says. Parents would generally read unhappiness into drug use for the interviewees. Agnes tells me about her mother’s reaction when she discovered that her teenage daughter smoked cannabis:

my mum walked in on us when we’d been smoking in my room and made it sound like we’d been… doing heroin. “How will you be able to afford cannabis? Next thing you know, you’ll start prostituting yourselves!”

Agnes’ mother interprets cannabis smoking through a fearful understanding of all drugs as being associated with addiction and sex trafficking. This seems exaggerated and clueless to Agnes, who believes that her mother lacks knowledge about drugs and has a black-and-white view. I understand her to mean that the colour black represents drugs and unhappiness, while white is drug-free and happy. Agnes calls for a more nuanced approach.

Katy does mention that it sometimes happens that drug effects are commented upon, outside the circle that uses them together. In the right company, she can imagine saying that she had “a little help along the way”. According to this expression, the drug is described as facilitating movement along a certain path, an intended path that has led her to the happy mood that is the reason she wants to put her use into words.

But does the person who says they had a little help along the way feel that they got ahead? Those who are told seem to have reason to wonder how the person who used drugs got where they are. This reflects a spatial distance that can be perceived as existing between people who use drugs and people who do not.

In this way, distance turns out to be a key concept in how drug-related emotional experiences affect relationships with others. Two people can be in the same room but, according to the women, the drug use of one or both of them can create strong feelings of distance or, conversely, intimacy. Agnes describes feelings of distance in relation to people who do not use drugs as linked to identity, an identity that therefore also includes drugs:

Drugs are one thing, they’re substances, but there are also the experiences, they’re connected, but I think the identity is perhaps also connected to the substances with all that they entail, the experiences that come with them. […] it’s very difficult for someone who has taken a lot of drugs to connect with people who haven’t.

In this quote, Agnes discusses how the combination of human and psychoactive substance is perceived by the person who uses drugs herself, as a unit that together experiences things that would not have been possible without drugs. Preciado describes techno-bodies, i.e. associations between bodies and pharmacological and technological objects, as monstrous (in a hopeful, Harawayian sense), irreversible implosions of modern dichotomies between, for example, nature and culture (2013, pp. 44f.).

Such a body, in Agnes’ narrative, becomes an experience, from a first-person perspective, of having become permanently different through previous fusions. Agnes understands the monstrous nature of this fusion between the body and dead matter, not as a negatively characterised identity, but as a starting point for enriching experiences. The drugs have thus given rise to meaningful views from other vantage points, aligned with certain other people’s (techno-bodies’) feelings for/through similar objects (Ahmed 2010, p. 38). These are thus experiences and feelings that cannot be shared with people who have never used them. Not being able to “connect” becomes a marker of distance. Agnes again:

So I would never have been able to meet someone or get close to someone I wasn’t able to talk to about these things. It would never have worked. Like, er, at all. So I would never be able to get close to anyone at my current job, for example.

The sensation of distance from people without drug experience is contrasted with how Agnes describes closeness to others while intoxicated. One example is a love story:

When I took MDMA for the first time in Berlin, it was with this guy I was dating a bit, who was an addict. I was 20 or 21, I think … and it was, well, it was such a rush that came in two or three seconds. And we’d just met and were quite in love, so it was very intense. It was an extreme relaxation, for several hours. We’d just met and yet we took a bath together and talked about our innermost secrets and there was an extreme naturalness in our being, all the time, which is… well, now I realised why it’s fun to take it. It’s that people become so natural, it’s not a facade any more. I don’t care so much about people’s status, what they’ve done in life, I think all people are quite interesting, but it’s hard to bring that out. And drugs make that quite easy. You can take anybody and give them a drug and then this extremely sincere person comes out and it’s really interesting.

This scenario is straight out of a film: two young lovers in a bathtub telling each other their innermost secrets. What stands out (but does not make it any less cinematic) is that the lovers are high on MDMA, the man is said to be abusing heroin, and the woman, a psychologist, describes it as the height of authenticity.

In this quote, Agnes attributes the synthetic drug MDMA with the ability to bring out what she describes as the “natural” in people. This is further described as a sincerity, free from the facades that obscure what is natural and interesting in people. She thus conveys an image of drug use that stands in sharp contrast to the image of drug-related happiness as false. Instead, she perceives the positive feelings experienced during drug intoxication as linked to the ability of drugs to induce a naturalness that would otherwise not have been there, or would not have been able to emerge. According to Agnes, these are also conditions that later, when the intoxication has subsided, create a distance from others who have never experienced that influence.

Drug intoxication, as well as experiences of such intoxication, need to be shared so that the naturalness, sincerity and so on can be experienced as creating closeness. Those who are not intoxicated themselves may instead experience feelings of distance from an affected person, as the example of Katy shows.

Concepts such as facades, authenticity, naturalness and help along the way all point to experiences of how an inner life, especially an emotional life, is imagined or perceived to be affected by drugs. Drug-related happiness becomes a state that is experienced from a different body than the one that a person had before the drugs were used. The perspective changes, orientation takes place in different ways and person who uses drugs will perhaps always carry memories and possibilities of orientation that had not been there before.

Drugs can thus generate a particular point of view, from which drug-related feelings of happiness are within reach. But drug-related happiness is a happiness that also has a distinctive relationship with its opposite. It can make others unhappy, be interpreted as unhappiness, or be interrupted by experiences of unhappiness when the high wears off. How does the meaning of happiness connect to unhappiness for the interviewees, and how does it affect their images of drug use?

2 Unhappiness

Ahmed writes that the original meaning of “happiness” was “lucky”, giving the word connotations of temporary and random events, rather than diligent endeavour. However, in a more recent context, feelings and descriptions of happiness have increasingly come to be associated with morally recognised paths to happiness according to normative ideals (2010, pp. 22f.; cf. pp. 88ff.). A bad person can be lucky, but it is more difficult to think of them as happy.

Unhappiness, Ahmed argues, is an understudied area in philosophy, but she examines the genealogy of the word. She claims that it can teach us something about the history of happiness, but I also see that the meanings of the word unhappiness paint a familiar picture of the knarkare or knarkarhora, who are exemplary illustrations of the word. Ahmed writes:

In its earliest uses, unhappy meant “causing misfortune and trouble”. Only later, did it come to mean “miserable in lot or circumstances” or “wretched in mind”. The word wretched also has a suggestive genealogy, coming from wretch, referring to a stranger, exile, or banished person. The wretch is not only the one driven out of his or her native country but is also defined as one who is “sunk in deep distress, sorrow, misfortune or poverty”, “a miserable, unhappy or unfortunate person”, “a poor or hapless being”, and even “a vile, sorry or despicable person”. (ibid., p. 17)

The “wretch” has much in common with the knarkare: the sad, poor and marginalised character I imagined at the beginning of my thesis project as one of the iconic visible drug users, with the other being the rich and famous user. Ahmed’s etymological study also encapsulates the active role of the wretch or knarkare and the madness that the knarkare on the street represents.

Wretchedness is not (only) about being “miserable” and “sunk in deep distress”, but also about causing “misfortune and trouble” and being “wretched in mind”, which together could constitute what might be described as a “despicable person”, or a person who for obvious reasons is not happy but unhappy. A person who falls into such a category is often invisible. An unpleasant category is unpleasant to think about, and the very act of categorisation makes the preconception of unhappiness seem given, tiresome and inevitable.

However, Ahmed also writes that “the familiarity of a scene of suffering should not stop us from describing the suffering of a scene” (2010, pp. 98f.). She thus calls for descriptions of the inherent suffering within familiar scenes, ones that have been described so many times that we know what they look like, without ever having understood what they feel like. Such a scene is embodied by the unhappy knarkare, whose wretched life and death are scripted as inevitable consequences of their actions. The term “wretched”, by both representing and causing suffering, places blame on the person identified as such, making it difficult, or even impossible, to mourn them.

If drugs can only contribute to false or monstrous forms of undeserved happiness, then drug-related happiness also becomes an expression of wretchedness. The unhappy knarkare and the happy one are both representations of the not-entirely human figures that I have previously shown are kept at a distance in society. This in turn creates an ambivalent relationship between the interviewees and drugs as happy or unhappy objects (Ahmed 2010, pp. 21ff.). Ahmed examines how the relationship between happiness/unhappiness and objects can be theorised, and quotes Spinoza, among others:

We call a thing good which contributes to the preservation of our being, and we call a thing evil if it is an obstacle to the preservation of our being: that is to say, a thing is called by us good or evil as it increases or diminishes, helps or restrains, our power of action. (ibid., p. 23)

This quote states that the effect of objects is what determines whether they are judged to be good or bad, but Ahmed points out that such a judgement is based on evaluation and how the evaluations in turn affect which objects we approach: “To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn towards things” (ibid., p. 23). As a result, she adds, happiness can play a significant role in shaping our immediate environment:

Objects that give us pleasure take up residence within our bodily horizon. We come to have our likes, which might even establish what we are like. The bodily horizon could be redescribed as a horizon of likes. (ibid., p. 24)

She thus argues that liking creates our bodily horizons and becomes part of who we are. Such a way of theorising drugs is complicated by the rhythm between pleasure and restraint, as described by Richard Wilk (2014). The liked objects can become disliked if they become too numerous and/or are too often present. In other words, drugs as happy objects can abruptly fall out of favour with the one who uses them and slip into a socially defined category of unhappy objects, just when/if they come to define the bodily horizon. This change shows that the path to happiness is not only related to approaching the right objects, but also to enjoying them in moderation and experiencing moderate amounts of happiness in their vicinity (Ahmed 2010, pp. 36f). In other words, a happy life involves the regulation of desires, which distinguishes morally good people from bad ones. The difference can be linked to will and self-regulation (i.e., middle-class ideals, cf. Skeggs 2004, p. 73) versus bodily desires at the “behest” of objects (Ahmed 2010, p. 36; 2014, p. 80), in this case when someone cannot resist drugs.

In spite of the fact that every single woman I talked to described experiencing feelings of happiness as a result of their closeness to drugs, I still got the sense that they viewed drugs as unhappy objects when they had come to define someone’s bodily horizons.

Therefore, despite the fact that all the interviewees described happy feelings as linked to proximity to drugs, a perception of drugs as unhappy objects was evident in situations where they have come to define a person’s bodily horizon. One question from the interview guide was “Are you a typical XXX user? What is a typical XXX user like?” where the XXX was replaced by the name of the interviewees favourite drug or drugs. In response to the first question, only Hanna indicated in a sad tone that she herself was probably a typical heroin user. This coincides with the fact that she was also the only person who stated that she was currently abusing drugs. The word “typical” can be interpreted in different ways. For example, a person who emphasises MDMA as a drug with many benefits and positive effects could be assumed to think that typical users were lively and social people. But the question was not necessarily interpreted that way.Footnote 4 Instead, Agnes, for example, interprets “typical” as meaning that the person uses the drug (amphetamines) to a very great extent and manifests a negative image of use:

I’ve got this friend [who] uses a lot. It’s really hard to have a conversation with him. He’s just, at it all the time. And… yes, cognitive impairments, [laughs] I would say. Restless…

Boel has a different image of the typical user, in her case of MDMA, whom she refers to in a slightly patronising tone. She says that she does not think that she herself is a typical MDMA user and continues:

A typical MDMA person, I think, is mainly, for all kinds of reasons, someone who’s trying to escape the norm. Who perhaps has problems with the norm and thus rebels against it by using.

Boel compares this kind of person to people who enjoy themselves when using MDMA and who feel that “everything about them is enhanced”—which is how, on an earlier occasion, she described herself and the people she prefers to socialise with while using drugs. Despite their own use of drugs and the fact that both Boel and Agnes emphasise use as an important part of their lives, albeit in different ways—Boel describes use as something she could very well do without, while Agnes thoughtfully concludes that she actually sees drug use as part of her identity—both individuals associate “typical use” with a person who uses the drug in a way that causes harm, or as a way of escaping problems. From their perspectives, the typical drug user thus does not appear to be a happy person. For drugs to be used in ways they consider advantageous, the use has to be atypical.

So using drugs is about navigating happiness and unhappiness, which are four different feelings: drug-related happiness, drug-related unhappiness (which cannot be mourned) and then other kinds of happiness and unhappiness. None of the four can be fully separated from the others. Happiness and unhappiness can serve as each other’s antithesis, but can also overlap and run into each other, as Thea explains:

Thea::

what drugs can be [about] for me, is that I’ve lost so much of myself because of… physical things that have happened to me, and how… burnt out I am, mentally. So I want to get back, myself. Yes, get my joy back, it’s like a reminder…

Emma::

Can you tell me about a time like that?

Thea::

[…] I took some MDMA, by myself. Then I took a little more, when I felt it started having an effect. Yes. I spent some time with myself. In bed, under the blankets. [laughs] And, kind of worked on getting in touch with myself.

Emma::

Was it a positive experience?

Thea::

It was. Ideally, you want to have someone who, someone else who makes you feel safe. You know, it works better then… But yes, I would say that, it was a positive experience, although it was also… it was also mixed with a kind of sadness, a… relaxed sadness, there was simultaneously this kind of sorrow, a… relaxed sorrow.

Thea’s starting point for drug use with the aim of regaining or being reminded of joy is the painful physical and mental conditions caused by the series of failed gender-affirmation surgeries that she has undergone. The quote above mentions an occasion that was experienced both positively—Thea desired the proximity to MDMA, even though she would have liked to be accompanied by a safe person—and as grief. This grief involved, among other things, terrifying and painful hospital stays and the physical challenges and problems caused by the surgery. In the story, she performs another repeated, familiar scene of unhappiness, namely her transitioning process. Thea can mourn this process by using MDMA, which not only puts her in touch with her sorrow but also brings up positive feelings. Navigating happiness and unhappiness thus does not necessarily draw a line between dichotomous experiences; in Thea’s case, it takes on the shape of a strategic path, via drug-related happiness, that allows her to approach or return to experiences of non-drug-related unhappiness. Thea felt that she needed to mourn them in order to be able to regain her joy, and used MDMA to enable that process.

In her piece The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (Cvetkovich and Michalski 2012), the artist and researcher Ann Cvetkovich writes: “It’s important to question what counts as Happiness, and to make room for feelings of Unhappiness that express the desire for a different kind of world”. For Thea, drugs served as a way to find the courage to approach unhappiness, and thus as a point from which the world unfolds in a way that allows change.

The above quote is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notable discussion of unhappiness and feminist “killjoys”, who can be, for example, people who do not laugh at something they do not perceive as funny (2010, p. 65). Such behaviour can ruin the mood of a room, and people who do not laugh, or perhaps question the joke, thus kill joy and become killjoys. Ahmed shows how happiness and joy are given conventions that can put pressure on people who are oppressed by what is presented as funny, and that laughter can be a practice that maintains power.

However, the feminist aspect of a critical stance towards joy is not just about laughter, but is also relevant to normative life events that are expected to bring happiness, such as marriage, making one’s husband happy, organising one’s home and family in particular ways and so on. If, in Thea’s case, there was a strategic idea of connecting to herself and experiencing grief during intoxication—a getting-in-touch that led to a change in her bodily point of departure and, by extension, of the way in which the world unfolds—women’s use of drugs, as discussed before (Ettorre 1992; Malloch 1999, p. 353), has often been about numbing oneself in order to be able to put up with the world as it is. Different drugs have different effects, which allows for vastly different and even conflicting opportunities to experience feelings. The interviewees’ ways of navigating between and through happiness and unhappiness are thus connected to different ambitions to maintain or deviate from normative lines.

3 Drugs as Happiness

The charged status of drugs as unhappy objects makes their use a thoughtful practice for interviewees, which is defended in various ways. Ahmed writes: “you can be affectively alien because you are affected in the wrong way by the right things” (2010, p. 67). When it comes to drug-related happiness, I interpret my interviewees as experiencing the opposite. They are emotionally alienated by being affected in the right way, but by the wrong things, but allied with others who approach drugs in the same way.

In the following, I describe three different patterns of navigating alongside drugs in the interview material, in relation to normative lines and through and between different forms of happiness and unhappiness. These are about: being made happy by the drugs as though it were the right thing; refusing to accept unhappiness induced by normative demands to approach the right things and instead using the drugs as happy objects; and the inability to access the right thing, which induces unhappy feelings. In the latter case, drugs become ambiguous, simultaneously happy and unhappy objects.

3.1 An Almost Normative Happiness

If normative lines are accepted as the right path to the goal of being happy, where, for example, striving and status-filled work are important promises of happiness, then drug use becomes a question of how it can be incorporated into such established notions of what the path to happiness should look like.

Madelene, who has been injecting heroin to varying degrees for years, tells me she now uses the drug a few times a month. “I don’t like taking it […] in a group. I take it by myself and watch a film or something. That’s how I use it. I use heroin the way others have a glass of wine on a Saturday”, she says, but adds: “And that isn’t accepted”.

Katy also makes comparisons with wine. She says that she does not see any reason to stop using drugs, which in her case means mainly cocaine and cannabis: “I don’t really see why I would do that. It’s like I would stop drinking, a glass of wine”. She describes a typical evening when she smokes cannabis:

it might be if I’ve had a really stressful day, and I’ve got a shitload of things to think about and, I can’t sleep and my head’s spinning…. and for me, like, my well-being is all about getting sleep. So that… then I can have my own little moment, when I light some candles and watch a [TV] series and smoke a little and just be myself.

The fact that it is the two hard-working single women who draw pictures of themselves as though they were relaxing after work with a glass of wine while using drugs is not a coincidence. Wine in Sweden has a history of being a more expensive alcoholic beverage reserved for the wealthy, beginning in 1702 when the Wine Merchant’s Society formed a guild (Jönsson and Tellström 2018, p. 94) to the Bratt system’s distinction between the unproblematic wine drinking of the bourgeoisie and the booze drinking of the working class (ibid., pp. 204f.) and on to the present day. The more widespread wine appreciation of the twenty-first century includes descriptions of grapes and wines that employ words like “refined” and “complex” (Nehls 2009, p. 130).

In other words, wine can signal good taste and respectability. Madelene’s and Katy’s modes of enjoyment thus follow normative lines, along which they place contested objects and argue for their appropriateness. Katy argues that cannabis has helped her to handle her demanding job. The drug then takes on the role of a market assistant in the literal sense, an object that not only guides one along happy lines shaped by a neoliberal labour market but also actively prevents unhappiness and the inability to work. She says:

my work is incredibly intense, all project-based, I never have any time off, I can finish a project on Friday and then start the next one on Monday. And I’m supposed to fire on all cylinders, it’s always like this when I start a new project, just one month and you’re expected to deliver, so I think I haven’t hit the wall because I smoke. Because then, just, then I disconnect everything.

For Katy, it is thus all about following the line that is expected of her, a professional line clearly born of a liberal market economy that requires flexibility and results. Pleasure in the shape of cannabis use manifests itself as a quiet time for herself, with the aim of getting her ready for work again.

3.2 Forbidden Happiness

While Boel uses drugs to help meet her job’s expectations of efficiency, she also uses them at parties, as an expression of a rebelliousness for which she says there is no place in everyday life. Her identification as non-normative comes up from time to time during our conversations, and Boel makes links to her sexuality. When asked if she feels that it matters that she is a woman in relation to drug use, she answers that it does, and she says that the rules regarding women’s morality are stronger, but then adds that these do not fully apply to her because she is a lesbian:

Boel::

I think my orientation matters, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I don’t have to relate to a boyfriend’s view of my lifestyle. And my parents, of course, it’s not like I tell them that I, but … when it turns out that I have other, when I make other choices in life …. they don’t react as strongly… as they might have done if I were straight.

Emma::

Why not then?

Boel::

Well, they don’t because they assume it’s part of my orientation. “I don’t know what it is but it’s probably your thing”, I don’t know. “That’s what you people do. You go to clubs, you do different things, you poke each other.” You know. I don’t know, I don’t have to deal with any of those expectations.

Her parents know that Boel is a lesbian, but not that she uses drugs. But their knowing about and accepting her lesbianism makes Boel believe that her parents would also accept her drug use as part of her deviant life choice. Ahmed describes people’s different choices of happy objects as rooted in what she calls the idiosyncratic nature of these choices. People choose different things for the same purpose: to be happy (2010, p. 119). But not all choices are comparable entities that can be substituted for each other. Opting out of heterosexuality moves the person beyond the normative proximity that can unite people’s choices into a single form. Boel feels that lesbianism has given her space beyond the normative demands that would have been placed on her if she had been straight, but at the same time she has been moved to a space where her parents do not expect to understand her choices. In other words, the promises of happiness familiar to the parents do not apply to the daughter, who goes her own way, and the parents accept this.

Boel seems sure of her direction, but during the interviews, doubts also emerge as to whether her free, non-normative space is really worth its price in terms of distance from the normative. For example, during a go-along interview, she describes a night out that ended with a skinny dip in the sea in the morning. From the field diary: “She says that in the middle of the dip in the sea she thinks of her mother, and that she had an existential crisis: ‘What would my mother say? She’s so proud of me, and I do drugs and bathe naked’”. The distance to her parent suddenly becomes painful. I interpret her as wishing at that moment that she had instead acted in a way that her mother could recognise as a path to happiness. When she suddenly sees herself through her mother’s eyes, the feeling of pleasure in swimming naked in the sea, while high on drugs, becomes a feeling of being off line, around the wrong objects, which then leads to a feeling of shame.

3.3 Instead of the Right Kind of Happiness

Carolina’s first encounter with amphetamines was an experience of calm. She describes getting it from her boyfriend and his friends and then walking away:

Carolina::

I… woke up, sort of. At a neighbour of theirs, and was so very calm and comfortable in my body. And I sat and looked through a record box that he had, with lots of different records, and I had often been, like, prevented from doing things fully, before. And very much so that you can’t think a thought to the end and can’t read, that I have to jump back in the text, that kind of thing…

Emma::

That you were impatient?

Carolina::

Yes, or what should I say that I kind of … but, when I sat there and browsed, I could really … it was calm. It was quiet around me and I could look through all the records. I was somehow calm and very focused, and thought it was very quiet, all around. In my head, it was. It wasn’t quiet, it was at an after party. But silence in the sense that I could sit and do what I was doing. It was really nice.

The amphetamines made Carolina feel at peace, she felt that she could focus and the world around her seemed to quiet down. This was “nice”, she says, so she started using amphetamines more often. Soon, she did not want to be without them. At the same time, however, she says that she had a nagging feeling of aversion towards the pleasure, a longing for something different. When I ask her why she never injected the drug (she ate the powder wrapped in cigarette paper, or mixed it in drinks), she responds by saying:

Because I really didn’t want it to be the best thing in life. There were people around me who went, like: “come on, it’s the best, it’s pleasure like you’ve never experienced it”. And I just went “but I don’t want that pleasure! I don’t want it to be the best thing in life.” You know?

For Carolina, the pleasure itself becomes a terrifying thought. Like Thea’s and Katy’s experiences of drug-related pleasure as warning signs of addiction, Carolina does not want to try anything that would make amphetamine use even more pleasurable. The increasingly hated amphetamines risk taking on the role of the nicest thing of all, as a reminder that she cannot access the ways she wants to be happy. She describes the frustration of not getting onto the courses she applied for and barely making ends meet in terms of housing and finances. So she orientated herself towards the promise of happiness, a normative line, but was not given a place there.

She often lost her jobs and had failed to get into university. As she describes how the amphetamine rushes affected her—calm, quiet and beautiful—they appear to be preconditions for orientation. But the stories of how she constantly puts herself out into an otherwise messy world are characterised by struggle and loss. In this situation, she felt that too much drug-related pleasure could become a definitive direction, “the best thing in life”, pointing away from what she wanted to do. Instead, she kept her consumption within a framework that simultaneously kept it limited, but also limited her, because she did not feel that she could live without it. Despite not injecting, she suffered the effects of heavy and repeated consumption. She describes how she became paranoid and depressed and that it changed her way of moving her body. Setting boundaries against injecting seems to have protected her from the pleasure she did not want to experience, but not from the painful consequences of drug use.

For Hanna, who describes no boundaries against pleasure, the daily heroin injections formed a similar pattern. She only hints with unfinished sentences that heroin use can be pleasurable. When asked if there are any positive aspects of heroin, the answer is that it serves as pain relief, which relates to her missing her children. She says: “It can do, it can…. It numbs the pain, it numbs the pain. Quite simply. The physical and psychological”. But then she says that she has no physical pain. She states in a matter-of-fact voice: “Mental pain occurred with the children”. This refers to the social services taking them into care. The kind of cushioning through heroin that Hanna describes, of pain caused by trauma and abuse, is defined by Natacha Du Rose as “a pursuit of pleasure as a form of pain management edgework” (2017, p. 50). Du Rose found in her studies that this kind of work is central to marginalised women who use drugs. Hanna is in many ways completely “off line”: shoplifting, not having a home of her own, selling sexual services that she does not really want to be involved in, the absence of her children, and so on, are all parts of her life that she talks about with sadness and discomfort, and the line of drug use appears to be undesirable but her only viable path. She says: “I have to console myself all the time with the fact that soon I’m going to kick the habit”. But what will be left if the heroin disappears? There is no guarantee that she will be able to get her children back.

The interviewees practise drug use in constant negotiation with how it relates to normative lines, with their promises of happiness, and conceptions of drugs as unhappy objects. Experiences of pleasure, tranquillity and adventure clash with non-acceptance, other people’s notions of unhappiness and the risk of drug happiness becoming the only possible happiness through the work of pain management. Drugs are thus characterised by a dual emotional nature, as happy and at the same time unhappy objects.

If drug-related happiness can be contagious and entails the risk of being drawn to drugs, this presents an ethical problem for researchers who investigate drug use phenomenologically. The first-hand perspective of the interviewees may involve accounts of happy moments that can be neither completely omitted nor distorted if the research is to be based on the interviewees’ experiences. However, in most cases, the women themselves did not describe happy experiences without weighing these against their own experiences and societal expectations of/about unhappiness. This meant that the reported drug use did not give the appearance of false happiness, but rather a happiness that is conditioned by various risks of unhappiness. However, for various reasons, the interviewees still thought it was worth the price, although sometimes with a certain degree of hesitation or, as in the cases of Carolina and Hanna, resignation.

Of course, there is still a risk that drug research that raises a topic such as happiness in relation to drugs may contribute to the contagion of drug happiness, but what is the alternative? Drugs are often portrayed in popular culture as attractive in various ways, and despite restrictive policies, criminality and the lack of scientific discussions on drug-related happiness, drug consumption in Sweden is currently at historically high levels. Perhaps, instead, discussions about negotiations of drug-related happiness in relation to unhappiness can provide a factual picture of a complex relationship between something that is actually common knowledge—the ability of drugs to induce feelings of happiness of various kinds—and how the risks of unhappiness entailed by the use of the same object look from the perspective of someone who uses them. If the relationship of drug use to happiness is not straightforward for people who use drugs, then their testimonies can serve as a counterweight to romantic portrayals of drugs.