Keywords

“They are ordinary women”. This is how anthropologist Ulrika Dahl summarised her impression of the women in this study when she was the opponent of my thesis, on which this book is based. This is also how they appear to me, in the sense that they are, contradictory and diverse, cultural beings, rather than primarily being people who use drugs. Even Hanna, who feels crushed and imprisoned by her heroin use and life conditions, is above all a mother, a grieving mother whose attention is directed towards her lost children. The women also use ordinary drugs, substances that are in most cases widely available as legal medicines, but also objects of research and can be bought illegally. But drug use, whether it is prescribed, enabled by gifts or by buying drugs on an illegal market, is risky and uncertain. Drugs are morally charged objects with the ability to change the world of the mind, to make people healthy or sick, to numb or amplify emotions and experiences.

When drugs are used in everyday life, these aspects have multifaceted significance. They will affect situations like going to the movies, taking care of children and sharing secrets in the bath with a loved one, just as much as they affect everyday lives marked by classed drug use, where chasing cash for heroin or taking the morning bus to work after a sleepless night in order to earn money for amphetamines is part of the daily routine. Some of the interviewed women link drug use to problems, while others describe how, with the help of various resources, careful planning and in relation to the rhythm of restraint and release that characterises modern consumer societies (Wilk 2014), their drug use is unproblematic. But these unproblematic aspects: happiness, legitimacy and propriety, are elusive and must be carefully balanced to avoid turning into their opposite—unhappiness, illegitimacy and impropriety.

In this book, I have followed twelve women along their paths. Through a queer phenomenological lens, I have explored how they oriented themselves towards illegal drugs in certain ways and ingested them into their bodies, starting from different class-related points that, regardless of what drugs they used and what fantasies about drug use they had, mattered for their further orientations. Along their paths, there lurk a whole range of risks that must be negotiated or avoided. The stigmatised knarkare, sober people, the syringe, the drug market, sunlight, children, prescribed medications and addiction, for example, are all described as having transformative power: a meeting with them can interrupt the path of drug use, making the drugs fail to extend the body in space and instead point towards the object of drugs—which means pointing towards the bodies that ingested them—and their failure or unwillingness to align with normative ideals (cf. Ahmed 2006). In the chapter Avoiding the Knarkare, Pernilla narrates how she felt bad after using too much cannabis and therefore could not go out into town and use public transport. Her question: “How do you ask for help when you’re under the influence of drugs?” illustrates how drug use can draw a line between the person who uses drugs and others, a line that can be difficult or impossible to cross. In Sweden, with its history of withholding healthcare and life-saving treatment for drug-related problems, as discussed in the first part of this book, her question takes on an extended character that she probably did not intend. It is as though people who use drugs are considered to have walked out of the welfare state. And as they are no longer really here, how could they ask for help?

Drug use is thus a spatial matter, in several senses, rather than a practice. A place has been reached through an inner excursion together with a drug, a trip. But that journey commences from and in a certain time, a certain physical place, a certain body and a certain social and cultural context that allows a certain journey and certain conditions for the return. That starting point has a history of past actions that opens up opportunities for how a certain type of drug use can take place (cf. Ahmed 2010, p. 209). Oriented drug use is therefore about having access to resources and about being able to assess where a journey can take place in a desired way, and whether there are any paths from there that link the place to other places where the person who uses drugs wants to be. As we have seen, the perimeter of the drug-use location is less about the drug itself than the above factors, although the differences between drugs are vast and each one allows certain directions, but not others (see Appendix Drugs and Medicines).

In the right place, drug use can become an experience of intimacy, comfort and fun. However, a misjudgement about time and space can instead lead to disorientation and serious consequences, such as social exclusion and stigma. The key word is shame for middle-class people who use drugs, but for working-class women, shame is only one aspect of a whole package of repressive measures, a state-run stigma machine that is put to work if drug use is detected (Tyler 2021). Women can have their children taken away, lose their jobs and become one with the dirty drug swamp, knarkträsket, which is discussed in Chapter 3, where women are considered to be whores, whether they sell sex or not. The location of drug use can then turn out to be experienced as a prison, as Hanna has shown. It is a prison without walls, but nevertheless powerful in how it orients the body in repetitive loops and physically restrains her from moving in other ways.

Societal expectations about regulating oneself with drugs show that some drug use can occupy large, normative spaces. Women are expected to be in some mental states but not others, and are more likely than men to be prescribed medicines to align their inner worlds with the outside world, an alignment that can be aided by psychiatric medication (cf. Sandell and Bornäs 2017). Using psychoactive drugs in order to function as a well-oiled cog in the neoliberal market machine is something that several interviewees have resisted. Their drug use is rather an act of protest against such an adaptation and can instead be about creating bubbles and islands of illegal states of mind. Such drug use, which in the news, films and books is often linked to chaos, violence and crime, is on the contrary strikingly calm in these women’s experiences.

1 Tacit Ways of Acting Out

In the previous chapter, Thea describes going to the cinema and then cycling home, Pernilla converses in her story about her trip to Bali when she stopped smoking cannabis for the evening. In Madelene’s story, she barricades the door and goes out through the hotel room window, but above all she programmes and sleeps. When Boel describes herself using drugs, a paradox emerges between her rebellious perception of self and her drug-affected behaviour. She begins dramatically:

I have some inner rock star, who likes to live out, sometimes, just “I’m a rock star and you suck”, I’m harder than everyone else. So I have no barriers.Footnote 1

She talks eagerly and mimes holding an imaginary tube to her nose, through which she pulls up imaginary cocaine. She says: “That’s the point: letting go of control!” But this description of the “rock star” seems to be at odds with letting go of control. This is a highly conscious person who is orientated towards the drugs. Boel thinks about safety, chooses the variety, negotiates prices and quality and so on. She explains:

I try to control it so that I can, at this end [holds out her hands and shows with her eyes how they represent two ends] just let myself go. So if I control so much here, maybe I can relax here.

Her explanation, where on the one hand the rock star lets go of control of certain parts (what can happen in the body after an intake) but at the same time appears to keep other controllable parts in an iron grip (environment, company and so on), is consistent with the concept of “controlled loss of control” described earlier (Measham 2002). It is about women’s ways of experiencing intoxication and at the same time performing femininity. Measham writes:

The contradictions of conformity and social control, of “losing oneself” and “finding oneself” in drug use, of deviance and rebellion, of restrictions and independence, will be affected by the gender of the individual user and the gendered attitudes held toward these issues in the wider drugs setting. (ibid., p. 349)

Both conformity and rebellion in drug use, according to Measham, are thus affected by gender. So what does Boel do when she brings out her inner rock star and lets go of control? She says it is important for her to act out and not “have to behave” during her drug use, but she continues:

Boel::

I’m probably much less outgoing than a lot of people I think. I’m very good at sitting in a corner and just being. [giggles].

Emma::

So that’s how you act out?

Boel::

Yes, that’s my, acting out, but being able to just sit and giggle. That freedom is really important, as well. I’m not one who likes to dance. I can, absolutely, do it but I’m not one who just [dramatises screaming:] “must dance!” So? No. I can sit in a swing for two hours and just “ah”. Observe.

Emma::

What happens then?

Boel::

Yes, what happens? I don’t know. I can’t put it into words.

Boel’s description of an outgoing state of intoxication thus ends up in a description of extremely quiet activities. Sitting in a corner, rocking, giggling and observing, she giggles both during the narration and in the story. What she emphasises as important is being able to “sit in a corner and just be”. Her acting out is actually a refusal to act. Through using drugs, she withdraws from responsibility for the social and material context, from consuming the expected things and from working (Campbell 2000). This makes her feel like a rock star without barriers.

Paul B. Preciado in his book Testo Junkie (2013) provides a long list of examples of femininity codes in a list entitled “Some semiotechnical codes of white heterosexual femininity belonging to the postwar pharmacopornographic political ecology” (2013, p. 120). This list enumerates a set of white rules of conduct and signs for women in the modern West, which Preciado argues is characterised by being completely permeated by pharmacological technology and pornography. The codes of femininity include: “Little Women”, “saying no when you want to say yes”, “saying yes when you want to say no”, “not leaving home”, “not making any noise when you walk”, “not making any noise when you eat”, “not making any noise”, “knowing how to wait” and “knowing how to restrain yourself”. He also presents a corresponding list of masculinity codes, which includes: “knowing how to raise your voice”, “knowing how to drink”, “the city”, “bars” and “bursts of laughter”.

Those who follow the codes in one of these lists thus become either extroverted, loud and violent or withdrawn, quiet and cautious. The enactment of white femininity, which could also be expressed as the enactment of women’s respectability (Skeggs 1998), is described as self-control and silence. Can Boel’s account provide a nuanced perspective on these seemingly repressive feminine codes? Perhaps there is a variance between silences and states of self-control, where some women might in fact resist ideals of femininity, such as taking care of others, socialising and working? Illegal drug use and alcohol consumption are notorious ways to induce chaos and noise: sudden fits of laughter, a taste for loud music and impulsive behaviour. From Preciado’s perspective, performing normative femininity seems to be about moving in the opposite direction, away from behaviours associated with drugs. Could an aversion to acting out and making noise even be a reason why women use fewer drugs than men?

However, not all drug use leads to extrovert behaviour, as we have seen throughout this book, as well as in the example given by Boel. Some substances are also known to help those who need to settle into a low-key existence, such as benzodiazepines (Metzl 2003). Preciado also gives examples of psychoactive substances in the femininity list, which consist of prescription anti-anxiety drugs and endogenous hormones (2013, p. 120; see also Ettorre 1992). The masculinity list, on the other hand, includes alcohol, Viagra and “speed”, the last of which can be read as a synonym for street amphetamines and as a word depicting rapid movement. All three of these “masculine” substances are linked to agency and sex.

The behaviour of my interviewees occupies positions beyond these lists, but their calm and silent drug use is a consistent impression in the material. The silence is interrupted by laughter, as mentioned in Preciado’s masculinity list, by conversation (Pernilla) and Thea’s loud breathing when she comes out of the cinema. The most recent quotes, in this and the previous chapter, are about LSD, cocaine, MDMA and cannabis. The acting out that takes place appears to be very different from the violence and crime-ridden stories that appear in the media, books and films. I get the impression of an overlooked drug use that is neither seen nor heard, until it is told. But, as Boel’s account shows, such passivity can be experienced as its opposite, as the acting-out of a rock star. The adventures occur mentally, inside the women’s heads, which in turn are found in different locations—Bali, Lisbon, a cinema, somewhere where observation is possible. From there, the world unfolds.

As I have shown, contradictions, which Measham takes up as characterising drug use, have been a common (tangled) thread throughout the material. This also applies to stories about drug use, together with probable expectations of judgemental attitudes towards these stories, which complicates how they are presented. Swedish research on women’s drug use has largely focused on women who have been positioned as sad, criminal and/or psychologically broken (Lander 2003; Rosengren 2003; Laanemets 2002; Lalander 2016), i.e. closely linked to the expression “mad, sad and bad”. Therefore, I have not perceived that the change in research perspective described by Measham (2002), that I discussed in the introduction of this book, has yet occurred in Sweden. It might now be under way, as shown in Oriana Quaglietta’s thesis in sociology, where pleasure and curiosity as motives for drug use are explored (2022). Through interviews with women who were not all gathered through institutions, but some through social media, Quaglietta provides a complex, yet more comprehensible picture of how drugs are used, in comparison with the previous repetitive stories of poor women’s compulsive chronologies of a downward spiralling. The language of the academy was not developed to articulate working-class experiences (Skeggs 2004, 2011); thus, to understand drug use, middle-class interviewees can be key to deciphering the mysteries entailed in why someone would deliberately embark upon drug-use journeys. All anti-drug campaigns, policies and laws against drugs are seemingly directed against psychoactive substances. But as long as only certain groups of people are seen to represent the problem, drugs are sidetracked by these campaigns, policies and laws. Knowledge about drugs remains low and certain people, but not others, are targeted. Representations of drug use do not only have to do with class, however, but also with factors such as gender, race and age. Pernilla describes how she views herself (someone who uses drugs) in relation to the law and law enforcement:

I feel like, in situations in which you’ve been out on the town and taken something, if you were stopped by the police, it really feels like… I just feel like it’d be easier for me to just, slip through the net, than for a man or a guy, depending on which age we’re talking about. Like, it would have been easier for me to fly under the radar… the police are more likely to have an eye out for young men.

As a white, middle-class, forty-something woman, Pernilla does not regard herself as being on the police’s radar when she is out on the town using drugs; she assumes that police officers will focus on young men instead. The idea of her as a person who uses drugs seems to be far removed from how people who use drugs are expected to appear. She comments on this by saying that a motive for her to participate in my study was to “crush stereotypes”. What will happen to Swedish policies if such stereotypes are crushed? If a feminist perspective on drug policy was implemented? What would a campaign against drugs targeting middle-class women look like? Perhaps the work with such a campaign would lead to a revision and a nuancing of which drugs to target and why (cf. Edman 2019, and National Board of Health and Welfare 2022).

2 Psychoactive Effects

Wiklund and Damberg’s book As She Drank: Women, Alcohol and LiberationFootnote 2 (2015), about women’s drinking, highlights how women’s intoxication in Sweden is not equivalent to men’s. Wiklund and Damberg note that women do drink, despite being judged more harshly, and they show how alcohol can be a tool for liberation and pleasure, among other things. However, I perceive a need to deepen the scientific discussion on what alcohol, as well as illegal drugs, means and how psychoactive substances take their place in society and in people’s bodies. Alcohol is hardly unproblematic, even when consumed on a gender-equal basis, but despite the problems associated with it, people who drink alcohol can experience intoxication as meaningful. These experiences do not disappear once they have passed, but remain as memories of intoxicating vantage points.

Madelene’s comment that “[i]t would never have happened otherwise” in the previous chapter is made in connection with her reflection that drug use has led to some of the most enjoyable memories she has. The story is a sometimes chaotic, sometimes calm scenario that unfolds in a hotel room abroad where fun is mixed with horror, pain, sleep and a focus on work. In this case, what would not have happened otherwise is the absurd mixture of emotions, actions and experiences. In the midst of it, she created a computer programme that was disseminated throughout the world. To her, it is not strange that she programmes while intoxicated, it is just what she feels like doing when she uses cocaine. Merleau-Ponty’s description of the dual belonging of the body in the world, of reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other, has far-reaching implications through the extensions of the body that the computer represents. Where does it begin and end? Merleau-Ponty describes us as mixed up with the world (1968, pp. 137f.). This entanglement is affected in specific ways by drug use.

When the starting point, the body and where it is located, changes, the vantage point also changes. New directions become possible and others fade into the background. In my analysis, drug use is about precisely this: how, for various reasons, the women’s starting points have directed them towards drugs, and then in new directions under certain conditions, from drug-affected starting points.

People’s starting points are affected in this way not only by illegal drugs, but also by pharmaceuticals and legal psychoactive substances, such as alcohol and coffee. The impact of psychoactive substances upon modern consumer societies is therefore difficult to overestimate. David T. Courtwright calls the economic interests behind the consumption of various addiction-related products “limbic capitalism” (2019, p. 6). This term brings into focus just how lucrative the market for mind-altering substances is. It is a market for what philosophers often claim is the goal of life: happiness, but also health, aesthetic experiences, alertness, well-being and sleep. Friends can become more entertaining, the desire to live can increase, self-confidence can grow to magnificent proportions, music can become better and monotonous work more bearable. From a perspective that focuses on the possibilities of drugs (and ignores the risks, stigma and illegality), it seems strange that anyone would turn them down. Above all, it is strange that people who experience major deficiencies in any of these areas say no, but, as we have seen through Skeggs’ class analysis, these drug effects are in line with the compelling self-development demands of the middle class, while respectability is crucial for the working class (2004, pp. 135ff.). But the relationship of drug use to capitalism also highlights how vulnerability to addiction, the inability to stop using, relates to the socioeconomic conditions surrounding the body. The states of intoxication can lead, for example, to the creation of ingenious computer programmes or becoming trapped in cramped, repetitive spaces.

It is impossible to imagine what emotions, actions, experiences and directions would have been experienced and made possible without the enormous amounts of psychoactive substances that have been affecting people for many centuries, but increasingly so now. What would urban planning look like? Love life? The music industry? Academia? What research would have been conducted and how would healthcare have worked? We are not unaffected by drugs and the world is not drug-free (Buxton et al. 2020), not even in Sweden. On the contrary, it is steeped in intoxication and drug-induced disorientation and orientation throughout history in a way that means we would not be freed of their influence even if all drugs disappeared from the face of the earth right now, by magic. The directions that are indicated, based on our entanglement with the world, are thus drug-influenced regardless of what we take into our bodies. But the lines that are drawn are influenced not only by psychoactive drugs but also by the resources, capital, objects and bodies that are close by. Thus, when I asked Pernilla if she could tell me about an event that characterised drug use, she replied that, for her, drug use is not about doing crazy things:

I’d done that kind of stuff anyway, or I’ve been to parties or raves, which last until the early morning, but I can also do it stone cold sober […] those environments or situations and, fun stuff, I don’t want to emphasise them as something I’ve been in because of the drugs, because I end up in them, anyway […] it’s not so much the external… environments that are different but rather my experience of them. […] I don’t take drugs because “yes, because then I’ll freak out” and do a lot of crazy things, but because “then we’ll… we’ll relate to being in this situation together”, and so on.

Pernilla thus says that “it would have happened anyway”, to reverse Madelene’s quote. The places and contexts that she seeks out would have been there, regardless of whether she used drugs or not. She follows the lines drawn in advance and does not deviate because of drugs. Instead, she explains that what is specific to her about drug use is a social experience of changing perspectives. She describes these experiences elsewhere in the same interview as experiences of intimacy, laughter, ethics and quietness in the form of “bubbles”. The changes in how the world develops in relation to drugs are thus perhaps not so much about visible, drug-influenced acts but about a changed point of view and experiences of the extensions of the body. Pernilla’s drug-use experience thus highlights a universal and collective concern that requires attention: How are people’s starting points affected by psychoactive substances, what is made possible from there, and what is left behind?