Keywords

The women who feature in this book exhibit different patterns of drug use. They use different kinds of drugs, to different extents and for different purposes. But they still share certain reference points: images, experiences and concepts that are linked to drug use. They interpret their own use through the cultural meanings that drug use has acquired over time in Sweden, and through additional meanings they encountered during their travels to other countries. Based on this input, they decided at some point in their lives to acquire experiences of drug use themselves. What led them to that point, and how has using drugs changed their view of these substances over time?

1 A Gateway?

I meet Agnes in Dublin on a Saturday morning, the sun filtering through the large windows of the café where we are sitting. Agnes has just graduated as a psychologist and is relieved and happy that she successfully completed her studies. Now, however, she is at a crossroads, with her future path unclear. One of the decisions she will soon have to make is whether to return to Sweden or remain in Ireland. She will also have to decide whether, and if so how, to keep using drugs. Agnes tells me that she is worried about her alcohol consumption, but also critically reflects upon drug use in general.

Sometimes I feel like quitting all of it […] I notice how… it wasn’t as clear when I was younger but now, that it’s become a bit harder to express myself, you do notice that I’ve, like, partied a lot, and I want my mind to be clear again. Actually.Footnote 1

In other words, Agnes does not view her drug experiences in a solely positive light. The above quote refers to her fear that drugs may have affected her intellectual acuity. Agnes gives long and self-reflexive answers to my questions and carefully considers her relationship to drugs. When we discuss the first few times she tried them, she expresses her drug use in spatial terms. It is as though drug use itself, rather than a rave scene or any other specific context for drug use, is a place to visit rather than an act of consumption (cf. Pini 2001). Speaking about a boyfriend she had back in Stockholm as a teenager, she says he was “in that world” (a social context where drugs were common), and her own use is described as something she “jumped into”, almost like a pool:

[My] friends didn’t party that much, but then when I was about 14–15, I met a guy who spent a lot of time in that world. He’d lived in France before… and took all kinds of things, but yeah, mainly smoked [cannabis]. So I started smoking a lot as well then. […] But when I moved here [to Dublin], suddenly, like, everything was around. Err, you don’t make the smartest decisions when you’re 20 [laughs], so I just, jumped into it, I guess.

Using the same terminology as writer Birgitta Stenberg uses in her autobiographical novel Report,Footnote 2 in which she refers to settings where people use drugs, primarily amphetamines, as “the other world” (2017/1969; see also Skårner 2007), Agnes describes how she was introduced to a new “world” through a cannabis-smoking boyfriend. In the quotation, it seems that cannabis served as a so-called gateway—a term stemming from the disputed theory that using a soft drug will lead the user on to harder drugs (Kandel 1975; Lynskey and Agrawal 2018)—which revealed itself to her via a love relationship. The oft-used metaphor of a gateway is interesting because it paints a picture of a willed direction that is taken, towards a specific object within reach (Ahmed 2014, pp. 40f.). But, the metaphor suggests that object—be it tobacco, alcohol, cannabis or other “light” drugs—will forcefully direct one towards other objects that one had not intended to approach. Just as in Agnes’ usage, the idea of a gateway transforms drug-taking from an activity into a place, a place that expands behind the doorway of seemingly innocuous drug use.

But Agnes does not describe her trajectory as a path upon which cannabis set her. She says that she started smoking cannabis because she herself had intentionally embarked upon a journey towards drugs:

Back when I was pretty young, I was really, I read a lot of books and [watched] films that painted a rather uncomplicated picture of drug use. And I remember when I was younger going like “oh, I can’t wait ‘til I get to the age when I too can go to festivals, and…” I just felt life was so boring. Like, “why don’t people get going?”

In other words, Agnes describes an impatient and active outreach. What she was seeking out were gateways to drug use and exciting experiences, which she hopes she will have if she approaches the “world”—a collection of things—that her boyfriend is a part of. But she also criticises her past self for having bad judgement when she finally did “jump in”. The gateway (in the sense of a way into a space where drug use is happening) is embodied not by the “soft” drug cannabis that leads to “harder” drugs, but by a boyfriend. Agnes finds him in her pursuit of exciting, drug-fuelled experiences, and cannabis happens to be what he gives her access to.

Several other interviewees describe having felt a similar desire at an early age to try drugs. Madelene, who is a senior software analyst at an IT company, is one of these. She prefers opioids but, unlike Agnes, who uses drugs when she is together with friends, Madelene mainly uses them when she is alone in her flat in Gothenburg. Although she arrived at a radically different drug practice and context, however, Madelene’s journey commenced in a similar fashion, with her interest being piqued at an early age.

[…] I’ve always been interested in drugs in a way that others are not, I’ve noticed. [laughs] I was completely fascinated by the film TrainspottingFootnote 3… and I and my mate, we wanted a flat like that. How many people, when you’re 15, think like that? And then I decided early on that I wanted to try everything.

Alcohol and sedative medicines, taken from her aunt’s bathroom cabinet, were the first drugs that Madelene tried. But she does not portray those first encounters with drugs as a determining factor for her continued use: from the start, she says, she was intent on trying “everything”, and she describes longing for a physical place that would allow her to do so. Twenty years later, she uses a range of prescription opioids on a daily basis—some that have been prescribed to her, and others that she purchases illegally. She tells me that she injects heroin a couple of times a month.

Both Agnes and Madelene can be understood as regular consumers of illegal drugs according to their own statements, and it is a consumption that they have purposefully sought out since their early teens. These searches led them to an aunt’s bathroom cabinet and a boyfriend active in a “drug world”, and then on to other places and worlds, such as opioid intoxication in the home and MDMA and amphetamines at dance clubs and techno parties. So what happens if we understand experiences of drug use as intentional visits to imagined worlds, collective spaces consisting of fantasy, media technologies and material resources, through acts of consumption (Appadurai 1996)?

Criminologists Fiona Measham and Michael Shiner argue that, if we focus too much on agency when we study young people’s drug use, we risk obscuring the important role played by structural conditions. They use two similar concepts, “situated choice” and “structured action”, to explain that, if we want to understand adolescents’ choices and actions, we need to contextualise them in relation to structural factors such as gender, race and class (2009, p. 505). These concepts are in line with Sara Ahmed’s use of phenomenology, as a way to make sense of the environment and its conditions and to understand the directions of the body and consciousness in relation to them.

Phenomenology asks us to be aware of the “what” that is around. After all, if consciousness is intentional, then we are not only directed towards objects, but those objects also take us in a certain direction. The world that is around has already taken certain shapes, as the very form of what is more and less familiar. (Ahmed 2006a, p. 545)

To begin the analysis from the body is to situate people geographically, structurally and socially; from there, orientation can take place and some objects prove to be reachable but others are not. What does this mean for Agnes’ and Madelene’s first experiences of drugs? The starting point for orientation is thus not only the body but also the place where the body tends to dwell. From there, the world unfolds. People intentionally orient themselves towards familiar or unfamiliar objects; the paths among these objects determine the continued directions in which bodies will move. So, the objects that are within reach lead onwards in new directions. A boyfriend who brings cannabis with him is both an intentional direction and a hopeful fantasy: what else could be within reach through a cannabis-providing boyfriend?

Passing through gateways to drug use is commonly traced back to a childhood defined by social exclusion, parents struggling with substance abuse and other kinds of trauma (e.g. Du Rose 2015; Laanemets 2002; Trulsson 1997). But neither Agnes nor Madelene described growing up in such an environment. Instead, they mentioned popular films as sources of inspiration for how they later embarked upon a path towards drugs. For these two women, their proximity to drugs was first and foremost cultural, part and parcel of popular cultural expressions. It was the films that made drugs recognisable and findable as physical objects. Both describe their class backgrounds as “upper-middle class” and their childhoods as secure, with close relationships with their relatives. The structural conditions underpinning their orientation towards drugs do not seem to be about vulnerability or social exclusion, but about cultural inspiration for how life could include drugs. So how can films like Trainspotting, which largely depict misery and suffering, inspire middle-class Swedish girls to use drugs? Agnes describes her orientation towards drugs as a search based on boredom, and for her as a child, drug use was situated in future, in adulthood:

[…] I just think it’s some kind of quest and that, yeah, curiosity, or as I mentioned that you go around feeling bored for a few years and hype yourself up: “soon, I’ll be grown up, then I can start”.

Being “grown up” seems like a practical matter for Agnes: once she is no longer held back by her legal guardians, she will be free to reach for drugs. In adulthood, she will be free to escape boredom. Despite their association with suffering, stigma and problems, the young Agnes saw drugs in a positive light, as the opposite of dullness. The structural circumstances in which Agnes and Madelene began to seek out drugs were privileged ones, from both a global and a Swedish perspective. From her secure position in an upper-middle-class family, Madelene became fascinated with the working-class misery in Trainspotting. She herself was not at risk of ending up on the margins of society, unless she chose to actively carve out such a position for herself.

Beverley Skeggs describes how the construction of the middle class as the moral class meant that the middle class became able to exercise moral authority, but it also made life rather boring. Anything dangerous, disruptive or sexual became the prerogative of the working class, which made it interesting and alluring to the middle class (2004, p. 22). Thus, it need not matter that drugs are associated with poverty and misery in order for them to be perceived as desirable, quite the contrary. Agnes and Madelene’s class conditions did not alienate them from drugs, which instead became interesting and attractive early on. Once someone does start using drugs, however, class-related conditions for drug use generate important differences in how it takes shape when practised. Their starting points in privileged positions allowed Agnes and Madelene to approach drug use in a tentative way that did not compromise their wider directions through the middle class. As Skeggs puts it, middle-class appropriation of working-class cultural assets does not necessarily mean that what is enjoyed is the same as what is taken:

[…] what has been extracted [from the working class] and attached to the middle-class body is [not] necessarily the same as that which was taken. It is in the relationship that the transformation occurs. (2004, p. 12)

In other words, it is in the relationship between what is taken and who takes it that the meaning of what is used arises. In spatial terms, this would mean that the entrance to drugs leads to different places depending on who walks through the gateway. Agnes and Madelene now indulge in drugs alongside their jobs as a psychologist and senior software analyst respectively. They approached and stayed around drugs without losing their class-related orientations—just as many people who use drugs with a childhood marked by social exclusion will remain in the class positions they have grown up with (Laanemets 2002, pp. 51f.; see also Olsson 1994, p. 193). Class, in other words, does not necessarily determine whether or not a person will approach drugs, but it does affect how drug-influenced directions are then mapped out. Neither do drugs’ own class positions, where, for example, the heroin that Madelene uses is strongly linked to vulnerability and misery, seem to necessarily determine the ways in which lines are drawn to, between and from drugs. Instead, they appear to depend upon other factors linked to the people who use drugs.

Gateways to drug use exist in all segments of society; due to popular culture and a busy drugs market, they are within reach of everyone. Yet there is one factor that appears to affect a person’s distance from these gateways, regardless of class-related conditions, and that is age. Drugs appear to be in cultural proximity to certain age groups, such as teenagers and young adults, but far from others, such as young children and middle-aged or older people.

Boel also describes a secure childhood and says that she had strict but loving parents. Much like Agnes, Boel mainly uses drugs at parties, but she also takes so-called microdoses when her job as a public-relations officer (“a demanding and intensive role”) becomes too much to handle. But when she talks about her entry into drugs, she does not describe it as a “gateway” that she has sought in the same purposeful way as Agnes and Madelene did. Instead, she describes a more hesitant approach to the gate when it was just a step away during her younger teenage years:

I’d say I tried drugs for the first time when I was 14, I think. […] But I felt a bit too chicken and backed out. Then I did ecstasy at some point when I was 17 and I noticed that a lot of people started feeling bad, so I backed out again.

Right after taking her first tentative steps into a place of drug use, Boel leaves that place behind. She does so in the same way as she entered, but “backs out” instead of actually turning around. Just like Agnes, who expressly describes the use of drugs as a world she “jumps in[to]”, Boel describes it in spatial terms. Her way of approaching the place where the drugs are found can also be likened to a pool. She tests the “water”, like a hesitant swimmer dipping her toes in, but backs away instead of turning round and walking or jumping in. Her friends are in the same place—in youth, in drug use—and leaving the neighbourhood altogether seems like a question for the future. Her friends are in the same place—in adolescence, in proximity to drugs—and leaving this context is an issue for future Boel to consider. While Agnes describes her childhood as an impatient wait for something familiar yet unattainable, Boel portrays her teenage years as a time when drug use was waiting for her.

Notions of insidious entrances to drug use, as implied by the gateway theory, also indicate that, once in, it is difficult to get out. As Agnes depicts drug use as a body of water she happily but indiscriminately “jumps in[to]”, it leads us to another common Swedish metaphor for the dangers of drugs: the image of drug use as a treacherous swamp, a knarkträsk.Footnote 4

2 A Swamp?

The entrance to the drug world as longed for and sought after, or as a boundary that can be crossed and retreated from, contrasts with representations of gateways as active and insidious. In Swedish political and media contexts, gateways to the drug world are often portrayed as pitfalls or as a swamp that will suck one down in a social sense. A common metaphor for problematic drug use is knarkträsk (sometimes also drogträsk or narkotikaträsk), literally meaning “drug swamp”. A speech made in 2018 by Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s social democratic prime minister from 2014 to 2021, paints a picture of how the term is used: “Whose children suffer the greatest risk of being dragged down into a life of crime, into the narkotikaträsk? Those of parents already struggling the hardest in life!”Footnote 5 He shows here how the entrance to the swamp is located not only in age but also in class. The speech as a whole revolves around poverty in Sweden, historically and in the present, and the words that summarise the problems are: “Cramped living conditions. Unemployment. Crime. Poor health. Substance abuse.” Taken together, these concepts provide a picture of class-related disorientation. Those who end up in the knarkträsk are characterised by a set of social markers that signify them as caged in by their circumstances.

The swamp metaphor indicates that drug use is not only problematic in and of itself; it is also part of an illegal and stigmatised network of relationships. The knarkträsk is an imagined world of everything from drugs to the sex trade, criminals and stolen goods. It has a fractured relationship with the rest of society where crime, begging, welfare benefits, healthcare and so on are meeting points. A spatial delimitation, positioning the swamp in a certain place or linking the concept to a certain body, is thus only meaningful on the basis of cultural perceptions of social conditions.

Journalist Magnus Linton has analysed Sweden’s drug policy and its consequences and published his findings in his book Knark (2015), which also looks into the way drugs have been conceptualised—the word knark, which came into use during the 1960s, and derivatives of it, such as knarkare (someone who uses drugs/knark). In an interview with the newspaper ETC, Linton says that the word knark has had a major effect on Sweden’s cautionary drug policy, and combined with the word for swamp (träsk), it has been particularly impactful (Beeck 2015). “Phonetically, knark has a repellent ring to it, especially in combination with träsk. There’s no better word than knarkträsk to describe some kind of abyss or collapse” (ibid., p. 17; see also Linton 2015, p. 45).

The link that Linton makes between a swamp, an abyss and collapse is rooted in the meaning of the word träsk, which can also refer to a quagmire: ambiguous ground that is neither stable enough to stand or build something on, nor liquid enough to swim in. It is an indeterminate in-between, which anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown signals danger (2002/1966, pp. 47ff.) and evokes a feeling of menace and unease. The idea of bathing in something that is neither solid nor liquid reinforces the link with dirt. Instead of becoming clean, someone bathing in a quagmire would become filthy and sticky. The knarkträsk thus acquires a temporal dimension that extends beyond having physically been in the swamp. The stickiness suggests that bodies that have visited the swamp will continue to be dirty, even after they have emerged from it. The use of the term knarkträsk or knarkare thus becomes a way of attributing blame and placing people in stigmatised and declining positions based not on drug use as such, but on drugs combined with socioeconomic status by indicating dirtiness, menace and danger.

Since the knarkträsk is populated by knarkare, entering the swamp means undergoing a metamorphosis. The person in question becomes a knarkare, an identity that is in turn associated with the concept of addiction, with its repetitive and chronic character. And since the entrance (or gateway) to the swamp is a downward one, exiting it means heading in an upward direction—and changing identity once again. The process of quitting drugs and becoming an ex-knarkare is commonly referred to as “getting clean” (see also the next chapter, Avoiding the Knarkare).

But being clean is not the same as never having been addicted in the first place (Keane 2002). This complicated journey is a narrative that is not accepted by several interviewees. Worlds of drugs, such as those which Agnes describes “jumping into”, do not need to be a sticky swamp—stigmatised places that do something negative to the individual—but can be perceived as places that it is possible to enter and leave without a negative change in identity. Drugs can be found in status-filled contexts, which in turn require completely different entrances than downward-angled gateways.

Pernilla, who is in her forties and works at a publishing house, is sitting on her sofa with a cup of tea in her hand. She seems to want to take the interview as an opportunity to really reflect upon her stance on drug use. She is quick-witted and has a certain theatricality about her that allows her to express things in an amusing way. We laugh a lot during the interview. She describes how surprised she was back in upper-secondary school, when she realised that drugs and drug-taking occur to a large extent in completely different contexts and bodies than the worn-down, stigmatised and dangerous ones she had been taught about as a child.

everything I’d been told and taught [in primary school] and just how people viewed it [drug use] in general was suddenly called into question […] to suddenly hang out with people you really like and meeting people who knew what it’s like on the inside, who do drugs themselves and who are part of a context where drugs are around and stuff, and who have a completely different kind of take, like a relaxed take on it. […] They were these expat kids who went to that school, whose parents were diplomats or worked abroad all the time […] really had their act together and high-achieving in many ways and really, smart people, you know, that’s how they came across to me. But they had a completely different approach to, to drugs.

Pernilla moved from the countryside to the city and enrolled in an upper-secondary school where a significant number of pupils came from affluent families with international ties. She describes how these pupils had “a relaxed view” of drugs, which differed significantly from the view of drugs that she had grown up with. Later on during the interview, she says “her jaw dropped” when one of her classmates talked about drugs in a very liberal way. The realisation that several of her new friends regularly used drugs was an “eye-opener”. This discovery made her question everything she had been told before, even the things she had assumed were a given. Her image of drugs and intoxication thus moved from one type of body to another—from stigmatised ones to important and trustworthy ones—which resulted in a shift of meaning. Drugs made an upward class journey before her eyes, and people who use drugs took shape in unexpected ways. The countryside partying that she was accustomed to, on the other hand, free of illegal drugs but including large amounts of alcohol—suddenly seemed rather low class: “parties in the countryside, back when I was in lower secondary, were dominated by, like, loud blokes”. She compares this to her friends in the city, “a quieter sort of people” who mainly smoked cannabis and whose drinking was more moderate. Looking back, she describes the drinking she witnessed while growing up in the countryside as rather destructive:

when we were, like, 13 or 14, when everyone started… we got absolutely hammered, basically, and so of course [there were] fights, well, of course it was destructive. Because it’s also a drug that really makes you act out, in a way. Alcohol causes all kinds of situations […] related to the whole puberty thing and sexuality and, you know…

From that moment onwards, illegal drugs started to play an important role in Pernilla’s life. She feels that there is a discrepancy between society’s view on drugs and what drugs and using drugs actually entail in practice. What she had been “told and taught” and the “take” on drugs that Pernilla describes herself as having—which were based on ideas of gateways and the knarkträsk—had led her to believe that everything about knark was dirty. But she describes how she discovered that this was not true. She looked to her friends, who were nothing like the marginalised knarkare in the knarkträsk. Nor does she mention feeling dirty herself, despite having used drugs on and off for more than 20 years.

When I head out to interview Katy, who is in her mid-forties, we meet at her office in Stockholm’s Old Town. She greets me with a generous smile, one that is clearly used to welcoming visitors, and leads the way to a meeting room, closing the door on the hubbub of her workplace. The location she has chosen for our interview signals that she does not feel ashamed for her use. At the same time, however, she says that work is the setting where it is most imperative no one finds out about her drug use. Secrecy is ensured by the closed door, but also, more than anything perhaps, by Katy’s social status, which makes it unlikely that anyone in the office will suspect the topic of our conversation. Katy also describes how the image of drugs and people who use drugs was repainted for her in a surprising way in her late teens, when she travelled to work as an au pair in Italy. Her previous image of cannabis was as a gateway to a life of destitution:

because we’d all been taught how those things worked: a gateway to harder drugs and once you start, well, you’ll end up on the streets. Or admitted to a psych ward.

In her new life, however, cannabis was part of different bodies than the ones she had expected:

Over there, I suddenly got to see that “fuck, people actually do this and live completely normal lives!”, you know. They have children and fancy jobs and earn a shitload of money and they have to be at the top of their game. And then they do this when they get home. You know. When they want to relax.

Like Pernilla, Katy also uses an expression to describe how her eyes were opened to the new insights about where drugs can be found. An order became visible that had previously been hidden by metaphors such as the gateway and the drug swamp. It is as though both women felt tricked: they had been told that drugs only existed in inaccessible, uninviting places at the very bottom of society, only to discover that drug use is common practice in an elite world they wanted to join, a world in which people have “a shitload of money” and “fancy jobs”, and are seen by Pernilla as “high-achieving” and “smart”.

These new insights did not challenge the image of the place of the knarkare at the bottom of the social order, but they discovered that drugs are not dirty in and of themselves. Rather, the people they met who used drugs were perceived as cleaner, in the sense of being better adjusted than Katy and Pernilla were themselves, who were just beginning to settle into new contexts (Douglas 2002/1966; see also the next chapter, Avoiding the Knarkare). These insights became turning points for both Katy and Pernilla, who continue to use drugs from time to time, with no plans to stop and without losing orientation within their professional jobs and careers.

3 Sinking into the Ground

Ahmed describes orientation in many different ways, but repeatedly compares it to feeling at home (2006b, p. 7), being at ease and thus being able to sink into the environment that surrounds us, which is in turn experienced as an extension of the body (ibid., pp. 134ff.). If the body cannot sink into the environment, and the feet cannot find any ground to sink into, this causes feelings of discomfort and a kind of nausea (ibid., pp. 138f.). Ahmed writes:

The ground into which we sink our feet is not neutral: it gives ground to some more than others. Disorientation occurs when we fail to sink into the ground, which means that the “ground” itself is disturbed, which also disturbs what gathers “on” the ground. (2006b, p. 160)

Places are not neutral, the ground allows some feet to sink more than others, and when the feet are not allowed to sink, this means that the ground is disturbed by the feet, which in turn also disturbs those who gather there.

This way of describing experiences of disorientation stands in an interesting relation to the metaphor of the knarkträsk. The drug swamp implies a high possibility of sinking into the ground: this is the danger of the swamp, being engulfed by a specific, dangerous environment. As the Stefan Löfven speech I quoted earlier showed, the swamp metaphor is also used as an image of an active ground surface that pulls young people down, especially those in socially vulnerable situations. So what exactly happens to people in the knarkträsk; that is, in stigmatised environments linked to drugs? Ahmed’s metaphor, about the possibilities of sinking into the environment as an image of orientation, seems to stand in opposition to the knarkträsk metaphor as a metaphor of disorientation. However, through a close examination of the marginalised and stigmatised lived reality of drug use, both metaphors can be instructive.

When I meet Hanna in a cramped office we have been able to borrow for our interview, she seems to carry her sorrow like a physical burden. Her elegant haircut and mode of dressing are testament to her interest in fashion and design, but her entire being seems cowed, beaten into submission. Hanna is in her fifties, injects heroin on a daily basis and wants to quit. Her addiction, she says, is currently dominating her life. During the interview, she speaks slowly and with hesitation; on several occasions, she mentions the loss of her children, who have been taken into care by the social services. Her current social circumstances—her financial situation (with welfare benefits and shoplifting being her main sources of income), her addiction to heroin, her housing situation (she says she is “staying at a friend’s”) and, not least, her grief over having lost her children—are all symbols of life in the knarkträsk. But the link between drugs and her current situation is not straightforward. When I ask her what she does when she is under the influenceFootnote 6 of heroin, she says:

Hanna::

I tend to do the things I’m most afraid of doing when I’m not on drugs. Brr! [laughs]

Emma::

Such as?

Hanna::

Err, it’s… I guess it’s, basically… basically everything I need to do.

The moments of tangible influence are when she feels most capable of action. With the help of the drug, she can orientate herself and cope with everyday tasks. In that sense, the metaphor of the knarkträsk as a place in which people use drugs has two sides to it. On the one hand, Hanna perceives herself to be in a stigmatised and vulnerable position, the kind of position that tends to be associated with the term knarkträsk. On the other, drug use temporarily leads to a swamp-free zone, where experiences of disorientation are exchanged for oriented action.

So heroin helps her feet to sink into the ground, but the same action leads to a social sinking, down into the knarkträsk. How did she end up here, surrounded by unfavourable living conditions? Looking back, she says, she had a completely “ordinary” childhood. Her dream was to work in fashion and design:

I was just an ordinary, everyday girl from an ordinary, everyday home. [sounds tired, defeated] My father was a manager in the public sector and my mother is, well, working class. […] I knew what I wanted and everything from the time I was twelve. Of course I knew. The way a teenager does. I wanted to be a fashion designer.

She situates herself as a child in class terms and describes her position as “ordinary”, and from there, she points out a direction: studies, followed by a creative career. But a year into design college, something happened to that direction. She moved to a larger city and met a man whom she describes as “the wrong sort”:

Hanna::

No [clears her throat], I met the wrong sort. Mm. Met the wrong sort, started seeing this guy who, yeah, did those things and stuff. Yeah… the wrong people. [almost inaudible]

Emma::

How did you support yourself back then?

Hanna::

At first, I, er, sold stuff and then… I started to prostitute myself. Mm…

Hanna’s description of her initial drug use is not primarily about the drugs, but about the company. The man she met seems to have served as her way in, as her gateway, and the way in which she narrates her story makes it sound as though she simply found herself there one day—on the streets, with a heroin addiction. Her responses are tired and brief, and I get the impression that they have been repeated many times, to social workers, health professionals and other authorities. A normal, everyday girl moves to the big city and meets the wrong sort. It is as though she lost her way and then could not make it out of a situation that had happened to her by accident.

Why was their first encounter with drugs so different for these interviewees? For example, how did Agnes’ long-awaited gateway become possible to both enter and exit, while for Hanna it led to a complete loss of orientation? How did the change take place from Hanna being “an ordinary girl” to being a heroin addict selling sex on the streets?

Looking back, Hanna describes herself as suddenly surrounded by the wrong objects: the drugs, the “wrong people” and the customers who paid for sex. The latter is a way of making a living that she talks about with a mixture of disgust and fatigue. She describes a period of disorientation, of being in the wrong space. When she recounts what happened after she started using heroin, she tells the story in a monotonous, chronological way. Life continued in the same way for about 15 years, she says, but then she became pregnant and gave birth to two children. She describes how she stayed clean for eight years after the first pregnancy by working out at the gym and spending all the rest of her time taking care of her children. Being off drugs felt like a relief, she recalls.

I felt liberated when I was free of drugs. It was liberating to get up in the morning without needing that first fix… it was such a relief. Yeah… because this thing, it holds you prisoner.

Hanna contrasts the concept of being drug-free with being a prisoner of drug use. She now feels imprisoned again and looks back wistfully on that feeling of liberation. But she also says that after a while the children’s father started abusing her.

I was abused by my, by the father of my children. He… started to hit me. I gave birth to a daughter… my third child, and he started to hit me, and… he once abused me in front of the children, in front of all three of them. The eldest told people at day care. “Fredrik hits mummy”. That’s when they contacted social services.

Abuse by men is a recurring topic in studies of socially vulnerable women who use drugs. Anette Rosengren (2003) writes that most of the participants in her study of middle-aged women experiencing homelessness had been subjected to a great deal of violence—mainly perpetrated by their male partners, but also by the police, security guards and others. At the same time, she writes: “The men represent protection and love” (Rosengren 2003, p. 207) for these (heterosexual) women. This double-edged nature of men and the emotions they provoke—protection and love on the one hand, which enables orientation, but violence and insecurity on the other, which restricts women’s freedom of movement—has certain elements in common with drug use in the knarkträsk, not least as Hanna describes it: that which enables simultaneously locks in. The image of sinking into the swamp cannot be separated from the at-ease feeling of being securely at home, which is how Ahmed describes being oriented; but this sinking leads to a social sinking, to a place at “the bottom of society”, where lack and constraint are the defining features of life. These days, Hanna no longer suffers abuse, but her children are gone and the conditions she needs to fulfil to get them back seem to be about gathering the right objects—a home and a drug-free partner, for example—and keeping others at a distance, such as heroin. Hanna repeatedly tells me that she wants to quit using heroin; when I ask her why she does not, the answer she gives me is not about security or comfort, but about time:

Hanna::

I take heroin because I don’t have time to come off it. That’s how I’d put it. Do you understand what I mean?

Emma::

Yes. I understand what you mean.

Hanna::

It’s as simple as that. I never take the time for it.

So Hanna says that she keeps using heroin due to a lack of time. It sounds counterintuitive, because she has mentioned that the majority of her day is spent “chasing the cash for heroin”. If the activity that takes up most of her time ceases, then the time to come off the drug should be freed up. But the way in which drug use changes perceived time is an aspect that several researchers have pointed out as under-theorised (Klingemann 2000; Klingemann and Schibli 2004; Järvinen and Ravn 2017). Sociologist Mats Hilte, who conducted a study comparing alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and heroin, argues that different drugs affect time in radically different ways (2019) and claims that these altered perceptions of time are a fundamental part of the way in which people experience intoxication. In her autobiography How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z (1999), author Ann Marlowe specifically discusses the relationship between heroin use and time. She describes heroin as providing a sense of living in an eternal present, while the past and the future cease to exist. Throughout her book, Marlowe, who used heroin for years, keeps returning to the drug’s ability to change time and make it stand still. During the come-down, there is no other way to resist the passage of time than to take another dose of heroin.

Hanna’s life is characterised by grief due to the ever-present awareness of the loss of her children, who were taken into care and placed with a foster family. In her situation, it is not at all surprising that she would be drawn to something that has the capacity to stop time. When she says that she does not have the time to come off it, she is referring to the time when she is not on heroin; that is: when she is not in the state that she says she needs to be in to get anything done. In a way, taking time to venture into the knarkträsk that surrounds the protective bubble offered by heroin means enduring time itself—not just by detoxing (and thus enduring a period of agony), but also by allowing one’s experience of time to change, allowing it to pass without the ability to act. But Hanna is in a place she does not want to be, and that is where she remains trapped when she suspends time by taking heroin. From an outsider’s point of view, it looks as though she is stuck in the knarkträsk. Hanna herself, however, views the drug as the one thing that allows her to do “basically everything” that needs to be done. Spatially and temporally, heroin appears to be both a solution and a dead-end.

The interviewees thus describe drug use and time under the influence in terms of places or worlds, which can also be understood as places where time works differently (Hilte 2019). As I have shown, the interviewees are strongly influenced by the socioeconomic structures that surround these places and the various objects found there. This relates to radically different directions, ways of understanding and relating to their own drug use. I have looked at the metaphors of the gateway and the knarkträsk as common Swedish portrayals of the idea that drug use will, over time, result in a downwards slide. My research, however, shows that the interviewees perceived themselves as having entered a variety of places, internal as well as the social worlds of drugs. Pernilla and Katy journeyed upwards from the entrance, into high-status circles. For Hanna, the entrance led to a place of disorientation and violence. Agnes and Madelene yearned for it and actively sought it out. During Boel’s teenage years, it was something that was ever-present and possible to repeatedly enter and exit.

Different social settings provided these women with different class-related opportunities to visit exciting yet sometimes dangerous worlds, where it is not only drugs that are close by but also collections of objects. These worlds take on different shapes as extensions of the body. Some interviewees temporarily dwell in them in the physical sense, while others have become stuck there, as though the drugs world and the body have become tangled up in each other and can no longer be separated (cf. Skeggs 2004, p. 177). I have analysed the metaphor of the knarkträsk as a term for class-related disorientation, and this metaphor does not apply to the majority of drug practices of the women who took part in my study. But even when I considered the swamp metaphor as a way of referring to a stigmatised and marginalised life, closer inspection showed the link to drugs to be more complex. Using drugs creates a protective bubble inside the unpleasantness of life in the drug swamp, which is characterised by harsh class conditions, a bubble from which the route out is tortuous and it is difficult to extricate oneself.