Keywords

Beverley Skeggs (2012) describes the concept of respectability as closely linked to norms of propriety. By respectability, Skeggs means a practice that is usually gendered, and that involves emotionally charged work of judgement about where the boundaries of propriety lie and about staying within them (2012, pp. 64f.). This work aims to establish value by being/becoming a proper person. She describes the requirements for propriety as historically inherited norms linked not only to gender but also to class, which impose an affective responsibility on certain people; that is, respectability is perceived as a mandatory norm, and loss of respectability means a loss of personal value.

How is propriety maintained during drug use? In this chapter, I explore how time and place are negotiated in relation to proper and improper drug use. I then examine the spatial relationship in the women’s lives between children and drugs, both highly charged symbols linked to norms of propriety.

1 Keeping the Rhythm

I conduct my first interview with Dora in her kitchen in Gothenburg. Dora comes across as a cautious, conscientious person, and tells me that she is interested in drugs but simultaneously afraid of them.

Cannabis is the only drug she has tried so far, despite having been offered other drugs on several occasions. She says she turned down amphetamines, for example, because she worried they would make her schizophrenic and because she does not trust chemically produced drugs.

Dora::

I just feel like all this white powder… could be anything, really, or, you know…

Emma::

So white powder –

Dora::

– equals bad. [laughs]Footnote 1

Several studies have suggested a potential link between schizophrenia and the smoking of cannabis (cf. Allebeck 2007; Manrique-Garcia et al. 2012; Månsson 2017), and these have been repeatedly publicised in the media. But cannabis does not “equal bad” for Dora because most of her friends—students mainly, from different fields of study and with busy social lives—use cannabis. This makes it an everyday, unremarkable part of life for Dora. However, she also calls smoking cannabis a stigmatised pursuit. I wonder how it is that something can be both stigmatised and everyday, and she describes how the time of day is crucial for controlled, non-stigmatised use:

Dora::

many of my friends are very high achievers, and I think they think a little bit that… if you start smoking in the middle of the day and… it might happen once in a while, but if you were also seen, by someone else, that they would think “oh, she’s really lost it”. […] “she’s really not taking responsibility for her…”, whatever commitments you have.

Dora does not want to seem like a person who does not take responsibility for her commitments, which is why she does not smoke cannabis during the day, a time associated with work or studies. The friends who sometimes smoke with her at night are the same people she is afraid might consider her as having “lost it” if they were to catch her smoking during the day. I interpret the expression “losing it” as closely related to Ahmed’s use of the term “out of line”, which describes both the drawing of a non-normative line that can be perceived as strange (queer), and an experience of disorientation (2006, pp. 66f.). But times of abstinence are followed by times when she can allow herself to use cannabis.

Richard Wilk describes this rhythm as one of the cornerstones of modern-day consumer societies:

The rhythm of restraint and release marks time in the lives of consumers; every day is divided into periods of work and breaks to consume coffee, lunch, snacks, and tobacco. Work is followed by leisure, during the day and in the week in the form of the weekend break. […] This cycle connects our […] consumption to work in a direct way, and is based on a moral scheme in which the pleasures of consumption are earned through the pain and the sacrifice of unrewarding, disciplined labour. (Wilk 2014, p. 14; see also Nichter and Nichter 1991)

This rhythm, Wilk posits, preserves a moral balance between pleasure and sacrifice. That balance differs between contexts: different substances may be consumed, for example, in different amounts. Dora’s suggestion that it is the time of day when one uses cannabis that determines whether or not such use is appropriate is in line with Wilk’s rhythm theory, in which daytime equates to work while evenings and weekends are moments that may be relaxing and pleasurable.

Sociologist Mats Hilte, however, paints a different picture. In his analysis of how the use of cannabis, heroin, tobacco and alcohol affects the user’s perception of time in relation to the environment, Hilte divides time into social time, which means shared time that corresponds to schedules and calendars, etc. (2019, p. 115), and subjective time, which is about the experience of time. In the case of both cannabis and heroin, people who use these drugs are reported to experience time as slower during intoxication. Hilte further argues that legal substances can be synchronised with shared social time in a different way than illegal substances can, because the latter are not accepted by the majority society.

Coffee and cigarettes are legal substances and therefore part of socially sanctioned rituals and practices for taking time out and suspending the passage of normative time. This is not the case with illegal substances such as heroin or cannabis. The use of heroin and other narcotic drugs is generally considered a deviant act in the West, argues Hilte, and there are therefore no socially accepted practice or rituals for using these drugs to manipulate the subjective experience of time (2019, p. 114).

However, Dora’s perception of what is appropriate indicates that cannabis can form part of socially sanctioned recreational rituals within a context that is hardly socially marginalised, but one that she describes as “high achieving” and which appears to be morally oriented. It, therefore, appears that the illegal drug cannabis can be included in social time in such a way that subjective perceptions of time under the influence, if it occurs within the socially accepted time window, can form part of a social, shared time that is synchronised with subjective time (cf. Hilte 2019, pp. 115ff.). The time shared with other people who use cannabis under the influence then comes to occupy an intermediate position. The subjective, displaced perception of time is shared with others in a limited social context during a certain period of time, a “bubble” or an “island”, in Pernilla’s and Angela’s words, which is adapted to the fixed points and commitments of general social time.

The rhythm of enjoyment and sacrifice is thus maintained in different ways by different people, nor does it have a precise temporal structure. Its boundaries are unclear, making it difficult to form judgements about the appropriateness of using or abstaining. Below, Dora describes an evening that demonstrates these unclear boundaries.

For our go-along interview, I had asked Dora to take me to a place that was important to her drug use. On the way there, she recounts an occasion when she met some friends in a large park on a bright summer evening for a picnic. We visit the park and in my field diary I describe my impressions:

She tells me she likes this place, because she associates it with summer, BBQing and having a good time. […] We walk over to where she and her friends laid out their blankets. As she talks, she recreates the scene by pointing and showing which direction they faced. They arrived around four or five in the afternoon, she says; at the time, several families with young children were seated on the grass nearby. One of her friends had baked a carrot cake with marijuana in it; several of them had a slice. Later, several other people she didn’t really know joined in as well; some of them decided not to have any cake. There is unease in her voice as the describes their decision.

I interpret her unease as stemming from the reality that the shared spatiality and experience during drug use (which I described as “intimacy” in the previous chapter) cannot materialise in the same way when some of those who are present do not join in. If drug use is the prerequisite for such a space, then those who are not part of the space risk disturbing its homeliness (cf. Ahmed 2010b, pp. 56, 58). Dora can get high if others are high as well. Around people who are not high, however, she risks becoming improper. Dora herself ate half a slice and initially experienced some positive intoxication effects, but then took another bite and gradually experienced increasingly unpleasant feelings and visions, and finally suffered several hours of vomiting. She herself links her emotional states to the influence of the drug, but mainly to the social situation, the behaviour of some of the people who had not eaten the cake, and the importance of time and place.

Everything began with a game of croquet. Another excerpt from my notebook reads:

Her arms felt weird and she felt as though she had lost some control. But she still wanted to “act normal”; she mentions the facts that it was light out and that there were still families around as reasons why she felt being high would not be appropriate. So she continued to play, but started laughing and throwing her ball around. Her behaviour drew people’s attention; eventually, her friends suggested she go and sit down on the blankets.

The nearby families and the late-afternoon sunlight created a milieu in which being high was inappropriate. At the same time, however, the whole picnic and get-together with close friends had been planned as an occasion during which being high would be appropriate. Summer evenings symbolise a time when release is permitted. But as the sun was still up, it signalled that it was still day. The time and the objects around her resulted in an ambivalent environment, in which Dora tells me she felt insecure and conspicuous.

The situation she describes exists in the space between night and day, the familiar and unfamiliar, joy and fear. The effects of the drug sound distressing enough in and of themselves. But, as Dora tells her story, she focuses on how uncomfortable she found it to be around sober people and have them witness her being high, because this meant they might find her improper.

She repeatedly tells me how some of those who were present and who had not eaten any cake found her behaviour funny.

She tells me she dislikes it when people see her at times like that, that she wants to seem proper and gives a lot of thought to that.

As mentioned above, Dora tends to avoid getting high during the day. She does not want to be considered improper or seen as someone who is “losing it”. Yet, on that particular evening, she threw her croquet ball around, laughed and called attention to herself. In a way, being “out of line” (in the sense of not being in sync with others) also means that one is “out of time” (Ahmed 2014, p. 50). Ahmed describes how, when one fails to keep a steady pace, one becomes more visible; and this conspicuousness can in turn be interpreted as clumsiness:

When we are out of time, we notice the other’s timing and pace; in noticing the other, the other might appear as awkward and clumsy, as not willing to be helpful […] Indeed, the feeling of clumsiness can be catchy: once you feel clumsy, you can feel even clumsier; you can even lack the coordination to coordinate yourself with yourself, let alone yourself with others. (2014, p. 50—note that Ahmed is not referring to the experience of being intoxicated/high)

When Dora’s intoxication occurs in front of sober people and families with children, she feels what can be described as being “out of line” as well as “out of time”. Her body and movements under the influence of cannabis are not intoxicated in a positive sense, but strange and clumsy. I interpret her laughter and the way in which she throws her croquet ball around as a sign that she feels uncoordinated, both with herself and with the environment, and in the midst of her intoxication she can find no way to regain control.

Ambivalence about time, whether or not intoxication is appropriate, is thus influenced by families with children as symbols of daytime and responsibility. In addition, her own company includes non-intoxicated people who disrupt the intimate spatiality. She therefore also feels “out of place” (cf. Ahmed 2006, p. 135; 2010b, p. 60). Perhaps the group could have created a spatial intimacy that Dora would have experienced as sufficiently suitable for intoxication, despite the families with children, if the sober people had not disrupted that intimacy, i.e. the creation of place? In any case, when neither intimacy/spatiality nor time is assured as appropriate, this leads to discomfort for Dora, who feels inappropriate and indecent.

She describes it as a relief when the families with children finally went home and it started to get dark. The time for intoxication moved more and more towards legitimacy. Despite this, the intoxication became more and more unpleasant. She says that she cried and threw up, that it was horrible and that she thought it would never end. I perceive her choice of location for the go-along interview as related to the fact that the experience made a strong impression that she is still trying to process. It was a particular event that frightened her, but it has not led her to give up cannabis. The highs that she describes during our interviews seem generally unpleasant, with associated feelings of anxiety and fear. This makes me wonder whether the rituals surrounding the intake of cannabis need to be analysed, at least in part, separately from the effects. My field notes for this part contain my questions and Dora’s answers:

You describe smoking pot [marijuana] as a social thing, but you describe the effect as becoming introverted and withdrawn. How does that work?

She answers that it is the sharing of the joint that is social. She repeats that it is. And that she wants to have friends around her with whom she feels comfortable.

I say jokingly: So you’re introverted together? A bit like yoga? She laughs and answers in the affirmative. “A bit like that.”

A division emerges between talking about smoking a joint, saying yes and taking the joint, as social and everyday, “no big deal”, something that most people are considered to do. On the other hand, the highs she experiences evoke both pleasant and unpleasant feelings, including the risk of stigma, acting strangely, paranoid experiences, etc. I perceive that Dora’s attraction to cannabis use is largely about participating in a social community, an intimate context that follows a rhythm in which cannabis use is defined as the opposite of sacrifice and discipline, in Wilk’s words. But, in the cannabis rush, she is worried about not having followed the rhythm in a proper way. Rather than a desire for the high as such, she orients herself rhythmically, enjoys allowing herself to indulge and then makes an effort to get through the high properly. The rhythm thus becomes uneven, and the intoxication itself does not represent “release”, but rather a type of “restraint”.

The joint or carrot cake containing marijuana can also be interpreted as “happy objects” in Ahmed’s sense (2010a, pp. 21ff.). She writes that happiness is attributed to certain objects, which are understood as good objects. We collect such objects around us and thus create a “horizon of likes” (ibid., p. 24). People who like the same things also gather nearby; Ahmed takes fan clubs and hobby groups as an example, and says that we often like people who like the same things as us. We thus align ourselves with others by investing in the same objects as causes of happiness, thus forming affective communities (ibid., p. 38). But being in a community that is centred on a particular object does not always mean that feelings of happiness arise. The opposite, negative feelings in relation to the object, can then mean experiences of alienation and being “out of line”. Ahmed writes:

So when happy objects are passed around, it is not necessarily the feeling that passes. To share such objects (or have a share in such objects) would simply mean you would share an orientation towards those objects as being good. (2010a, p. 44, italics in original)

When the joint or carrot cake is passed around, Dora wants to share the happiness by orientating herself towards these objects as being good, but then she does not always feel that being under the influence of cannabis is much fun. The goodness of the object does not match the impression it makes. Experiencing the wrong emotions associated with the joint/carrot cake is, therefore, not just about loss of control in front of the sober. The investment in the object as a cause of happiness is shattered, and Dora becomes “out of line” with the other people who used cannabis.

Another aspect of Dora’s uncomfortable experience is how it is gendered. Sara Ahmed reminds us that rooms have a history and a present, and writes that rooms become extensions of the bodies that visit them. They have been shaped by the bodies that have already passed through them (Ahmed 2010b, pp. 56ff), and this affects how they receive new people. They may appear open and permissive, but expectations of what the bodies in the rooms should look like create places where some bodies become part of the room. Bodies that deviate appear alien and visible, and alienation becomes an uncomfortable feeling for those who do not fit in (Ahmed 2006, p. 133). Public space was long considered to be reserved for men, “public woman” in the late nineteenth century literally meant prostitute (Svanström 2000). Drugs and intoxicants also have a history of being men’s business in the public sphere (Berridge 2013). When I ask Dora whether there are differences between men’s and women’s use of cannabis in her social circle, she again refers to time, but also to publicity:

Dora::

Mm… maybe that men do it more often… during the day, and more around people and so on, that they don’t spend as much time thinking about how it makes them look, perhaps?

Emma::

Why do you think that is?

Dora::

Well, maybe it’s about propriety, the fact that you should, or that you don’t want to be seen as improper and irresponsible. And like, not having your shit together, kind of. That you’re, losing… That’s how the environment might see you.

The spatiality of a shared intoxication, what I have called intimacy, thus constructs a context-dependent social time that is also subjective. I would, therefore, argue that the boundaries of social time and subjective time in relation to drug use are more fluid and situated than Mats Hilte (2019) assumes in his study. The “environment” that Dora refers to is important for her as a way of judging whether the intoxication is appropriate, but as I understand it, this judgement can also stem from people who share an intoxication that is positioned in the right time and place. Dora does not take the joint/carrot cake in order to deviate, but rather to align herself with the rhythm between sacrifice and duty based on her situated starting point, i.e. she takes the joint precisely in order to relate to social time. However, this behaviour is affected by gendered uncertainties about the appropriate time and place, along with the effects of cannabis, which in her story about the park became unmanageable. Uncomfortable feelings lead to alienation, both from the non-cannabis affected and from the other intoxicated people, and Dora felt misplaced, i.e. non-aligned, which she formulates as impropriety. In other words, propriety, i.e. respectability and value, is contrasted with an inappropriate rhythm, but it seems difficult to assess in advance what constitutes such a suitable rhythm, which can offer sustained decency.

When does an “evening”, when cannabis use is a proper activity, start? How can one keep intimacy intact, i.e. how can one avoid sober participants? And how close can a person under the influence of drugs get to a family with children without losing their propriety?

2 Hiding

For a person under the influence of drugs, public space during the day, where the influence is illegal and stigmatised, can become a space where much is about hiding. The psychoactive substances can affect the expression of the body in different ways, creating “embodied deviance” that is visible from the outside (Campbell and Ettorre 2011). Such a body is marked by stigmatising beliefs, and the interviewees describe different strategies to counteract the drugs’ effects that they know can become visible to others when someone is under the influence of the drug they have taken. Carolina’s use of amphetamines, for example, made her hyperalert, and by extension the use of the drug produces a typical, nervous body language which she describes as a source of shame in the public domain. She contrasts this with the sense of freedom she experiences in other timed spaces where she can be left alone, and in yet other spaces where drug use is about social interaction.

I used to climb scaffolding a lot and go up to the roof. And sit or lie there. For example. And then… so in these morning hours… between three and five, because then it’s so quiet, calm. It was like a parenthesis… I mean, nobody else, there weren’t many others awake, just me and the birds and the city, and then you can walk around and move freely and nobody’s watching and so on, but as soon as the day starts to dawn again, around six o’clock or so, and the morning traffic and morning people and so on, then I become aware of reality and aware of the day, what I have to do during the day, maybe have to get more so that I can go to work or whatever. Or aware of… that people can see me. And see that I’m under the influence and then I have to cover up and hide myself and feel ashamed. But that particular time between three and five somewhere there was always… a little, quiet freedom like that.

In my conversations with Carolina, she often returns to explaining that she did not want to use amphetamines, but still did so almost daily for eight years. This use became a solution to the anxiety problem that she still lives with, now without using illegal drugs, but it was a solution that she was ashamed of and did not want to continue. In other words, for her, visible drug use was not only about the law and the stigmatising view of others, but also about self-loathing related to her inability to stop using the drug. Concealment, therefore, became an advanced and demanding practice:

I didn’t want anyone to see that I was under the influence. So I had a few different tricks. Fake glasses, for example. That’s good because then you can’t see the eyes so well. Er, cap. Cap and hat. But sunglasses are the world’s fucking dodgiest thing, it’s ok if it’s sunny, but then as soon as you come in or the sun goes behind clouds, it’s the world’s dodgiest thing to walk around with sunglasses. It looks so dodgy. Hehe. [laughs and dramatises with her body] But such things. Maybe I could wear make-up sometimes. Tanning in a solarium so you look a bit fresh.

The masking that Carolina describes was not about hiding the problematic behaviours associated with drugs, such as personality changes, antisocial behaviour, violence or acute medical conditions. It was about hiding enlarged pupils and the worn appearance caused by inadequate nutrition and lack of sleep. Carolina perceives these as signs, in the environments where she wants to hide her use, of a person who uses drugs and is associated with problems, whether or not any problems have occurred. A body that shows such signs is not welcome in the workplace or in public spaces, but with a mask she can pass as a person who is allowed to be in these places. But it is not only the appearance of the body that must be hidden. The amphetamine’s energising effect made it necessary for Carolina to act in reverse, to act tired among other tired people:

Or also try to behave like the others, so you were like there, in the morning traffic and going somewhere, and everyone is sitting there and is so tired in the morning. Then I also tried to look so tired in the morning and yawned a bit, like [yawns]. Although I had been awake for a… day and wasn’t tired at all, you still [yawn] try to blend in. Look at how others behave, because it was embarrassing if someone suspected something or said something.

Carolina’s behaviour in the morning traffic shows that her concealment is based on a strong need to be an invisible and expected part of the rooms she is inhabiting. When she says that it would be “embarrassing” if someone suspected something, I interpret this not as being about the risk of being reported, but about the risk of being seen as a person whose alertness and lack of sleepiness could be due to drug use. This would signal an alienation and an intrusion by someone who deals with criminal and stigmatised people and products, but still insists on riding the bus to work with the morning-tired. Dora’s statement that being under the influence of drugs during the daytime could be interpreted as not fulfilling one’s duties and commitments has a reverse meaning for Carolina, who resorts to “tricks” to avoid being revealed as someone trying to fulfil duties and commitments under the influence. I ask if what she says means that she felt pressure to be perceived as not being under the influence of drugs even by complete strangers:

Yes […] Absolutely. And among people I knew, it was definitely like that, where you really had to lay it on and try to pretend like hell in the workplace when you arrived in the morning: “Uhh [yawns loudly] I’m so fucking tired”, and so on. Even though you absolutely weren’t, or hadn’t slept or something like that: “oh I’ve slept so well”. So, all the time that lie and… the image that would… or if I went together with another knarkare who was like this, obviously a drug user. “Damn, how embarrassing [whispers], damn, how embarrassing, he’s walking around here flapping and oh, I’m dying, how embarrassing”.

In this quote, Carolina expresses the fear of being seen as someone who uses amphetamines, which for her means being someone who has failed to stop using amphetamines. This is true in public spaces among strangers, but also among people she knows who are not part of the contexts in which amphetamine use is accepted and creates cohesion. On the one hand, she follows a normative line that, in her stories, primarily takes her to and from various jobs and through them. The spaces crossed are public spaces and the restaurants in which she works, where the risk of expressing something that will reveal her is always imminent. At the same time, she reluctantly draws a line that deviates, moving through friends’ and acquaintances’ flats, parties and onto rooftops. There, the rules of the game are different and expressions of amphetamine influence are expected, or do not matter. It is as though she is pushed away from normative lines, and onto deviant lines, by feelings of impropriety. At times and in places where amphetamine use is not allowed, the price of accidental disclosure is high. Carolina felt ashamed, she was risking her job, her relationships and “getting caught” by the police. In short, her whole life situation was constantly at stake.

In other words, the rhythm of restraint and release in consumer societies may well include drugs. Marginalisation is not primarily about the drug’s relationship to the law but about social context, time and place, and the fact that drug use can only be expected at certain times and in certain places. But women’s drug use seems to be in constant danger of slipping beyond the narrow and elusive windows of the right time and place where use is permitted, and ending up off line, which means experiences of impropriety. The body in such improper places must be carefully monitored to avoid or limit harm, and drug use as a release can become a situation of intoxicated, strict restraint where what is at stake is human value.