Keywords

As the previous chapter showed, both compulsive and recreational drug use can be linked to different ways of doing class, with different outcomes. The key concepts for successful middle-class behaviour are control, time management and resources. If any of these are missing, drug use leads to unsuccessful middle-class enactments, or else the use was never intended to generate such capital. In this chapter, I examine addiction as an enactment of drug use in the light of Beverley Skeggs’ class theory.

Skeggs writes that research lacks the tools to theorise subjectivities other than those conceived as worthy middle-class subjectivities, which are based on certain epistemological assumptions about what people strive for.

Theories of the good and proper self (the governmental normative subject, be it a reflexive, enterprising, individualising, rational, prosthetic, or possessive self) or even the self produced in conditions not of its own making, such as Bourdieu’s habitus, all rely on ideas about self-interest, investment and/or “playing the game”. (2011, p. 496)

She argues that lack of interest in self-optimisation or “playing the game” is unexplored working-class positions. Instead, such lack of interest is woven into (middle-class) descriptions of the working class as worthless (2011, pp. 503ff.). The working class, Skeggs argues, also does not have the resources to develop a self that can be described as valuable through capitalist metaphors, such as investment, inheritance, profit and loss. From such a perspective, the working class appears paralysed and dependent (2004, p. 187). Skeggs does not explicitly refer to dependence on drugs per se when she describes the middle class’s construction of the working class as dependent. But, as I will show, class is inextricably linked with issues such as drug dependence, addiction and substance use disorders. This, in fact, is an issue that could perhaps shed light on the reasons why those in lower socioeconomic and educational positions use drugs more frequently and in larger quantities (CAN 2021Footnote 1). Namely: How can a person in a neoliberal world, whose drug use has become problematic, quit using drugs if they lack the resources and/or the desire to become a “governmental normative subject”, interested in optimising and investing in their self?

When drugs are used in line with the performance of an optimising middle-class self, they sometimes function as more or less temporary prostheses, something that is needed to “play the game”. Such a need for drugs in order to maintain or increase personal value (in Ahmed’s words: to align oneself, and remain in line, with normative ideals, 2006, p. 66) contrasts with addiction, that is: the need for the drug itself and the drug’s intoxication, despite the fact that its use does not optimise the user, causing them trouble instead.

Addiction is defined by addiction researcher Markus Heilig as “continued use despite negative consequences” (2015, p. 35). These negative consequences may include loss of one’s home, work and relationships, which thus indicates a downward class journey over time, regardless of the point from which the addict started. In other words, the optimising middle-class self and the dependent self seem to move in diametrically opposite directions in class society.

But while some addictions can indeed lead to the kinds of losses listed by Heilig (Laanemets 2002; Lewis 2017), the consequences of addiction are not set in stone. Becoming addicted to drugs does not automatically mean that one will lose one’s home, for example. Which negative consequences an addicted person will experience depends upon the assets and resources they have at their disposal.

If addiction is about “continued use despite negative consequences”, then it is a concept of time. Addiction does not refer to a single instance of drug use that has led to negative consequences, but rather to a prolonged process that also extends forward from the present, through the word “continued”. Thus, an ongoing addiction has already occurred, but it is still present and will continue. An addicted person is thus crossed by a line that runs both backwards and forwards in time. Nevertheless, several interviewees define addiction as a point that one passes, something that risks occurring as a result of a single act. This point then takes the form of an accumulated line (cf. Ahmed 2006, pp. 178f.) that arises and extends backwards as well as forwards, but might not have arisen if that particular point had not been passed. What does addiction mean when viewed from different distances to such points, and what does class have to do with that meaning? How is a line of addiction that unfolds forwards as well as backwards experienced? And how can non-dependent, dependent and inactive dependencies be understood?

This chapter examines different interviewees’ perceived proximity to addiction and the directions that are pointed out from there, from different ways of staying at a distance to being inside addiction. The lines drawn are discussed in relation to will, class and direction.

1 The Will to Perform Class

Pernilla reflects upon the question of whether there are any drugs she cannot imagine using, and the answer indicates that it is the risk of addiction, and its connection to certain drugs, that is decisive for her drug use practices.

There are many different drugs. I’d say I’m pretty… selective. Take crack, for example. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve seen, just how incredibly quickly it induces addiction. The way it utterly and completely changes who you are, as a person.Footnote 2

During trips to the USA when she was younger, Pernilla met people who had started using crack. She was horrified at how quickly they became addicted and how the drug changed their personalities. Pernilla expresses addiction—a timeline through the body—as a matter of spatiality: a state of proximity to a certain object (crack) that induces addiction. The Swedish term for addictive, beroendeframkallande, literally means “addiction-inducing”. It suggests that addiction lies dormant in the body, and that it is the characteristics of an object that can awaken the addiction. This, Pernilla says, is why she avoids crack.

It is not just any kind of addiction that Pernilla fears crack would induce. By nature, humans depend on the supply of a range of substances—oxygen, water, certain nutrients—to stay alive; for many people, everyday medicines too are life-sustaining. A crack addiction, on the other hand, can alter, or even shorten, one’s life. The addiction that Pernilla is wary of is thus one that could result in more changes than simply becoming addicted. It is an addiction that has to be initiated to be able to commence, and Pernilla believes that ingesting crack could lead to negative changes in her life. This is why she feels the need to avoid crack—as opposed to the drugs she likes to use, such as cocaine and amphetamines.

How should we interpret this line that Pernilla has drawn, expressed in terms of avoiding crack? Below, I examine two different addiction research perspectives that theorise addiction as will from a psychosocial perspective, and as defective will from a neurological perspective. To understand why my interviewees sometimes reject and sometimes approach drugs, I discuss both perspectives in relation to phenomenology and Ahmed’s concept of lines (2006).

Drug researcher Ted Goldberg’s psychosocial perspective on addiction, which he defines as “problematic use”,Footnote 3 focuses on will:

In the psychosocial school of thought, recreational consumption and problematic consumption are two essentially different things. When consumption is problematic (rather than recreational), all fundamental areas of life – one’s living conditions, physical health, mental health, social relationships, financial situation, self-image, etc – deteriorate. Most citizens do not want that to happen; they want to create a good life for themselves and their loved ones. (2012, p. 60)

Goldberg thus makes a sharp distinction between recreational consumption that can be part of “a good life” (cf. “the optimising self”, Skeggs 2004, pp. 62ff.) and consumption that negatively affects all important areas of life. He suggests that some people want to engage in problematic consumption, while others do not, and that the two forms of use are therefore essentially different. According to him, a person who uses drugs in a problematic way and the person who uses drugs recreationally are headed in different directions, but does this mean that the “essence” of use, which I interpret as the drive to use, is definitely divided and separate? Would it be enough for Pernilla to be sure that she wants a good life, in order to then be able to test crack unproblematically? Or is a desire to consume certain drugs problematic by definition? In other words, does the “nature” of the drugs, i.e. their properties, have anything to do with it? Pernilla mentions another drug she does not want to try, namely heroin.

Heroin. I would probably not… dare, precisely because they say that once someone’s had a taste of that high, they immediately want to go there again. I think I have a lot of respect for addiction, for addictive stuff.

Pernilla is thus afraid that, if she were to try heroin, she would acquire a new will that she did not have before—a development she expresses in both spatial and temporal terms. She fears that experiencing the high of heroin would make her want to “go there again”. Between the lines, she suggests that she is afraid this new will would be more powerful than her other wills, and thus lead to addiction. Wanting to “go there again” also illustrates how the line of addiction is not a straight one: it is a loop, one that keeps returning to the same point, over and over again. The loops of addiction lead one away from optimisation, in the sense of personal development and success. Instead, they spiral towards the next hit of drugs.

What is addictive according to Pernilla is thus not the objects or addictive substances themselves, heroin and crack, but the experiences of intoxication located in time and space. Experiencing the world through crack or heroin are experiences that she fears could lead to new desires and directions, towards certain places where the body would spend time instead of being in others. Sara Ahmed writes:

“orientations” depend on taking points of view as given. The gift of this point is concealed in the moment of being received as given. Such a point accumulates a line that both divides things and creates spaces that we imagine that we can be “in”. (2006, p. 14)

From one perspective, the world seems to develop in a particular way that offers certain possibilities, but from another the world looks different and other things seem attainable. The space that is available seems obvious from the point from which it is viewed, and orientation takes place from there. If Pernilla resists heroin and crack, life does not unfold from such intoxications, and she can stay in line with her current perspectives.

If orientation from a certain point takes place in relation to what appears to be possible and attainable from there, the areas of life that Goldberg judges to be the most important, “living conditions, physical health, mental health, social relations, finances, self-image, etc.” (2012, p. 60), also end up in a dependent position in relation to the addicted person’s other life conditions. What can be maintained, and how this is done while the addict devotes a lot of time to his or her addiction, becomes a question of capital in Bourdieu’s sense, or resources in Skegg’s sense, which in addition to capital also includes cultural resources that have no accumulative value (Skeggs 2004, p. 17). Regardless of drug dependency, the conditions concealed behind the abovementioned areas of life relate to people’s different living conditions, which means that notions of “a good life” do not look the same for everyone. For example, poverty, poor health and problematic social relationships are a radically different starting point for addiction-related “negative consequences” than extensive financial assets, good health and a strong social network.

Many famous personalities throughout history have lived their lives as both successful and addicted. The poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see e.g. Plant 1999), the novelist Thomas de Quincey (2003/1822), poet and writer Charles Baudelaire (see Plant 1999), songwriter and singer Billie Holliday (see Palmer and Horowitz 2000), singer and actress Judy Garland (see e.g. Iversen 2012, chapter 5), rock musician and actor Elvis Presley (ibid.) and rock artists Courtney Love (Carr 2017) and Lady Gaga (ARTPOP by GAGA 2013) are a selection of famous people who have had the opportunity to engage in both optimisation and addiction, either simultaneously or alternately (cf. Berridge 2013, pp. 160ff.). In several cases, their addictions have involved serious consequences, including death. But during their active and successful lives, addiction was part and parcel of their activities. It could be argued that, for them, the desire for a good life has meant both professional accomplishments and problematic drug use. Rather than being oriented in different class directions by definition, the loops of dependence are stuck in class-related lines based on conditions, capital and claims for optimisation.

I will come back to the role of (free) will and addiction’s relationship to certain drugs and class, but first I would like to examine addiction from another point of view—as exemplified by Carolina, who does not refer to addiction as an act of will.

Carolina describes her addiction as clashing with her will, which is to “do things in life”, rather than starting from it. As previously mentioned, she used amphetamines as a daily practice for eight years, has undergone twelve-step treatment and has since been involved in Narcotics Anonymous (NA). In other words, she has extensive experience both of being addicted and of talking about it in specific contexts where addiction is understood within an institutionalised conceptual apparatus. She tells me how her addiction manifested itself once it had arisen, after she had tried drugs for the first time.

[T]hen I just, kept using. And, like, went to school on Monday, lied – and I’m the kind of person who never lies. Lied to my teacher: “I think I was drugged this weekend, I should go home”, and then I just immediately headed home to him [her boyfriend], looked for his stash and used again. It was like it came automatically, so it just, kept going. This was, like, a week before I graduated from upper-secondary.

This quote illustrates how her use became “automatic”; what started as a conscious choice “just, kept going”. The way Carolina puts it, it sounds as though someone else was in the driving seat. Carolina, who hates to lie, lies and skips school so she can use more amphetamines. She describes the events as though she suddenly found herself at a point from which the looping line of addiction immediately unfolded and actions that she would usually find unthinkable suddenly appeared reasonable.

While Goldberg argues that problematic use is based on volitional actions, neuroscientist and physician Markus Heilig describes addiction as a state in which the will is suspended:

The most striking thing about people who seek out treatment for problems with alcohol or drugs is […] how their motivational engine somehow seems to have broken down. […] I have never yet met a patient who valued getting drunk more than having a job or a home. Yet countless patients can easily and repeatedly risk these things for a chance to drink or take drugs. […] This inability to direct behaviour towards desired goals is at the heart of compulsive substance use. (2015, p. 34)

Heilig describes the brain as broken and the addict’s actions as compulsive, painting a picture of a state beyond their control. But he retains a loophole for himself by writing “countless patients” instead of “the patients”, which allows for exceptions. Some patients do not risk their homes for their addictions, partly because some homes are simply not at risk of being lost, but may some addicts not allow their homes to be risked either? His interpretation of the term thus involves some uncertainty about what it might mean: that the ability to direct behaviour towards desired goals may not be completely eliminated? In any case, this quote from Heilig emphasises an image of the addict as a compulsive consumer, a person who has fallen out of the rhythm between pleasure and duty (Wilk 2014), where duty represents the motivational machinery. The addict may become unable to steer their behaviour in the desired direction in the long term—doing/not doing what is required to keep their job and home, for example—which highlights its difference from the short-term nature of pleasure. The rhythm thus involves not only an alternation between sacrifice and relaxation, but also between the present and the future (ibid., pp. 9f.), long and short lines that must coincide in a way that prioritises the long lines in order for the rhythm to work.

From the points that are passed while following short lines, such as recreational drug use, it must be possible to imagine how these lines can be drawn to points along the long line, and the lines must coincide well enough for life to proceed towards long-term, normative goals. However, Carolina does not express her use as either playful or wilful. In relation to Heilig’s motivational machinery metaphor, the “automaticity” that she describes manifests as an error rather than a will, a compulsive movement that leads her astray.

In other words, the self must follow lines towards normative goals, otherwise addiction/problematic use has occurred, according to both Heilig and Goldberg. But the two different ways of describing addiction and problematic consumption—from a neurological and psychosocial perspective—collide in terms of will. Simply put, the clash can be described as a question: Does the person who is addicted or uses drugs problematically want to use, or is the will/motivation machinery broken? (The latter seems to be in line with Pernilla’s and Carolina’s images, as well as experiences of addiction.) How can this question be analysed from a cultural analysis perspective?

The queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) writes about the relationship between the will and the concept of “addiction”. Sedgwick argues that, since the medicalisation of so-called dependency states through the term “addiction” has come to cover everything from the use of drugs and tobacco to food and exercise, it has proved impossible to identify what it actually means (ibid., pp. 131f.). It can be about the intake of a foreign substance, but also about the body’s own substances; about uncontrolled activities but also about extremely controlled activities characterised by willpower. She believes that the discourse is based on an imagined dichotomy between absolute free will and compulsiveness, which are actually inherent in each other.

Sedgwick argues that hope for the addict is constructed as the existence of the free will to stop using, which is threateningly overshadowed by the fact that the person has previously been forced by the addiction (which is chronic and has not ceased) and has acted compulsively. At the same time, there is comfort in the fact that unwanted behaviour was precisely compulsive, not free will, but this is overshadowed by the fact that at any given moment—if free will exists—the person could have chosen differently (ibid., pp. 134f.).

Instead of “addiction”, Sedgwick advocates the concept of “habit”, although she believes that this concept is difficult to use:

It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine an analytically usable language of habit, in a conceptual landscape so rubbled and defeatured by the twin hurricanes named Just Do It and Just Say No. (ibid., p. 140)

I also see that an everyday word like habit risks belittling people’s struggles to extricate themselves from painful states of addiction. But Sedgwick wants to use the word as a complex expression that names the movement by linking “habitus”, “habit” and also “habitation”:

[A] version of repeated action that moves, not toward metaphysical absolutes but toward interrelations of the action – and the self acting – with the bodily habitus, the appareling habit, the sheltering habitation, everything that marks the traces of that habit on a world that the metaphysical absolutes would have left a vacuum. (ibid., p. 138)

For Sedgwick, the term “habit” thus implies a movement, not towards a particular drug but towards the behaviour itself, and in this interpretation it includes the habitus of the body as well as expression and a sheltered place to be. Moreover, Sedgwick indicates that the habit leaves various traces that absolute compulsion or free will cannot comprehend. This can be compared with Ahmed’s description of directions that shape the body if they are repeated and that depend not only on how we direct ourselves but also on how we are directed by what we see in that direction (2006, p. 15f.). That is, what is expected of us, how we are addressed and treated, for example, and what is then made possible. I interpret Sedgwick as saying that habit (cf. habitus and performativity) takes a different approach to the subject’s context (thoughts, relationships, material assets and so on) than addiction, which also includes a relationship to time. Short and long lines coincide in these habits, our repeated, everyday events. From the position of the body, habits provide a number of fixed vantage points from which the future can be imagined and lines drawn. “Free will” thus becomes linked to what can be imagined from the vantage points of habit.

If we go back to Pernilla’s reasoning about the concern that using heroin could lead to wanting to “go there again”, the question of when the will changes is also important. Is it in connection with the choice of drug, or when the drug has already been taken? When does the motivational machinery break down, or when does problematic use become desirable? Goldberg argues strongly that problematic use can be linked to stigmatisation and historical vulnerability among people who use drugs in a problematic way (2000). However, the example of Pernilla’s avoidance of heroin and crack demonstrates a concern with the characteristics of the drugs, which she describes as “addictive stuff”, that extends beyond such an explanatory model. Her understanding of addiction, as someone who has never experienced it, is not unequivocally in line with Heilig’s concept of “broken motivational machinery”, but involves the imagined ability of drugs to change the will so that the body takes new directions.

So what are these places and perspectives that Pernilla does not want to make her own? The people she mentioned who used crack were part of a structural context of which she does not want to be part. She says, among other things:

I’ve seen too much of the social structures around it [crack]. People stealing from their own mothers and then selling their loot for another hit of a shitty drug made of residual products.

Crack is thus not attractive to Pernilla as a perspective-creating object because, from her outsider perspective, it is part of a social context that she perceives in negative terms. Crack is described as a “shitty drug” and its very materiality—extracted from “residual products”—as inferior to other drugs made from previously unused raw materials. Recycling, in this context of cocaine-containing residues, thus lacks the charge of reuse and environmental sustainability and contributes to Pernilla’s disdain for crack as rubbish. It fuels her outrage over the drug’s effects, the way that it makes people rob their own mothers so they can indulge in the rush of crack once more. The scenario is a clear picture of the non-respectability and moral inferiority associated with the intake of a certain substance. For Pernilla, allowing such a drug into her body thus entails the risk of taking the step from defining the morally inferior to constituting it. When Pernilla makes these arguments about drugs she does not want to try, I ask her why cocaine and amphetamines feel okay.

Pernilla::

Well, there I think it’s a matter of me having been in so many contexts in which people use them. Before even trying them, I already knew people weren’t addicted. If I’d spent time in social circles in which every other person used heroin from time to time, maybe I would have seen it [heroin] differently too. There’s something about that drug that makes you go “well, it would be exciting to give it a try”, but then I also think […] well, you know, the risks. […] It feels too hard, too dirty, in a way to become… I mean, dirty in the sense that it’s like “poof”…

Emma::

So the fact that you’ve seen these social structures and…

Pernilla::

Yes, it’s partly that and then also how it seems to affect your behaviour when you use [it]… or something. I guess I like being present…

I interpret the hard and dirty aspects that Pernilla does not want to deal with as a description of the environments she associates with these drugs, which are usually portrayed as marginalised, violent and dirty. That drug use can look like this is also something she says she has witnessed herself in the case of crack, manifesting as dysfunctional relationship structures linked to a desperate need for the drug in combination with a lack of money. In addition, she describes the effects of the drugs as rendering a person no longer able to be “present”, an expression to which she returns in various parts of the interview. I interpret “being present” as synonymous with being in tune with one’s environment and in line with the directions staked out before use. The fear of no longer being in tune is thus not about falling out of tune as an experience of disorientation, which can be caused, for example, by unpleasant or strong drug effects and which she talks about in other terms (e.g. as being “cuckoo”), but about new experiences of orientation and new directions from there. She does not want to move away from the long lines; rather, she wants to be present and aligned.

So, for Pernilla, the desire to have a good life and the drive to optimise herself and be in line means that she does not use certain drugs because she associates them with addiction, rather than with recreational use. The will to experience a good life is about a will that leads her to refrain from using these drugs, and this line is drawn even before use is even considered. A line towards crack and further into addiction is thus defined at the same time as it is regarded as a point, in the form of an object to be avoided. Some drugs are expected to produce such strong effects that Pernilla is doubtful whether they can be used without changing a person’s long-term perspective. These objects are described as points on already defined problematic lines, and she contrasts them with her own use of amphetamines and cocaine, which she has not only used herself but has also seen others use without any problems. But, while both of these drugs are common recreational drugs, they are also known as problematic, addictive substances (Iversen 2012; Wierup and De la Reguera 2010). In other words, there is an inherent uncertainty about how the world will develop from a certain point, whether addiction will occur and hence turn the point into a line in the form of a loop. Birgitta Stenberg’s addiction, for example, which lasted for several years, was to amphetamines. In the documentary All the Wild OnesFootnote 4 (Belfrage and Gustavsson 2012), Stenberg describes one of her first amphetamine rushes:

It was so magnificently beautiful. I said to Palle: is it like this? This is how it is, he said. Exactly like this.

Later, she adds:

You have to remember that these things that look so dirty when it comes to narcotics – dirty quarters, dirty needles and… – you wouldn’t voluntarily put up with that if there hadn’t been an infinite answer in, in narcotics.

Stenberg unabashedly links her wild life to drug use and shows in the quote how the world can look from a drug-using versus a non-drug-using perspective. That which looks dirty and filthy from one angle can be magnificently beautiful from the other. Pernilla’s fear of addiction could be interpreted using Stenberg’s terminology. If something magnificently beautiful were to unfold after taking crack or heroin, she also knows how dirty and filthy it would look from the outside. The longing for the temporarily magnificent is, therefore, held back by an aversion to the dirty, an aversion that keeps her anchored within the perspective of the long lines. These perspectives are shaped by norms about what constitutes a good life. But, since the contexts in which Pernilla uses amphetamines are not dirty and return to or never leave the long lines, the grandiose can be enjoyed without the risk of dirtiness. But the question is: If enjoyment and the desire to go there again are crucial for whether or not addiction occurs, how grand can it be allowed to be without a drug being perceived as difficult to resist? That is, for the will to be replaced by a new will, or, according to Heilig, for the motivational machinery to break down.

Some of my interviewees recounted their experiences of pleasure in precisely those terms: as experiences of risk.

2 Does Pleasure Equate to Addiction?

Thea is one of those who believe that their own use of certain drugs involves risks of addiction. She believes that the opioid-based drugs for back pain, which she is sometimes prescribed and sometimes buys illegally, pose such a risk. She also tells me how friends who started taking the opioid heroin changed, and even died from their use, which deters her from trying the drug herself. She describes herself as “interested in drugs”, and has tried many different ones, both legal and illegal, since her youth. She says:

I can also, well, quite honestly, sometimes I take it on an empty stomach. Then I get a little more high, and that’s nice. […] so there is a risk that I could become dependent on it.

Taking opioid-based drugs on an empty stomach, instead of after a meal, enhances the experience of the effect. Thea says she gets “a little more high”, and that it feels good. I understand her concerns about addiction being linked to the longing for niceness, to experience effects beyond the pain relief. This is a desire that was problematised in the previous chapter in relation to an information sheet from a health centre, where the intention of the intake is described as decisive for whether a drug-classified medicine is a drug or not. Thea feels that the desire to get a little higher, or the fact that she takes painkillers in such a way that she not only numbs the pain but also gets high, could indicate that she is aiming for an illegitimate pleasure, and it is this that she feels could lead to potential addiction.

However, the drugs are causing her body to become constipated, which in itself is associated with pain, health risks and anxiety. Thea’s intestinal system has been damaged as a result of various surgeries, leading to several intestinal disorders. As a result, she lives with periodic back pain and periodic constipation due to painkillers, but the latter periods are not so long or frequent that she worries about the risk of addiction. She has approached addiction in such a way that she has been able to recognise it as a risk due to experiences of pleasure. The risk is kept at a distance by practical circumstances; the painful constipation caused by opiates negates the point of using them to treat back pain, and therefore, she has not had to make decisions about consumption based solely on a risk assessment from an addiction perspective. But she says that she does do so in relation to other drugs, again with a focus on pleasure, for example in connection with her first use of MDMA. This comes to mind in a context where she discusses fears. One fear that she perceives as common among other people is that addiction will occur on the first use of a drug. She says:

[P]eople have a lot of fears and stuff about, addiction or, the whole addiction thing…. Without knowing that it’s not as simple as trying something and becoming hooked. That’s not even the case with heroin. I felt that way maybe, the first time I took MDMA, when I was 19. […] then I just had this thought: “ok, this was… I’ve never felt this good in my entire life. There’s a potential danger in this.” [laughter].

Thea describes how she linked positive feelings during this occasion of drug use to danger. The danger was that she felt better than she ever had before. In other words, what she describes is an experience of optimisation. Even while in the intoxicated state, she realised that she would either have to accept returning to a less optimal state, or try to maintain the MDMA influence over time. I perceive the attraction of the latter option as the “danger” in this argument, because repeated use is associated with addiction. For Thea, addiction as a danger thus took the form of an experience of feeling extraordinarily good together with the drug, a fusion that she nevertheless perceived as impossible to maintain without sacrificing other things that she would eventually be deprived of. What was so extraordinarily good about Thea in that moment was due to the drug and, if she wanted to remain in the experience, she would become dependent on the drug being provided. She, therefore, had to make a decision to feel worse again shortly afterwards to avoid becoming even worse in the long run. If the person who uses drugs, in Pernilla’s words, “wants to go there again” too often, this optimisation transforms into its opposite. There is, therefore, an inherent loss in such an intoxication, which must be accepted in order to avoid addiction.

MDMA does not appear to have high addiction potential (Iversen 2012, chapter 8, pp. 16ff.), which Thea also mentions in another context. It is a drug that loses its effect after only a few doses, but I perceive what Thea describes as a danger of addiction, the unparalleled positive state, to be a fundamental idea within how the concept of addiction is conceptualised. The formula for addiction then becomes: the drug involves surprisingly strong experiences of pleasure. The relationship with the drug is crucial for a person to continue feeling so good. The person who used drugs “wants to go there again”, the drug use is repeated and the one who uses drugs becomes an addict.

In other words, according to this formula, the addict is a pleasure seeker. Markus Heilig writes about the search for the cause of addiction and dismisses such a formula:

[A]re drugs’ effects all that matter? Hardly. Most people appreciate that social inhibitions ease after a couple of drinks at a cocktail party. Most people who try cocaine experience euphoria. And yet, for most people who try these drugs, substance use will not become a problem. (2015, p. 29)

Thus, according to Heilig, enjoyment in itself does not explain why some people who use drugs continue to use despite negative consequences. Instead, Heilig argues that only some individuals develop dependence, and that this takes time. One important factor is “drug craving”, which he defines as “a strong and overwhelming desire for the drug even after prolonged abstinence”, which constitutes “the driving force behind continued substance use despite negative consequences” (2015, p. 35). Thus, as I interpret Heilig, the danger that Thea identifies when she tries MDMA for the first time consists of an admittedly hard-to-believe pleasurable experience, but which in most people does not lead to compulsive use as long as drug cravings do not develop. When this has happened—and research cannot determine in advance whom it may affect, but according to Heilig it requires repeated use—the addiction is a fact. Thea’s interpretation of the pleasure as dangerous argues against such repeated use. The danger consists of an imagined future scenario that involves repeated use, which Thea describes herself as having already rejected as a viable way to go while she was in the intoxication situation. Instead, she orientates herself away from the danger. Enjoyment seems to have acted as a warning bell, rather than as a direction towards uncontrolled repeated use.

Heilig also mentions another symptom, “drug-seeking behaviour”, meaning the physical movement towards the drug which in addiction becomes a repetitive movement. He states that his research has shown how this can be linked to stress and “negative thoughts” (2015, pp. 84ff.). Both the concepts of drug craving and drug-seeking behaviour describe how bodies and objects approach each other, on the body’s initiative. They give a picture of a craving behaviour enacted towards drugs, and an active seeking behaviour, respectively. Odd behaviours that some bodies, oddly enough, engage in. But the negative thoughts that can be linked to such drug-seeking behaviour indicate that there is something significant in these objects, which is the reason for the search.

Can craving be described as a desire to escape negative thoughts? Heilig also argues against such an interpretation of addiction. He writes, for example, that people who become addicted but stop using drugs (including alcohol) have elevated anxiety levels during withdrawal, but thereafter do not report greater anxiety than the normal population (ibid., pp. 92ff.). Nevertheless, they are at risk of experiencing cravings and relapsing into addiction. But he also writes that the lasting changes in the brain to which compulsive use is believed to lead involve a bodily balancing act, where the brain reacts antagonistically to prolonged euphoric experiences. He compares this to the brain’s reaction to a hangover, but describes the addicted brain’s reaction as stronger and more prolonged. Addiction, he says, means that people permanently react more strongly to stress than they did before, which often leads to relapse. This reasoning leads back to the negative thoughts, but also out of the brain, to stressors in life.

Thus, regardless of how and whether the brain changes, the prognosis is better for an addict who is free of stress, and the reason for the onset of addiction is linked to the effects of drugs on stress and negative thoughts. Thus, Heilig argues that patients’ experiences of euphoria are not in themselves a warning sign; instead, the experiences of drug cravings and drug-seeking behaviour are signs that the addiction has already been established, which usually requires high and prolonged consumption. I interpret him as saying that a feeling, drug craving, drug-seeking behaviour and the body’s movements towards drugs, together define what addiction “is”. But how can repeated consumption in a given moment be distinguished from addiction? From a neurological perspective, the transition from use to addiction is shrouded in mystery. From Thea’s perspective, the euphoria is noticed immediately after the first intake, but it functions more as a warning bell not to use again (soon) than as a gateway. This contrasts with Carolina who, after her first intake, felt that use had already become automatic.

Thea distinguishes between the lines by arguing that there was an important aspect in the contrast between euphoria and her well-being in the potential danger she experienced during her first MDMA intoxication. For example, she says that, then, at the age of 19, she had “never felt this good in my entire life”, which in the context of how she describes her well-being as a young person implies a longed-for experience of feeling better. For example, a major problem factor was that she had not started her trans process and felt bad, uncomfortable in her body.

Her 19-year-old self wants to feel good, but perceives such a state as necessarily linked to long-term changes, such as the gender reassignment she later undergoes. From the body’s point of view, a prolonged MDMA high looks unsustainable. In contrast, she perceives opioids as more risky from an addiction perspective. Freedom from pain is a state that is experienced positively, and she can also get “high”. I perceive her as though, from within the intoxication as well as afterwards, she makes judgements about danger, where the positive effects of the intoxication on her mood signal the risk of addiction. In both cases, practicalities limit her use—Thea and the drugs are separated.

The purpose that Katy describes for her cocaine use is a desire to stay awake for longer. She says that she loses interest in social situations when she gets tired in the evenings, and therefore uses cocaine primarily to feel alert. She says that she does this only rarely and in small doses. According to her, the purpose of her drug use is, therefore, something as mundane as feeling awake. Nevertheless, she also recognises a danger in the euphoric aspects of drug use. When she talks about the time she tried crack without knowing what it was, she says:

It was… it was amazing. Really. You got, like, super alert, it’s short, intense periods. But … it was probably, unfortunately, the best thing I’ve ever tried. I think.

The reason why she regrets that crack was the best thing she ever tried is because she never wants to try it again. Even though it was the best drug she had used, she describes the occasion with irritation in her voice. She emphasises that she would never have tried it if she had understood that it was crack and not “regular” cocaine. It happened with a boyfriend who smoked his cocaine in foil, which she describes as “a bit dodgy”. She also first calls what he was using cocaine, but then specifies that it was crack. She describes their approach to the drug as different:

I’m not an addiction kind of person […] Which might also be why I do it. Because I know I’m in control of it. And as soon as I notice that I, as I did with crack, that I notice that “oh God, wow, this”, then it’s like “uh oh, alarm bells”. And then I won’t take that one again.

In this way, Katy also approaches something that she perceives as the risk of addiction, and comes close enough to metaphorically hear warning bells ring. A question here is whether the warning bells came from the drug experience itself, or whether they were rather related to what she already knew about crack, which is burdened with a bad reputation as a highly addictive drug for the racialised poor, especially in the USA (Nelson 2021; Wierup and De la Reguera 2010, pp. 241ff.; Campbell 2000; Maher 1997). Above all, she expresses embarrassment at having crossed a line that she did not intend to cross because she did not realise that the cocaine was crack. In a spatial sense, it was the crack that crossed her border under a false name. Katy put some kind of pipe to her lips and drew crack smoke into her body.

I interpret the degree of intimacy with drugs as an aspect of use that extends beyond risk assessments of health impact and also pleasure. The intimacy of bringing the drugs into contact with the body, together with the various risks (legal, health, social) and the intense pleasure sought, could be the basis for strong experiences of integrity violation and disgust in a situation like the one Katy describes, when an unwanted drug turns out to have taken the place of the desired one (cf. Lupton 1999, pp. 131f.). When, on top of that, the unwanted drug also carries connotations of class stigma and puts one at risk of a life-altering addiction, the experience might even feel like an assault by the “lower” drug world that Katy never wanted to have anything to do with (cf. Ahmed 2014, p. 86).

The astonishing class journey between bodies that Katy saw the drugs make when she started travelling around the world as a teenager, from vulnerable and excluded to respected and desirable bodies, does not apply to all drugs, but adheres perhaps especially to cocaine. When Katy strongly distances herself from crack but continues to use cocaine, she inscribes herself in a classed discourse that distinguishes between the two drugs of the same origin and those who use them. Magnus Linton describes cocaine as a drug with positive connotations, associated with mental acuity and successful people. It is “the drug for those who don’t like junkies” (2010, p. 20, see also p. 29). Crack, on the other hand, despite its origins in and similarity to cocaine (see chapter on “Drugs and Medicines”), is strongly linked to the very definition of the junkie: loss of control, prostitution and poverty (Maher 1997). The shorter and even more intense high associated with crack is perceived by Katy as dangerous because it was the “best she had ever had”, but the radically different class connections may also have played a role. Katy wants cocaine in her body, but not crack, and the intensely pleasurable experience does not mitigate the discomfort, rather the opposite.

I interpret the interviewees’ fear of feeling too good as an indication that these experiences involve more than just euphoria. Katy did not want to use crack again, and Thea felt that the use of MDMA was risky and assessed that any future use must be under careful self-monitoring. The euphoria involved orientation away from repeated use and therefore did not lead to addiction. Instead, potential new experiences of orientation and new wills seem to constitute the risk of pleasure, which would consequently affect the body’s movement patterns, what Markus Heilig calls drug-seeking behaviour. If such new desires and perspectives completely took over, people would not seek help for drug addiction. Instead, the new wills and perspectives often seem to clash with other wills and with the expectations and demands of their surrounding environment. Addiction appears to be a paradoxical experience of the world unfolding in different directions, with certain lines that enable orientation, sometimes in the form of loops, coming to the fore for different people. In Carolina’s description of such an experience, its use became automatic and required eight years of struggle to find her way back to other lines. Pernilla is heedful of certain drugs she views as addictive, while Thea and Katy have caught glimpses of addiction in moments of overwhelming pleasure. In all of these stories, addiction seems to lie beyond a sharply drawn line: it has either already occurred or remains at a distance. Did my interviewees experience any other close encounters with addiction?

3 In and Out of Addiction

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines the cultural significance of the transition from drug use as an activity to addiction as follows:

In the taxonomic re-framing of a drug-user as an addict, what changes are the most basic terms about her. From a situation of homeostatic stability and control, she is propelled into a narrative of inexorable decline and fatality, from which she cannot dis-implicate herself except by leaping into that other, even more pathos-ridden narrative called “kicking the habit”. (1993, p. 131)

Thus, according to Sedgwick, addiction denotes not just a condition but a narrative of “inexorable decline and fatality”. Her description is a comment on texts found, for example, in treatments based on twelve-step programmes. A message formulated in different ways in the Narcotics Anonymous literature is: “We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death” (1986, p. 1). “An addict” is thus characterised not only by their actions but also by an already imagined, deviant life trajectory. The addict is expected to move through time according to a preconceived downward chronological progression that terminates when the person either dies or stops using. But Sedgwick also writes that “kicking the habit”, that is, quitting drugs, or “getting clean”, has its own dramatic narrative. In short, in such a reading, the concept of addiction constructs subjects in life-changing ways.

Angela, however, rejects the idea of addiction as a compulsive state. She describes how she has been both close to and inside what is called addiction, but says she has realised that identification as an addict is required for the addiction to be reified. She thus opposes the “re-framing” that Sedgwick describes. She says:

I mean, I’ve read articles saying that this addiction people talk about… That love helps cure addiction and that people who were given morphine ahead of surgery don’t go through the same withdrawal at all as someone who sees themselves as an addict. And it’s the same for me, I haven’t, like… Or, that is, I’ve always understood that you… need to change things up [mumbles] I think people might be looking for an identity, like “now I’m part of this group, now I’m adopting this style, now I’m getting an… addiction. Then we [become], now I become an addict.”

Angela believes that, if love can ward off addiction and withdrawal looks different depending on the context in which drugs were consumed, this indicates that it is not the drugs themselves that are key when it comes to addictions. The argument that one has to “change things up” is a reference to how she quits using a certain drug when she starts to feel a need for that drug in particular. Switching from one drug to another entails a change of perspective, a refusal to identify with a certain drug-related way in which the world can unfold.

While Agnes too tells me of her proximity to addiction, she herself has not taken responsibility for these changes of perspective. Instead of backing out, she has remained where she was and acted on her longing for drugs and her drug cravings. But when she has turned to drug-seeking behaviour, her friends and other circumstances have stopped her, which she considers lucky.

Emma::

You mentioned before that amphetamines are very addictive. Have you experienced that yourself?

Agnes::

Mm. Absolutely. I think it’s enough to take them a few weekends in a row, and you can end up in trouble. Yes, it’s very easy to romanticise it. And you don’t realise that yourself, but you don’t see it as something dangerous any more. That it goes from having tried it and just “oh my God, what have I done?” to, it’s something normal. […]

Emma::

But have you ever had a hard time not taking it?

Agnes::

Well, I’ve been really lucky with a lot of these things because I think that, if I’d had the opportunity… I think things could have gone pretty badly. […] But now I always, like, when I wanted to go out again the day after or do something, there’s always been someone who’s told me to stop, so yes, I’ve been lucky. But I think it’s incredibly hard to put a stop to things yourself.

On the one hand, Agnes describes drug-seeking as a wilful action from a perspective where drug use and the return to drug use seem normal. During the interview, on the other hand, this behaviour, which sometimes appears normal, is described as dangerous and the fact that factors in her environment stopped her as luck. Addiction, therefore, appears to Agnes as an imminent risk; she orients herself in loops, but thanks to an obstructive environment, other lines enter her field of vision and the loops are straightened out.

It is at this abstract point where use occurs or ceases, between lines and loops, to use the terms of this chapter, that Sedgwick argues substances and behaviours become “addictive” or not, according to the medicalising discourse of which she is critical. She calls the point “The ability to […] choose (freely) health” (1993, p. 132, italics in original). Such a notion of free will, she argues, conceals social conditions behind a moralising imperative. Angela’s drug changes and Agnes’ obstructive environment show that loops and lines can coexist, and that the options of death or “kicking the habit” are not the only ones possible. For both Agnes and Angela, loops and lines seem to alternately appear as the perspectives from which the world unfolds. For Angela, it is a strategy of forming winding lines that diverge towards other targets when the loops become visible. For Agnes, it is about being in the right context. Are these contexts really about luck, or has she targeted them, in a similar way to Pernilla, with the intention of escaping addiction and keeping the lines in sight?

4 The Will to Quit Using Drugs

At Brukarföreningen, the Users association’s syringe exchange at Globen in Stockholm, there was a note on the noticeboard with the text: “Don’t look back cuz you’re not going that way!”, with a sun on it (Observation 22 November 2017). This is an orientation instruction. I interpret it as containing both a request not to look back upon undesirable events that may provoke unpleasant feelings and obscure the view away from the drugs, and simultaneously a request not to move in a loop, via drugs.

As an instruction, it is negative, focusing on the direction to be avoided. When I ask Hanna, who says that she wants to and will stop using drugs, what she will do instead, she firmly answers that she wants her children back. Since she lacks a home of her own and also seems to want to stop prostitution and shoplifting, I ask where they will live and how she will support them. I want to hear how she envisages other lines than loops, but I receive only delayed and evasive answers. Among other things, she says:

Um… [pause] You know… usually you don’t have options when it comes to work, you don’t have much choice in life. You don’t have that. You have to… take what you… can get in life. Isn’t that so?

The lack of choice in life that Hanna imagines means that the pursuit of self-developing optimisation does not seem relevant in her thoughts about the future, her life beyond heroin. The metaphor of long lines loses its relevance. She imagines herself not going anywhere but holding onto her children and taking what she can get.

Drug addiction appears to be a familiar room in which Hanna finds herself, but she wants to leave that room and close the door behind her. Then she will get “clean” but at the same time she will find herself in unfamiliar territory where she cannot orientate herself. The instruction not to look back can therefore also be interpreted as an invitation to force oneself to orientate away from the familiar, regardless of what happens. Ahmed describes a person’s orientation in a dark unfamiliar room as groping for recognisable objects (2006, p. 7). A wall, for example, which sooner or later leads to a door. For Hanna, it is precisely the familiar objects that risk leading her back to the door she came out of. I perceive that Hanna’s perspective during the interview, from the starting point in her body, is firmly focused on her children. Before she can reach them, however, she has to make it past heroin—the very thing that enables her to get anything done at all (see the chapter The First Visits). She is thus trapped in a looping Catch-22. Without heroin in her body, she cannot reach for them, so she turns towards heroin. When she turns around again, under the influence, her children are pulled away by society.

Carolina, who has not used drugs for eight years, describes new ways of orientating herself, away from the loops. Her story reads like a tale of exceptional determination. She portrays her experience of coming off drugs as a long and persistent struggle to gain access to treatment. In the end, what she describes as “eleven months of active attempts” (involving both her father and another relative) led to a place at a rehabilitation centre. A twelve-step programme was what would help her, she believed:

we really insisted on twelve-step treatment. My dad too managed to get sober thanks to the twelve-step programme. So, like, we had proof that this was something that worked.

The name of the twelve-step programme itself indicates a spatial movement in a certain direction, through twelve numbered steps. Carolina’s struggle was thus about getting help to orientate herself, to move physically and mentally, in line with a specific programme. She found the toughness of the twelve-step programme helpful and has continued to follow it through the twelve-step-based organisation Narcotics Anonymous (NA).

But does the twelve-step programme mean moving in completely new directions? NA’s texts show that it is not that simple. The organisation brings together people who, in a group, but one at a time, talk about the worries that plague them after they stop using. Some participants have not used drugs for decades. Others may have decided to stop just a few hours earlier. What is required to participate is “a desire to stop using drugs” (NA 1986, p. 1). The people who gather are directed to the space where the drug use would have been, which is not a void but a mental place of memories, feelings and problems, and, with their involvement in NA, also a physical place for a community of people who formerly used drugs (Heilig 2015, pp. 266f.). Can NA be understood partly as a gathering place for mourning what is lost when drugs are no longer used? The people who gather are committed to the cessation of an activity, sometimes for the rest of their lives. This involves a new activity that is intended to facilitate a shift away from drugs, and towards other desired goals, but requires movement along a line that, like addiction, continually folds back into a place where drug use is central. In this way, a drug-using perspective is retained to some extent.

I ask Carolina what happens when one has reached the final step.

No but, you know, you do all of the steps, and then… you can go through them again, and again, and now I have “sponsees”. I have a sponsor who supports me, and I’ve started sponsoring a few girls myself. So then I go through the steps with them and learn even more myself and start seeing additional things I have to work on.

She describes the movement as loops: the twelve steps recommence from step one, and other people are led through the same steps. Through these loops, Carolina says she is alerted to new aspects of herself and her life that she has to work on. Under the headline “Recovery and Relapse”, NA formulates this looping movement as follows:

Complete and continuous abstinence, however, in close association and identification with others in NA groups, is […] the best ground for growth. […] We may tire mentally in repeating our new ideas and tire physically in our new activities, yet we know that if we fail to repeat them we will surely take up our old practices. (1986, p. 4)

This orientation through the repetition of new ideas and activities seems to offer a necessary substitute for movement back towards actual drug use, which would otherwise be too tempting. The loops resemble a bodily habitus, a movement that the twelve-step programme understands as permanent. The choice available to people who used to use drugs is whether to allow the loops to include physical drugs or just talk about drugs.

If drug intoxication is an alteration of the starting point from which one’s world unfolds, the twelve steps are returning points, or points of connection to those previous points, but where the focus is on developing the self. By exploring what life was like when they used drugs and making plans for the future, with drug use as their point of departure, the person who formerly used drugs approaches the same points they passed before, but sees them in a different light. In the NA text Another Look, the organisation writes “In recovery, through the help of a Higher Power and the steps of NA, anything is possible” (1992, p. 2). The vantage point from which one looks in this case is based on the experience of drug use and the repetition of the steps, from which all possibilities are described as attainable.

Helen Keane criticises such a revision of the starting point as an illusion of freedom of choice, while being an essentially predetermined self-realisation project according to specific templates. She writes:

The healthy and productive life of recovery is a particular mode of existence that comes about not from natural processes of healing or growth, but from a concerted and multifaceted project of self-production. (2002, p. 158)

Keane argues that, according to the twelve-step programmes, the recovering addict is different from both addicts and non-addicts, because the recovering addict has embarked upon a journey that leads to a particular spiritual awakening and a free and harmonious interior. But freedom, on the other hand, is based on a profound inwardness within a regulative discourse of freedom (see also Rose 2019) that requires the recovering person to engage in rigorous self-monitoring and a series of daily practices, such as honesty, sobriety, self-examination and regular meetings. What is possible is limited to normative endeavours to transform the inner self (Keane 2002, p. 172) and free it from delusion. According to the twelve-step programmes, the alternative to addiction thus appears to be an optimisation strategy, a focused interest in self-development, in a lifelong relationship with the loops of addiction.

Beverley Skeggs, as described earlier, locates a central aspect of class difference in the self. She discusses how the ownership of the self and the ability and authority to police it is a fundamental middle-class privilege that is constantly made through self-representation, which can be contrasted with how the working class is considered to be in need of policing, and how personal experiences and narratives are interpreted as expressions of a generalisable “otherness” (2004, p. 37). In such an analysis, spending time and effort on formulating a complex interior becomes a making of class distinctions, “interiority as a form of superiority” (Skeggs 2011, p. 497). Such a self-reflexive and performative way of constructing oneself as valuable is institutionalised as a starting point for how a good citizen should be—Skeggs describes this as “compulsory individuality” (2004, p. 57)—while the creation of the working class is seen as a form of surveillance. It is, and always has been, about constituting a deficient counterpart, a backdrop of meaninglessness against which valuable middle-class selves can be measured (2004, p. 118). However, Skeggs argues that there are other ways of establishing and perceiving value, which—as I mentioned earlier—can include, for example, care and love, non-market values that are invisible to a middle-class gaze when they are not accompanied by capital.

For those who do not find resources for self-realisation in their situation, such as Hanna, it becomes difficult to formulate alternatives to the loops. If a person does not think of themselves as a progressive self-actualisation project, how can subjectivity be understood at all in a capitalist class society? The purposeful loops of dependency look threateningly clear compared to a desire to just be with one’s children.