Abstract
This project examines how meanings of drug addiction are negotiated through analysis of situated social actions in a telephone conversation. This paper uses interactional analysis to show how a former heroin user’s identity is constructed and moralized in the process of providing accounts through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences. This case shows how social actions in interpersonal conversation provide insights into judgment and addiction, and how participants manage the complex moral hierarchies associated with drug use and drug user identities. The analysis contributes to enriching an area of empirical research that needs more data and more attention to interaction, while also contributing to theories of categorization, normalization, stigma, and morality of drug addiction.
Keywords
Drug addiction is a major health problem with serious medical and economic implications at personal, social, and societal levels. A challenge for understanding the experience of drug addiction is the massive stigma surrounding drug use and abuse (Yang et al., 2017). This project seeks to understand how the meaning and stigma of drug addiction are constructed by and for drug addicts (cf. Hughes, 2007; Weinberg, 2000) by analyzing how a former heroin user’s identity is managed in naturally-occurring talk through descriptions of drug use and addiction, the social consequences of addiction, and the challenges of rehabilitation.
Interaction and stigmatized identities
Interactional research has examined formulations of problematic health-related behavior, for example, in the context of history-taking during doctor-patient interactions, where research has shown that participants orient to certain topics and behavior (such as sex, drinking, and drug use) as delicate, and as such doctors design questions about this in certain ways while patients package their responses to attend to potential problems and/or present their own behavior as normal and healthy (e.g. Bergen and Stivers, 2013; Denvir, 2009, 2012, 2014). Other research contexts involve the language of such behavior in the public discourse such as through media and social media (e.g. Morris and Melia, 2019), or descriptions of problematic behavior including around drugs and alcohol in therapeutic contexts and in neighbor and police-related disputes (e.g. Edwards, 1995; Stokoe, 2003). Though there are many examples in research in which participants in ordinary conversation happen to mention taboo topics, as in gossip (e.g. Robles, 2019), far less research specifically examines how people discuss addiction and addict identities in their everyday lives.
There is also little research examining accounts, admissions, or descriptions of addiction, or displays of addiction identity, from close analyses of actual everyday interaction. Most of this research has taken place in institutional contexts – for example, Pino (2014, 2020) examines interactional practices in a therapeutic community for people with addictions, noting (among other conclusions) how generalizations highlight categorical and individual descriptions, revealing tensions in people’s sensemaking (Pino, 2020). Pillet-Shore’s (2021) is a notable exception to this literature, in that she examines what occasions a disclosure of drug misuse in an ordinary conversation between university students. Pillet-Shore’s analysis highlights many of the tensions of drug addiction, including the tacit acceptance of problematic uses of alcohol, the delicate nature of admissions of use of more socially problematic drugs (such as opioids), and how ordinary conversation can reproduce social norms related to drug use and potential addiction.
Because addiction implicates behavior deemed problematic, disruptive, unhealthy, and immoral in many societies, discussing addiction makes relevant people’s social identities – particularly in interpersonal situations, in which it is not a diagnosis or health matter that is more salient, but rather one’s moral character. In most contexts, medical to private, research participants – who, by then, are generally undergoing or have undergone rehabilitation – orient to an addiction-recovery dynamic where addiction-phase identities are framed as problematic, and selves aim toward recovery and becoming ‘normal’ (Dingle et al., 2015; Nettleton et al., 2013). This shows how the ‘normal’ of people’s identities is also the normative – identities are performed, described, and attended to in ways that show their importance, and how they are judged (Benwell and Stokoe, 2010). Sacks (1992) described how ‘doing being ordinary’ is an accomplishment, invisible and presumed effortless to many, but in fact involving significant doing. Where people fall outside the norm, the work of producing an ordinary identity becomes visible, as in Garfinkel’s (1967) breaching experiments. Drug use, addiction, and having occupied an addict category are situations that reveal what others take for granted as normal, often good, ways of being in the world.
Where judgment comes in, languages provide a rich array of labels – from the innocuous to the derogatory – for dividing people up and activating associations with inappropriate drinking or drug behavior (see e.g. Thurnell-Read, 2013). For this reason, membership categories – a discursive approach to identity categorization – are a useful heuristic for understanding how conversational participants (‘members’) attend to and produce categories as interactional resources for social purposes (Edwards, 1991). Sacks (1992) described the membership categorization device as a way of understanding participants’ practical reasoning as done through description and interpretation: describing the activities of selves and others as attributed to types or members of groups. These inferential links are cultural, and subsequent research in this area describes categorization as a way of seeing ‘culture in action’: ‘the orderliness of cultural resources [. . .] is constituted in their use rather than pre-existing’, therefore culture is ‘internal to action’ (Hester and Eglin, 1997: 20, 154 [emphasis in original]). Categorization is also about ‘norms in action’: category configurations are intimately linked to normative regulation (Housley and Fitzgerald, 2009). In Sacks’ famous analysis of ‘the baby cried, the mommy picked it up’, it is not only that the mommy picks the crying baby up, but that she should pick the crying baby up; and were she to let it cry, she might face reproach.
In addition to good and bad categories or types of people, we can use the ‘wrong’ category to reprimand someone for their behavior (of an adult: ‘don’t be such a baby!’), assume a category based even on the hint of an action (‘no smoke without fire’), impute linked categories and widen circles of praise or blame (‘guilt by association’), substitute categories or deploy vagueness (‘urban’ for Black, ‘that sort of person’), and so forth. Various studies of categorization have shown how moral assessments are done through categorization (e.g. Jayyusi, 2013; Nikander, 2000; Rapley et al., 2003; Stokoe, 2003).
Certain categories of person may have negative moral assessments so pervasively associated with their identity that it becomes a form of stigma. Stigma is associated with people who, for example, are homeless or live in shelters; are diagnosed with HIV or AIDS; have disorders such as eating disorders; or have mental or intellectual disabilities (Coker, 2012; Juhila, 2004; Stommel and Meijman, 2011; Yearley and Brewer, 1989). Goffman (1963) defines stigma as an attribution of discreditation to categories of persons; those discredited he contrasts with what are socially presumed to be normals. Goffman describes drug addicts and ex-drug addicts, as well as other types of addicts (e.g. gambling), as falling under the umbrella of such stigma, from the perspective of the general society.
While the canonical addict is discredited, there are gray areas that exist between deviant and legitimate identities (Radburn and Horsley, 2011), as with legal gambling, or prescription medication. Furthermore, across a life and across a conversation, people who have used drugs may pass in and out of addict categories, through orientations to recovery and relapse. Thus, the moral status of an addict identity is always negotiated (Rødner, 2005). However, research on addiction has tended not to focus on the complexities of this negotiation (Kusow, 2004) – rather, the focus is overwhelmingly on who has stigma and who does not, often in the context of a narrative of recovery, typically focusing on ideal, successful cases (Hoffmann, 2003; Radcliffe, 2011) (though see Schubert et al., 2009). This research on what Goffman (1963) called one’s ‘moral career’ – the history of a person’s socialization into a society that allocates stigma in certain ways, and the attribution and experience of being stigmatized – thus can inadvertently endorse the allocation of stigma by privileging the progression toward normality.
More research is needed that examines the complexity of addict identities in a way that is empirically grounded and situated in participants’ own practices and orientations to addiction and its potential stigma. The point is not to take for granted the judgments that constitute stigma, but to interrogate them. As Jayyusi (2013) points out, ‘Morality,’ ‘moral values,’ ‘moral positions’ ‘moral beliefs’ are not invisibly locked into the minds and feelings of persons. Rather. . .in the very display and public availability of action-intentions and beliefs, in the very performance of actions and in the very organization of talk, moral positions, values and stances are displayable and publicly available. . .[and] ascribable to agents despite their own avowals. (p. 210)
Therefore, order to dig beneath the moralization that threatens to put every discussion of morality as a practice in a dilemma with its own attempts to describe, one must be as empirical as possible. The first order of business is to see how morality is invoked, presupposed, presumed, attributed, and avowed in participants’ practical actions.
After describing the methods, this paper’s analysis examines how a former heroin user’s identity is managed through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences, and how the conversational participants moralize and account for the category of being a former drug addict. The analysis shows how the moralization of drug use and drug addict identities can be hierarchically managed in complex ways in the course of a conversation.
Methods
Research has demonstrated that an analysis of a single unique case may be important for describing situations that are unique or rare (Schegloff, 1987; Whalen et al., 1988), as the first step toward building collections as a larger scientific community; and as Stokoe (2018) has pointed out, analysis of conversations is a qualitative enterprise, with value in understanding the particularities of an instance for their implications regarding the patterns of what may be possible, in the same way that there is value in understanding the phenomenon of a single black hole. The acquisition of the data for this analysis was entirely serendipitous, and very difficult to build a collection around, as there are serious ethical and practical challenges to working with stigmatized groups such as those who use, or have used, illegal drugs. Although this analysis is part of a larger project understanding talk about addiction in various settings (including online), it is a unique datum and the goal of analyzing it here will be to understand it both on its own terms, and for its implications.
Analysis
This project takes an interactional and discourse analytic approach that examines in detail how situated language use is produced in ordinary conversations to accomplish social actions (Tracy and Haspel, 2004), including through sequences of action (Sidnell, 2011) and, in particular, categorization (Stokoe, 2012). Categorization is a way of analyzing how members orient to or describe social categories and their associated activities (Fitzgerald, 2015; Stokoe, 2012). Based on the work of Sacks (1992) and others (e.g. Hester and Eglin, 1997; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2009), analysis of categorization involves showing how categories or ‘types’ of people are associated in an essentialist way with presumably homogenous groups that stereotypically share certain traits or behaviors – in the interactional approach, the preferred term is activities, emphasizing that what might be called traits or behaviors (in psychological language) are social accomplishments constructed out of series of routine actions. In conversation, participants may explicitly use a category label (such as mother, student, addict), and the extent to which usage is procedurally relevant shows the relevance of that category identity to the action of the conversation, and the consequences of how that conversation sequentially unfolds. At other times, a category may be implied by describing the activity more explicitly. These analytic approaches provide for an inspection of how participants jointly construct, turn by turn, who they and one another are in relation to the categories addict/nonaddict, the activities associated with those categories, and their attendant moral assessments.
Data
This analysis focuses on the case of a nearly 40 minute telephone conversation between former heroin addict Andy (AND) and older sister Amelie (AME). The conversation was recorded as part of a larger IRB-approved project during 2011–2013 in which ordinary conversations were voluntarily audio and video recorded by undergraduate students at a USA university. No particular topics (including drug use) were sought in these conversations, so consent to use the recording was re-obtained after the potentially sensitive subject emerged during the phone call. The call was transcribed verbatim as part of the larger project and Andy was informally interviewed to provide some context (however background details have been changed/kept intentionally vague to avoid identification). Selections of the call referring to or related to drug use were re-transcribed using Jefferson’s (1984) notations.
Descriptions of former drug addiction
Jayyusi (2013) notes that ‘the activities of describing, inferring and judging [are] pervasive in the conduct of everyday life. Indeed, they seem to be constitutive of diverse social practices and domains of social life’ (p. 2). It is in descriptions that categorizations often occur – where people and their conduct are described and, very often, assessed (indeed, description may not often be possible without some evaluative component: see Edwards and Potter, 2017). Jayyusi (2013) proposes that categorizations are inherently tied to assumptions about rights and obligations, and that the selectivity implicated in choices of how to describe reflect and reconstitute a moral order. These moralities are locatable by members regardless of what particular moralities are at play: people orient to one another’s judgments and to what is ‘assessable’. So it is that to describe people in a way that arrays them into types will be read for evaluations of character. In the following analysis, categorizations in descriptions moralize (as good, bad, etc.) the character of addicts and non-addicts. Though such moralizations are enacted by both the former addict Andy and her sister Amelie, these are done in different ways, with different implications. What is notable here are the ways Andy’s moralizations of her own and others’ behavior resist the (more conventional) moral judgments articulated by her sister. While it is Andy who introduces a moral hierarchy into descriptions of drug use, her talk also undermines and complicates that hierarchy, drawing on her own experience with illegal drug use to do so.
Contrasting addict and normal
At the time of the conversation, Andy had been clean (including off methadone, a drug used for attempting to quit other opiates such as heroin) for at least a couple years, and was enrolled as an undergraduate student at a USA university. Andy was Amelie’s adopted sister and they were not consistently raised together; furthermore, their relationship had previously been difficult because of Andy’s drug addiction and her many years of estrangement from her family. However, at the time of this phone call, they had been recently reunited and supportive of each other, and talked regularly by phone. The conversation covers many topics, including various personal challenges. There are two segments during the phone call when Andy’s former drug use is referred to or topicalized: toward the beginning of the conversation (lasting about 10 minutes) and around the middle (lasting about 4 minutes). The analysis focuses on these two parts of the data.
The following two excerpts come from the first portion of the transcript in which (1) Andy makes the first explicit reference to her former drug addiction, and (2) Amelie formulates her initial response to this. The reference to Andy’s former drug use is initially raised because it is treated as relevant to a description of an ongoing activity she is currently undergoing, which is attempting to rent an apartment. The arrows in the transcript point out two key places where the language explicitly contrasts Andy’s lack of a ‘normal situation’ (line 1) with how that might be perceived by others as ‘very odd’ (line 25). These are points at which implicit categories are being worked up through their associations with normal and odd ways of life.
In fragment 1, Andy had previously begun a troubles telling (Jefferson, 1988) in which she describes anxieties around trying to move from subsidized accommodation into an apartment. She discusses her worry about how her rental application will look due to not having a consistent rental, credit, or employment record. In this part of the conversation, she focuses on the trouble of her employment record. Her first description of something being ‘atypical’ is provided in the formulation ‘I don’t really have like a normal situation’ (line 1). In this she contrasts the vague activity ‘normal situation’ as something that would be expected in most rental applications. She proceeds to incrementally expand what she might mean by that when she receives no uptake from Amelie: ‘employment and previous employment’ (line 3). She then offers a candidate description in lines 3–4 of what her work-related situation was during her period of drug addiction: ‘my previous employments have been very illegal’. This is followed by laugh particles (line 4) and then, when Amelie still offers no affirmation or response, Andy adds ‘technically speaking’ (line 5). In this assessment of the phrase ‘illegal work’ as ‘technical’, it seems she is being somewhat ironic, since ‘legality’ is a rather technical distinction and the work to which she refers (prostitution) is straightforwardly illegal; however, this could be indexing the fact that she does not have a criminal record for it (which is described later in the conversation).
It is Andy, therefore, who introduces a distinction between what is ‘normal’ versus what is associated with ‘addiction’ in terms of two core features of everyday life: employment and housing. As Andy begins to initiate another turn containing laugh particles, Amelie orients to the talk as laughable and comes in with laughter at line 6. Andy starts to re-do her turn initiation in line 8, still with laughter particles interpolated throughout, and Amelie interleaves a receipt of Andy’s ironic commentary (line 9) and an assessment in the form of a suggestion or warning: ‘might not wanna go there’ (line 11). This provides an affiliation with Andy’s comment that her employment record is problematic and the earlier description of it as ‘not normal’. It also establishes Andy’s past as something that is, epistemically, mutually known to them both. Nonetheless, Andy does (after agreeing with Amelie’s joking warning in line 12) go on to refer (if obliquely) to her limited ‘normal’ past employment experience and the return to addiction that followed this (lines 12–17), the latter formulated as a three-part list of chronological events (lines 17–19).
The description of going back to heroin after methadone is specific, but the display of difficulty producing something next, and articulated as the vague ‘onward’ (line 19), once again moves away from concretely describing the activities associated with the relapse into heroin use. Andy returns to the problem of employment with the phrase ‘illegal career’. Following this she launches into a fairly detailed description of each part of her worries regarding this process of obtaining new housing, discussing her current situation and its atypicality (lines 20–27), and how it might look ‘very odd’ (line 25) to someone assessing her application for new housing. Andy wraps up this multi-unit turn with a sequence closing assessment delivered through a frustrated ‘response cry’ (Goffman, 1981) on line 28, after which Andy uses hypothetical reported speech to characterize her concern in line 30: that she may have a hard time obtaining housing because of her unusual past.
In producing and responding to the descriptions of Andy’s current and former life, both Andy and Amelie support a contrast between ‘normal’ employment situations and ‘illegal’ employment situations, and the difficulty Andy’s past poses for her current aims. These contrastive descriptions of activities implicate certain identities associated with those activities, in this case as-yet-unnamed ‘normal’ versus ‘drug addict’.
Moralizing normality
Andy continues to describe aspects of her past with drug addiction that are potentially problematic for her, especially in the completion of her rental application, which provides an account for her current self-presentation (which might be characterized as concerned or worried or seeing reassurance) as well as a potential account should her current actions be, ultimately, unsuccessful. Andy continues talking (lines 30–32), describing in detail her concerns about particulars regarding the process of obtaining her new accommodation regarding letters, applications, bank statements, etc. (lines deleted). In lines 33–41 Andy formulates both the conclusion of the story (reassurance from the paralegal advisor, and her own acceptance of this) and the upshot of why she has told it (her frustration that her past could complicate her rehabilitation). The arrows on the transcript indicate some key points where the language orients to normality (line 36, ‘normal and fine’) as well as praising the transformation from not-normal to normal (line 53, ‘becoming a human being’). This talk continues to build and assess what constitutes a categorically ‘normal’ person.
In overlap with Andy’s summary, Amelie initiates an affiliative response in line 42, explicitly preceded with ‘I understand’. This is self-repaired with a mitigation that displays a limit to her understanding in lines 43–44 – ‘I haven’t done drugs’ – which explicitly names the problem Andy faced by naming what Amelie’s problem is not. Amelie follows this with a description of her problem, again indirectly formulated, as ‘I have done credit card issues’ (lines 44–45). She orients to this as laughable and this is receipted with laughter from Andy (lines 45–46); Amelie then specifies the problem with this in line 47, which is ‘I have complete debt’. She then transitions in line 48 with ‘but the thing is’ into a ‘bright side’ description (see Ruusuvuori, 2013 on bright-side responses to problems), which optimistically projects Andy’s past as something that can be overcome. Amelie lists two candidate overcomings formulated in parallel structure – ‘you can build your credit back up’ and ‘you can build your reputation back up’ – and describes these as outcomes of ‘the things [Andy is] doing right now’ (lines 49–51). In this way Amelie positively assesses Andy’s current activities.
Throughout this part of the conversation so far, Andy and Amelie distinguish the activities associated with her former addiction from the activities associated with her current life, the latter which is consistent with ‘normality’ generally. This is observable in how the descriptions are marked – language such as ‘normal’ and ‘fine’ versus ‘odd’, ‘illegal’ ‘different’ – and how the sisters imagine others responding to Andy’s past and the possible consequences of that, such as not being able to obtain housing. However, the distinction is not merely practical, and some of the evaluative dimension emerges toward the end of excerpt 1. After having praised Andy’s changes in her life (lines 49–51), there is a pause (line 52) after which Amelie goes onto formulate more specifically the activities that constitute ‘the things that you’re doing right now’: ‘you’re becoming a human being’ and ‘contributing to society’, which she follows with an explicit positive assessment (‘that’s a valuable thing’) and an encouragement (‘don’t cut yourself short’) (lines 53–56).
In Amelie’s response to her sister, two category contrasts are made. In one, she and her sister share the category of people for whom past difficulties might pose current problems; but this is then partitioned along the reasons for the past difficulties based on drug addiction versus credit card debt. In the second reference to categories, Andy’s past category as a drug user is invoked by the contrast with her current category or rather, category-in-becoming. By ‘contributing to society’ Andy is described as ‘becoming a human being’. This is expanded with the vaguely described activity ‘that is contributing to society in a particular way’ (lines 53–55). This does not necessarily entirely dehumanize Andy’s character in the past, but it distinguishes, and evaluates by contrast, two different kinds of human beings. The positively assessed type ‘contributes to society’ in some way, which may partly index what has already been previously described in the conversation: paying rent, having a legal career, not using drugs, getting a university degree, keeping in touch with family, and so forth. This invoked category is co-implicated with the ‘normal’ category of person who ostensibly has a ‘normal’ life. Thus normality is not merely what is common, but also what is good and the ‘right’ way to be, and Andy is praised for making progress toward this normative life.
(Im)moralizing addiction
In contrast to the previous two excerpts, in the next two excerpts, the categories are made explicit, and not merely invoked in relation to other descriptions. Excerpts 3 and 4 come from the second portion of the transcript, around 6 minutes later, in which (1) Amelie introduces the theme of drug addiction into a description of Andy’s life history and her biological parentage, (2) Andy acknowledges and resists how her and her biological mother’s identities are co-implicated in the drug addict category, and (3) Andy introduces real and not real addict categories. Prior to the start of excerpt 3, Andy had mentioned being a ‘threat’ to Amelie, and Amelie had said a bit about feeling in competition with Andy for their parents’ attention. This occurs in the general context in which Amelie has been describing how she resented Andy when Andy was first adopted by Amelie’s parents. The arrows indicate where three addict categories are invoked: ‘drug baby’ (line 6), ‘fried brain’ (line 18), and ‘real medical condition’ (lines 21–22).
After Amelia’s (ambiguously nonserious) complaint about how Andy’s adoption into their family made her cry (line 1), which Andy follows with an (also ambiguously nonserious) apology (given she can hardly apologize genuinely for actions done as an infant), Andy launches a possible account for what may have made her a difficult infant. Lines 1–2 and 5 incrementally and nonfluently produce the description ‘I was probably coming off something’. This is potentially analyzable idiomatically as ‘coming off drugs’, and Amelie’s attribution of ‘drug baby’ in line 6 ratifies this interpretation. A drug baby is a way of referring to an infant that, born to a drug-addicted mother, is born addicted to the same drugs, having ingested them in the womb.
Amelie’s description of this category is delivered without mitigation as an apparent fact – ‘yeah you were a drug baby’ – and thence upgraded with ‘there is no doubt in my mind’ (lines 6–7). This is receipted with laughter, the function of which is not clearly in agreement; this is followed by ‘I don’t know’ (line 10), an epistemic hedge which marks a potentially disjunctive stance (Tsui, 1991) toward Amelie’s assertion, and comes across as a dispreferred action (Pomerantz, 1984). Andy then takes a turn (lines 10–17) in which she potentially describes her biological mother in a way that might align with Amelie’s position: she describes her as overly talkative (‘cannot get her off the phone’), describes her speech as ‘slurred’, and says she’s ‘not there’ (lines 12, 15), an idiomatic way of suggesting someone is missing some element of mental presence or capacity – it can describe someone whose mind is merely wandering, but may also describe someone who is cognitively ‘absent’, as might occur through the use of drugs. In lines 16–17 Andy begins to provide a possible account for this (a ‘medical condition’, though it is not clear at this stage whether it is the condition or what is prescribed for it that might account for the traits Andy attributes to her biological mother). However, Amelie provides an alternate/candidate account at lines 18–19 that attributes the ‘symptoms’ Andy described to having a ‘fried brain’ from doing ‘too many drugs’. This builds on Amelie’s earlier categorization of Andy as a ‘drug baby’, since that is predicated on her biological mother as having ‘done drugs’ and possibly still using or suffering consequences of having used.
Andy does some work in her next turn to simultaneously align with Amelie while also resisting the suggestion that former drug use is a complete account for her biological mother’s symptoms. Following a turn-prefacing (but prosodically modulated) ‘no’ (line 20), Andy categorizes her biological mother as having formerly abused prescription medication (lines 20–21) but describes her as currently having a ‘real medical condition’, for which prescription medication is appropriate and helpful (lines 20–23). However she follows this by proposing the quantity of the medication might be inflated to a ‘maximum dosage’ (implying this might be unnecessary) or that she might even be requesting ‘extra’ (‘telling her doctor she needs m-’ which projects ‘more’ and suggests more is being asked for than might strictly be required) (lines 24–25). In lines 26–27 she finishes her turn by suggesting that her biological mother ‘sounds pretty fucked up’ which is a way of describing someone who is possibly intoxicated by medication, rather than describing someone who is merely managing a condition or symptoms.
In this excerpt, the explicit link between Andy as a former ‘drug baby’ and her biological mother as having a ‘friend brain’ is treated as relatively obvious by Amelie; Andy, however, resists the obviousness or simplicity of the categorization by making a further distinction drug use as implied by ‘fried brain’ versus drug (medication) use as implied by someone with a ‘real medical condition’. The ‘real’ marks ‘medical condition’ as being a possibly insufficient description, and Andy’s further description in lines 24–25 suggest that conditions can be used (and perhaps even faked) in order to procure purportedly unnecessary drugs. Thus the partitioning of assessable characters is shifted from normal versus (problematic or addicted) drug user, to legitimate (having a ‘real’ medical condition) versus illegitimate drug user (where the latter is someone who may not technically need the drug). Andy’s ambivalent stance toward her mother’s drug use both resists Amelie’s moralization of Andy’s mother as having a ‘friend brain’ but also suggests she may be using her ‘real medical condition’ to receive more drugs than necessary. The final excerpt sees the sisters continuing to contest the category ‘drug user’.
Complicating the morality of addiction
In excerpt 4, Amelie aligns with and builds on Andy’s description of her mother as possibly using her medical condition to procure unnecessary quantities of medication: after a short pause with no uptake (line 28), Andy begins to take another turn when Amelie introduces a reformulation of what she takes Andy to have been saying previously: that Andy’s biological mother is ‘getting (an) high off her doctors’, or using medication for intoxication rather than for medicinal purposes (lines 30–31). The two explicit categories marked by arrows in the transcript are ‘druggie’ (line 48) and ‘real junkie’ (line 63).
In except 4, there is a series of overlapping and abandoned turn fragments (lines 32–38) and then Amelie does a disclaimer that projects an upcoming complaint by first describing her own flaws (not ‘perfect’, ‘fucked up soul’: lines 39–40). It seems that Andy is positioning herself to potentially agree with Amelie, as she follows Amelie’s contrastive ‘but’ (line 42) with the aligning formulation ‘there’s a difference’ (line 44). This seems to be potentially building on the contrast Andy was working up in excerpt 3 between those who use drugs primarily for recreation and intoxication, versus those who use drugs primarily to manage medical conditions.
Then in line 47 Amelie launches an opinion delivery in which the category ‘druggie’ is introduced and explicitly contrasted with someone who’s ‘not a druggie’. She describes this nonspecifically as an ‘aura’, a sense or feeling someone produces, which (1) may not be explicitly evident in particular symptoms, (2) may be denied or obscured by the druggie, and (3) may be hard to describe precisely. This categorizes explicitly the description of Andy’s mother in excerpt 3 as ‘having fried brain from doing too much drugs’.
Amelie seeks possible confirmation of this, either as a possibility or a fact, from Andy (lines 51–53). Andy begins with a rejection (‘no’) but embeds it in an indirect report, which downgrades epistemic certainty (it is merely what Andy’s biological mother ‘says’) (line 55). The veracity of the report seemingly is further downgraded by Andy launching into a description of her mother’s dishonesty: she twice states that her mother ‘lied’ about some event related to Andy’s biological father (lines 56, 48). Up to this point it would seem that the ‘lies’ suggest that Andy’s mother might also ‘lie’ about not doing drugs (or not using medication as a drug).
However, as Andy continues, the account the ‘lie’ provides seems equivocal. She continues to relate a partial story her biological mother has told her in which there were ‘needles in the yard’ (lines 60–61). Andy’s ensuing talk expresses doubt toward this description as evidence for serious drug abuse. Andy introduces the category ‘junkie’ in line 61 – a term for a drug addict, roughly equivalent to ‘druggie’ – and dismisses ‘fucked up’ (being extremely high on drugs) as an account for what she subsequently provides as evidence for not being a ‘real’ junkie. She describes needles in the yard as ‘shit’, ‘stupid’, and ‘sloppy’, all of which she proposes a ‘fucking real junkie’ would not do because it would too easily garner attention and possible police attention and incarceration (lines 60–66).
By providing this information and a strong stance toward it (‘bullshit’ line 66), Andy displays epistemic authority (Heritage and Raymond, 2005) due to her right to know, through direct experience, what junkies are like, and what differences might exist between real and not-real junkies. This is different from the ‘real’ versus ‘not real’ medical condition she described her mother as having in excerpt 3, as Andy does not have a direct experiential relationship to that distinction (Andy did not have a diagnosed medical reason for using drugs in the first place during her years of addiction). Though Andy’s description complains about and casts doubt on her mother, it also could be read as partially exonerating her. If her mother is not a ‘real junkie’ then it might lend further support that she should better be understood also as ‘not a druggie’ but rather as someone with a ‘real medical condition’ – who may be mildly abusing that condition where the quantity of drugs is concerned, but who has a legitimate reason to use drugs nonetheless. Thus, Andy introduces a much more complex moral hierarchy into the conversation around drug users and drug use.
Andy’s story also may be potentially implicitly contesting the grounds on which Amelie produced her description of druggies having an ‘aura’, simply based on a feeling. In contrast, Andy claims primary rights to assess not only whether someone is a drug addict, but also what kind, in far more nuanced ways than Amelie could possess. Though Andy produces a number of on-record and affective stances that align with Amelie’s ongoing assessment of how problematic drug addicts are, there are also a number of resistant features embedded within Andy’s responses to her sister. Not only are there disjunctive qualities in the discourse markers, laughter, pauses, and speech rate, but there is also a subversive quality to the introduction of the ‘real/not-real junkie’ contrastive set. In addition to the term ‘real’ usually being associated with authenticity and therefore positively assessable, Andy’s contrast sets up an unusual hierarchy in which ‘real’ junkies – who may be presumed to be more problematic in various ways – nonetheless are superior to those who are ‘stupid’ and ‘sloppy’ with their drug paraphernalia. Furthermore, by positioning herself as having the authority to make this distinction, Andy trades positively on her former drug addict identity. At the same time, the ‘real junkie’ is also a problematic category in comparison to that of a prescription drug user who has a ‘real medical condition’.
Reflections
In moral philosophy, the ‘is/ought’ distinction – that there are facts, and there are values – is theoretically and analytically important; but for people in their everyday lives, it is itself a ‘moral method’, a way of asserting, challenging, undermining, etc., what is right and good, or wrong and bad (Jayyusi, 2013). Even a single telephone conversation offers multiple opportunities for moralities to be proposed and argued. In the conversation analyzed here, two sisters jointly constructed – and contested – the moral problem of one of them having been a drug addict. This involved categories that were often explicit and negative (such as druggie and junkie) but also categories that were implicated through their implied contrast – such as different sorts of productive or ‘contributing’ humans. As the participants negotiated their assessments of drug users and drug use, some differences emerged. In general, Amelie took a position that was more normative and consistent with the position most literature, and most of society, tends to take: a negative view toward Andy’s past drug use, and a positive assessment of her progression toward ‘normal’ life and all the traditional markers thereof (stable, legal employment, for example). While Andy’s own talk often aligned with this, or even intensified it (by introducing hierarchies of drug use, as when comparing real versus ‘not real’ medical conditions for which drugs are legally prescribed), Andy’s hesitations, reformulations, and moments of disalignment also resisted the simple ‘good/bad’ orientation to drug use. This offers insights into the complex, ambivalent ways former drug users might construct own pasts as situated objects in conversation – something that will rarely emerge in contexts outside a private conversation like this one.
The sisters’ conversation involves troubles talk, stories, forms of advice-giving, and so on, in the course of doing interpersonal conversation (cf. Tracy and Robles, 2013) ranging from casual catching-up to more serious concerns about life. Such projects are generally in service of forms of social support or affiliation – here reassurance, wherein providing accounts prefers (and provides opportunities for) affiliating with the other’s concerns. Beach (2018) demonstrates the relationship between justification and reassurance in a different context (cancer) – but shows how minimization plays a crucial role in this; whereas in the sisters’ conversation, attempted reassurance is accomplished not through minimization but through the contrast between an extreme past and a different present. The access to these past and present descriptions is not epistemically equal, and so accounts are also produced to manage this differential access to the experience of drug addiction or how to assess the behavior of those using/misusing drugs. The work the participants did around Andy’s past life generally avoided being very explicit about Andy’s activities and, alongside the other markers of doing delicacy, demonstrated that Andy’s past is treated as problematic. This is especially delicate in the current conversation because (unlike Pillet-Shore, 2021) the conversation is not disclosing new information, but rather known-in-common information which has been experienced, accessed, and understood in different ways.
Pillet-Shore’s (2021) single-case analysis of a conversation about drug misuse among university students is the most similar to the analysis conducted here, but there are some notable differences with regard to the ‘moral career’ associated with addiction. Through describing and categorizing Andy’s past drug addiction, the conversation generally immoralizes drug addiction and normalizes (and moralizes) standards of ordinariness (e.g. employment). The work Andy’s sister does to frame Andy’s past in relation to a narrative journey of addiction to recovery and normality is consistent with the attested literature (e.g. Dingle et al., 2015; Nettleton et al., 2013). While the initial content of Andy’s troubles telling topicalizes the structural barriers encountered by former drug addicts, drug addiction as a problematic identity – which forms the logic of structural marginalization – is jointly reproduced in the structure of the conversation. This production is not, however, monolithic. Within the situated activity of the conversation, there are moments of resistance and subversion of drug addiction as a straightforward ‘evil’. This particularly begins to evolve later in the conversation, when terms like drug baby, druggie, and junkie become more explicit. It is worth examining ordinary conversations, as well as looking further into the more interactive spaces of public discourse, for such moments of resistance.
In conversation, ideas and identities around drug addiction are contested as part of social actions, constructing meaning for addicts and recovering or former addicts in their everyday interactions. A key dimension of this is the epistemic authority of the drug addict, and what happens when people with different experiences encounter each other, as well as those without addiction experience. Pino (2014) examined experts’ unknowing/knowing stances toward people with addictions in a therapeutic community. These ‘epistemic struggles’ are sights of contestation but can also resolve dilemmas. Formulations of experience of drug addiction seem critical to the actual practice of managing and constructing what addiction is and should be, and therefore are potential sites of understanding addiction and assisting with recovery.
What is often neglected in a lot of the research on addiction is that the ‘moral career’ of the drug addict is rarely smooth. This absence makes sense, to some extent: it is difficult (and ethically problematic) to conduct research on those who are currently addicted, who are not actively seeking recovery, or who are deemed by society as unsuccessful ex-addicts. But in everyday conversation, the former addict is given countless opportunities to reflect and account for the shape of their moral career (often because they are hardly allowed to forget it). Though the current study mostly examines one person’s single conversation with one other person, it nonetheless offers a window into the issues, challenges, and kind of talk ex-addicts will be faced with years after they stop using, and probably for the rest of their lives.
Moralized descriptions of addictions and addict-related identities – with negative assessments of category, character, and type, in criticisms, reproaches and evaluations – were prominent across the data examined here. Pomerantz (1978) notes the preference to self-attribute blame over other attributions, but it is perhaps indicative of the moral judgment against addiction that data shows people enact blame toward drug addicts without much mitigation or hesitation. Concomitantly, shame is expected of the addict and former addict. Though shame may be an ever-present interactional risk (Scheff, 2003), it is endemic to the addict. In his book on stigma, Goffman (1963) mentions the idea of ‘shameful differentness’ (p. 140): shame is produced in, and expected of, people who are different to the extent of what society might call deviant. Drug addiction is a social deviance that clings to people even if they have recovered. Shame is a powerful mechanism for social control through the degradation of one’s status as a warning to others, and surveilling the self anticipates this possibility – forms of covering (nakedness in the Garden of Eden after the fall being a canonical example) or isolation (see Garfinkel, 1956). This resonates with the necessity to obscure drug use from the public, to relegate it to acceptable quarters. But it also is reproduced in how others, and former addicts, describe addiction, as entirely separate from what is normal or acceptable. This reflects the important relationship between individuals and society, and that normative orientations to conduct are society’s norms made manifest (reconstituted) in the moment-to-moment practical actions of a single 40 minute conversation. As Jayyusi (2013) notes, morality organizes ‘the ongoing praxis of members in the social world’ because ‘morality presupposes community, as community presupposes morality’ (p. 220).
This research contributes to enriching an area of empirical research that needs more data and more attention to interaction. By examining categorizations around addiction and how these unfold/are dealt with in real conversations and relationships, we start to build a members’ account of addiction. This can provide insights into how addiction is described, accounted for, and managed in relation to identity and potentially for rethinking the role of stigma in behavior around drug use.
Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought [. . .] we lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. (Goffman, 1963: 2)
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.