Contemporary Drug Problems

Theoretical attempts to formulate cultural theories of drinking and drug use have traditionally stemmed from norm theory or functionalism. These tend to reduce drinking and drug practices to intoxication alone or to neglect intoxication altogether. The semiotic turn in the 1980s brought “meaning” to the focus of cultural studies. This article proposes, following Bruno Latour, that cultural practices and discourses should be seen as translations of each other. Intoxication is a proto-semiotic fact between culture and nature, not being completely meaningful but not possible without meanings either. This is the reason why images of intoxication are powerful translations of social relationships and the relationships between humans and nature. It is especially powerful language to articulate status distinctions that are shaky or confused, such as between youths and adults.

The author describes young Norwegians' use of alcohol in “russefeiring,” a special rite of passage to adulthood in the form of prolonged graduation parties. In this ritual, the young people wear special clothes, celebrate, and drink beer and spirits from the 1st through the 17th of May. The article argues that young people have invented rites of passage in which expressive individualism is stressed as a value. The article discusses the use of symbolic anthropology and sociology and field methods in research relating to this kind of ritual alcohol use and intoxication. Theoretically, the focus is on studying alcohol use as a ritual practice. Use of alcohol can be defined as a key symbol in these ritual processes, offering an opportunity to communicate meaning between members of the society and culture concerned.

In this paper we take into consideration data from three qualitative research studies on young people and alcohol carried out in Italy from 1997 to 1999. We analyze these data searching for meanings and functions of alcohol consumption and abuse in youth subcultures in a wet society, with particular attention to the functions of the peer group: drinking socialization, abuse control, gender role and drinking styles. In addition, we analyze whether current research and health-promotion projects mainly underlining the damages caused to young people by drinking are right, or if there are also positive drinking aspects that could be useful in prevention actions.

Women's illicit drug use has been increasing rapidly in the 1990s in the UK and elsewhere in the developed world. Lifetime prevalence rates show that gender is no longer a significant predictor of, or protector from, illicit drug use. The concentration on lifetime prevalence in the academic debate, however, has been to the detriment of the wider cultural context of drug-related attitudes and behavior in drug-using groups and wider society. This paper considers the socio-cultural context of gender and drug use, and reasserts the central importance of gender to our understanding of drugs cultures. Drug use is not just mediated by gender, but, far more significantly, drug use and the associated leisure, music and style cultures within which drug use is located are themselves ways of accomplishing a gendered identity. Building on Messerschmidt's concept of crime as structured action, the author suggests that gender does not just influence “doing drugs”–drug use itself can be seen as a way of “doing gender.”

This paper explores drug use in the lives of female gang members. Gang researchers have traditionally neglected the roles that females play in street gangs. More recent efforts have begun to examine the social life of young women and to uncover the extent to which the women develop a subculture within a male-dominated environment. In analyzing the culture of drug use in gang life, we uncover the extent to which women use illicit drugs in a highly gendered way. We focus on the ways in which female gang members use drugs in a recreational manner, in a social setting where drug taking is normative behavior. Data for this paper are drawn from an ongoing study of street gangs in the San Francisco Bay area in which 168 female gang members were interviewed using both a quantitative and a qualitative interview schedule.

Using interviews and observations, this article analyzes the practices and meanings of drinking and cannabis use among 32 Finnish non-professional young adult rock musicians, mostly male, in the late J 990s. The practices of drinking and marijuana use are described in certain social contexts, thus showing how substance use and music-making coexist and intertwine. The results illustrate a tight and complex, yet contradictory, connection between music-making and substances. Drinking is experienced as an unavoidable part of amateur band life. The article also presents a brief review of studies of substance use among popular musicians and of research on non-professional rock musicians. Although these two fields have remained relatively separate, it is argued that a closer connection between them would provide new, more complex insights into the everday life of musicians and into gendered processes in rock music.

In the early 1980s the term “straight edge” was coined to describe a youth subculture within the punk rock scene, a subculture that chose a lifestyle that abstained from alcohol, tobacco and drugs as well as promiscuous sex. While considered a smaller youth scene today than in its peak years of the late 1980s, straight edge has evolved into an international, more complex subculture with several different strands. This paper explores the youth subculture of straight edge, with a special focus on how they construct and signify their abstinence from alcohol and other drugs while often participating in a music scene and a youth culture that embrace their use. An analysis of the language surrounding alcohol, other drugs and abstinence on their Internet websites provides the data for this exploratory, qualitative research. The paper concludes with speculation about the future of this side branch of the American abstinent tradition.