Life as a drug user
Authors: Svensson Bengt 
Published: January 2018

This article is based on a field study I made in trying to understand the everyday life of drug users. I tried to answer the question why drugs stay in addicts’ lives. Is it because of the power of the drug? Or has life on the drug scene any advantages compared to the available life in ordinary society?

The material, which was collected through ethnographic fieldwork in the milieus where the drug users spend their time, is based primarily on observations, conversations, and in-depth interviews. In this article I focus on a group of seven key informants, five men and two women, whom I met during the field-work. In between 1989 and 1995 I met these and other informants more than five hundred times.

I introduce a metaphor by which I look at the addict's relation to the drug as a love affair. The relationship begins with a phase of falling in love, which leads to a decision either to live separately or to live together. In the latter case, the relationship is established as a marital relation, characterized by security, habits and routines, moments when passionate love flares up again, periods of doubt, and possibly a decision to break up. This break-up can lead to divorce from the drug, but the relationship can also be resumed after a period of separation.

When I began my study after having worked for many years as a social worker, one of my basic assumptions was that there was a solidarity among drug addicts and that it was one of the main attractions of a life on drugs. I have since arrived at the conclusion that there is extensive sociality, but without solidarity. There is outward solidarity, vis-à-vis outsiders, authorities of various kinds. The primary expression of this outward solidarity is the principle of not to “snitch”.

There is no inward solidarity, however. People let others down, trick their friends, steal from each other, expose others to risk, ignore pleas for help, and so on. The lack of solidarity is due to the fact that the addicts all do business with each other. The most important ways of making a living are based on deals: selling drugs to other addicts, doing break-ins together and sharing the loot, receiving goods from others and offering to sell them, exchanging goods for drugs, treating someone to a fix and expecting a fix in return, charging people who use their flat as a crash-pad, arranging contacts with pushers, selling on a commission basis for a pusher. Relations between the actors in the drugs world are generally permeated with economic relations.

The lack of real solidarity is perhaps the main reason why addicts want to leave drugs behind. Only one of the key informants never talked about kicking the habit. Quite a few of them have tried to break out of their addiction. These attempts to break out - or to break into normal society - have demonstrated some of the difficulties facing an addict who wants to get established in ordinary life. As competent drug addicts, with a large network of contacts and a short planning perspective, they come to a world where this competence has no value, where it is essential to be able to plan one's economy, and where they know very few people who do not take drugs. They move to a new world, but the old world of drugs is always alongside it. Even if they move to a new town, they can recognize people of “their own kind” around them.

Although staying in the addicts’ world means misery, betrayal, and even death, it has other features: the sociality, eventfulness, the short perspectives, the everything-will-work-out-fine attitude, the sense of competence, having something to do (in the form of criminal ways of making a living), and the artificial pleasure of the drugs. This can be contrasted with the alternatives offered to them by ordinary life: solitude, unemployment, poverty, idleness, the sense of being superfluous.

Despite the difficulties, many of the informants make constant attempts to break into ordinary life. I see this as an expression of their having the same basic goals in life as people in general: that they want to live a normal life and be respected by normal people. The result of their efforts depends to a large extent on how they can fill the emptiness they meet when they quit drugs and a lifestyle completely connected with drugs.