Elsevier

International Journal of Drug Policy

Volume 49, November 2017, Pages 102-108
International Journal of Drug Policy

Risky pleasures and drugged assemblages: Young people’s consumption practices of AOD in Madrid

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.08.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Drawing on a research project that we carried out on the functionality of “excessive” consumption practices in the lifestyles of young people in Madrid, this article aims to understand how (dis)pleasurable states emerge during young people’s consumption of alcohol and other drugs.

Methods

This article claims that these states derive from “drugged assemblages,” that is, a set of (human and non-human) actants that intra-act to produce different effects. Although pleasure can be one of these effects, it is not always guaranteed: consumption practices are assemblages that fluctuate between pleasure and displeasure, and the former can be reached or not depending on the characteristics acquired by the assemblage. It is this fluctuation that makes pleasures “risky.” Drugged assemblages also configure and are configured by specific spatial-temporal and material apparatuses or dispositifs. We will analyse botellones, night-clubs and raves as examples of this kind of dispositif, focusing on how they work as a holistic frame where drugged assemblages emerge.

Results

Finally, we will focus on the different strategies and practices that young people, in constant intra-action with other agencies, develop in order to achieve and keep a “controlled loss of control” within the limits and potentials offered by these contexts, in a constant effort to avoid the risks that may result from the blurred line that divides pleasure and displeasure.

Conclusion

In this sense, we will argue that, despite the criticisms it has received, it is possible to make Measham’s concept of “controlled loss of control” compatible with a post-humanist theoretical framework.

Introduction

Social value placed on drugs stem from two different, almost dissenting, sorts of discourse. The first one, markedly catastrophic, associates drugs with physical or moral dangers and derives from medical studies and debates. The media usually echoes this stance, entrenched as it is in moral (panic) narratives that refer to “social permissiveness” to advocate for prohibitionist or surveillance policies. On the other hand, other discourses have also spread, especially among social work associations and consumer groups. In these discourses, pleasure is considered as the legitimizing element of consumption, which is reassessed as “recreational use”. The AOD user is also regarded as a rational and autonomous subject that sidesteps the risks inherent in consumption due to a “well-informed choice”. Likewise, from this view healthcare institutions should provide information (on-site analysis of substances, for instance) so that consumers could make a rational decision about what they consume and how to consume it in order to enjoy controlling. Both discourses, however, share an analogous way of conceptualizing “pleasures” and/or “dangers” as fixed effects of discrete entities: substances (drugs) that produce (pre)determined effects, or individuals (consumers) that do or do not have enough information, and that are (or are not) able to decide and control what to consume and how to do it.

In this article, however, we will claim that the boundaries between “pleasure” and “danger” are neither fixed nor consistent, and nor are the subjects and objects from which such notions emerge. Drawing from theoretical stances such as the Actor-Network Theory, Barad’s “agential realism” (2007) and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages (1987), we will aim to understand consumption practices as assemblages of different elements from which the subjectivity of the body (either individual or collective) emerges. Such emergence is produced from a flow of different enactments that oscillate between pleasure and displeasure, and hence its “risky” condition. Therefore, pleasures that arise from states of bodily intoxication are also fragile and precarious. “Excessive” consumption, according to young people from our ethnography, relates to the imbalance in which pleasures promised (and indeed offered) by consumption may turn into displeasures depending on the context and on a variable combination of several factors.

Likewise, we will also state that most common time-spaces for AOD consumption by young people from Madrid, that is, botellones,1 nightclubs and raves, are configured as specific material and socio-spatial apparatuses that enhance, but also limit, certain sorts of actants assemblages. We will define the latter as “drugged assemblages”, relying on Bøhling’s term “alcoholic assemblages” (Bøhling, 2015). We aim to understand, through these assemblages, how subjects (both individual and collective) emerge in drug use practices, considering the latter as management practices of “risky pleasures”. To fully understand “risky pleasures”, hence, an approach to the subjective bodily states (Poulsen, 2015: 15) that arise from drugged assemblages is needed.

The unstable condition of pleasurable states that derive from AOD consumption leads young people to perform control practices to avoid undesirable and unpleasant states. On the one hand, in “drugged assemblages” the humanist notion of ​ “control”, related to an autonomous and rational subject, is inadequate because it does not consider how the intra-action of different actants leads to unexpected effects that overflow the limits of individual autonomy. On the other hand, young people from our ethnography have repeatedly expressed, both in the interviews and in the observations, their desire to “control” consumption: “if you have never eaten a kind of drug, dude you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You shouldn’t eat eight pills if you don’t know what they are [made of], because it is likely that your body doesn’t tolerate them” (Paula, 19 years). We will claim that ​​a properly reformulated notion of “controlled loss of control” (Measham, 2002, Measham, 2004) may be compatible with the assemblage framework to which this article is ascribed.

In the following section, we will present the methodology through which we conducted fieldwork with young AOD users from Madrid. Data and results derived from that fieldwork will be used as empirical material in the subsequent findings sections. In the third section, we will show the relationship between what we will call “drugged assemblages” and their production apparatuses, that is, a set of socio-material articulations deployed in characteristic space-times such as botellones, clubs or raves. In the fourth section, we will focus on how AOD consumption is related to pleasant states that are, however, fragile and volatile. We will state that the limits between pleasure and displeasure are extremely porous, starting with the development of the concept of “risky pleasures”. In this context, we will discuss, in the following section, the way in which AOD consumers’ agency, related to a “controlled loss of control” (Measham, 2002, Measham, 2004), is not an autonomous, discrete and consistent entity. On the contrary, some of the consumption-management practices, in the context of the drugged assemblages, are oriented to the sustainability of a sort of “pleasure flows” by means of a controlled loss of (shared) control. Finally, in the last section we will present some reflections on the implications of our analysis for the development of public policies.

Section snippets

Methodology

The data analyzed in this article derive from a research project that sought to understand, from an ethnographic stance, the functionality of “excessive” consumption of alcohol and other drugs in the lifestyles of young people from Madrid. For that purpose, ethnographic fieldwork was conducted by a research team of five anthropologists (including the authors of this text) during six months in different night-time environments from Madrid. The data generation process unfolded in two overall

Material and socio-spatial apparatuses of production of drugged assemblages

Bøhling considers the state of alcohol intoxication as a “continuous mode of corporeal, affective and subjective expansion and contraction which, in relation to particular assemblages, (continually) increases and/or decreases the drunken subject’s capacity to act in, feel and affect its surroundings” (2015: 133). These particular assemblages, that we will call “drugged assemblages”, are themselves a connection between a variable and contingent plurality of actants: drugs, music, cold/heat,

(Dis)Pleasures and risks in drugged assemblages

The role of pleasure during the outings is crucial. Young people spoke of it in terms of “joyness” (gustera), and defined it as something that could be shared (given and received) through communal drug consumption, dance, and even glances: “when I’m dancing and I’m super comfortable, and I look at people and people see that I’m watching them, I transmit to them the joyness that I’m feeling […] I notice that I’m transmitting it and I like it a lot” (Sofía, 24 years). Contact, both visual and

The controlled loss of (shared) control: still a useful category of analysis?

Fiona Measham’s notion of “controlled loss of control” (Measham, 2002, Measham, 2004) brought a high degree of innovation and sophistication to AOD studies, especially regarding substances and social constructs. However, her theoretical framework is based on the humanist notions of agency and control, and this makes her overlook the alternative agencies and bodies (both human and nonhuman) that may be involved in AOD consumption practices. Nevertheless, in spite of the inadequacy of Measham’s

Epilogue: some notes on the transition from academic research to social intervention

On May 29, 2017, we were invited to present the research on which this text is based at a session of the Board “Minors without Alcohol” in the Spanish Congress. Formally, a Board is made up of members of congress and senators from all the political parties with parliamentary representation, and it takes place in different sessions over several months. The objective is to hear the opinions of experts and professionals on the subject of the Board – minors and drugs, in this instance – in order to

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our research partners Lara Alonso, Ariet Castillo, and Olga Fernández. Likewise, this research has been carried out thanks to the support and funding of the Centro Reina Sofía sobre Adolescencia y Juventud and the FAD (Fundación de Ayuda contra la Drogadicción).

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