Youth, Drugs, and Nightlife by Hunt Geoffrey;Moloney Molly;Evans Kristin; & Molly Moloney & Kristin Evans

Author:Hunt, Geoffrey;Moloney, Molly;Evans, Kristin; & Molly Moloney & Kristin Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2010-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Targeting youth as at risk

The behavior of young people has long been of major concern to adults, especially behavior that occurs outside education, waged work, or adult supervision. As Griffin (1993) has remarked, the history of research on youth is both a history of “young people themselves. … [and also] a history of adults’ preoccupations and panics” (1993: 23). The precise issues of concern have fluctuated in different locations and in different historical periods. One key area of control and regulation has been young people’s leisure activities and especially activities associated with ingested substances such as illicit drugs. Youthful drug use is portrayed as particularly dangerous because young people are perceived as “a highly vulnerable sector of the population” (Ettorre and Miles 2002: 176). As a result of the weakening of traditional sources of social differentiation based on social class and communities, as noted by Furlong and Cartmel (1997) and Miles (2000), young people today are viewed “as attempting to find self-fulfillment and ways of identifying with other young people through the consumption of goods” (Furlong and Cartmel 1997: 61), especially fashion and music. However, while young people may seek to construct their identities through the process of consumption, whether that be fashion, music, or drugs, they become increasingly identified as “risky consumers” involved in risky consumption (W. Mitchell et al. 2004). They are portrayed as having a disordered relationship to consumption, especially drug use (Griffin 1997). Consequently those arenas, such as raves, in which drug use is perceived as commonplace, and which are viewed by young people as places of excitement, adventure and risk, are perceived by adults as problematic. They must therefore be increasingly controlled and regulated (N. D. Campbell 2000). As Aitchison has noted, “leisure sites and activities have become the focus of a society preoccupied with minimizing risk” (2004: 97).

Given the increasing efforts to control young people and to characterize their behaviors as disruptive or deviant, especially around their drug use, it is our intention in this chapter to explore the experiences of young people who use drugs and who are involved in the dance scene. In examining their accounts, we hope to highlight how these young users, far from being passive, ignorant, or ill-informed of the dangers of using drugs, operate and actively engage in an elaborate system of techniques designed to minimize a sense of uncertainty associated with their drug use.

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