Research paper
‘It's just a social thing’: Drug use, friendship and borderwork among marginalized young people

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Abstract

This article joins a growing chorus of researchers who doubt the utility of the concept of peer pressure for explaining young people's initiation to and use of drugs. Drawing on interview data with 45 patrons of a youth drop-in centre in Ottawa, Canada, we argue that drug use is more intricately woven into friendship – affective relationships of trust and intimacy, belonging and sharing – rather than simply part of the unidirectional pressures some young people put on others to fit in to a subculture. Marginalized young people's narratives show that drugs and alcohol furnish them with a relatively inexpensive pastime to share with friends, introducing opportunities for intimacy that are otherwise difficult to attain at the individualistic and isolating margins of neoliberal cities. We demonstrate how young drug users draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable relationships to drugs and alcohol, articulating an important sense of belonging to a superior group of drug users. Through this ‘borderwork’, they solidify the bonds they share with the people with whom they smoke cannabis and drink alcohol.

Introduction

The social scientific literature on teens’ and young peoples’ drug use is vast. Most often the goal is identifying the determinants or predictors of drug use (and alcohol misuse), as well as the protective factors or sources of ‘resilience’ that mitigate drug use. The dominant approach to achieving these research goals over the last several decades has been a quantitative, epidemiological one (Moore, 1990, Moore, 1992), but since the late 1990s, there have also been significant changes in the way drugs are treated in the broad ‘field’ of youth studies. Like in other areas of youth research, representations of drug users as “deviant” and “delinquent” have receded, making room for notions of “risk” and “resilience” (Bessant, 2001, France, 2008, Baron, 2010, Hamme Peterson et al., 2010). Research has also moved somewhat away from seeing youth drug use as an isolated, all-important social problem in its own right (Brunswick, Merzel, & Messeri, 1985) and towards seeing it as one element in a more complicated compound that involves, depends on, and shapes social, cultural, historical, emotional, economic and political components (Duff, 2003, Lunnay et al., 2011, Spooner et al., 2001). In other words, when young people's drug use is problematised, it is rightfully coming to be understood as embedded in wider, structural social problems, or a complex symptom of them, rather than solely a problem unto itself (Duff, 2003).

Social networks and peer groups continue to factor (alongside family characteristics, neighbourhood contexts and relationships to dominant institutions) in explanations of young peoples’ initiation to and continued use of drugs (Ford, 2009). In these studies, the relationship between drugs and friends has largely been characterized as a matter of ‘exposure’ (Jang & Johnson, 2011), ‘peer pressure’ (Bousman et al., 2005, Crockett et al., 2006) or ‘peer influence’. Young drug users are depicted within peer pressure frameworks as being initiated into a culture of drugs by their ‘deviant peers’ and engulfed by pressures to conform to the norms of ‘anti-social’ peer groups (Drapela, 2006, Martino et al., 2011, Svensson, 2003). Connections to “prosocial peers”, on the other hand, have been proffered as a protective factor against the initiation to drugs and sustained drug use (Martino et al., 2011, Rice et al., 2007, Tyler, 2008).While there are some notable exceptions (Boeri et al., 2009, Lunnay et al., 2011, Martin, 2010, Moore, 1990, Moore, 1992, Page and Singer, 2010, Pilkington, 2007a, Pilkington, 2007b), and more recent research has begun to challenge overly simplistic models (see Pilkington, 2007a, Pilkington, 2007b), this area of research pays only scant attention to young people's own interpretations of their relationship to drugs. Most often, the puzzle of youth drug use is tackled using quantitative methods. The tendency is to adopt a normative view (drug use is bad, drug addiction is worse), develop sets of indicators by which to measure the occurrence and severity of drug use, and then connect these indicators to ‘risk factors’ and other independent variables.

In this article, we take a different, qualitative approach, mining young marginalized people's stories for a deeper, more interpretive understanding of what leads some to use drugs frequently, how they feel about their drug use, whether and when they decide they have gone too far, and how drugs factor into the relationships they have with their peers. We join a burgeoning chorus of youth researchers who understand that qualitative methods (e.g. in-depth interviews), attuned to people's understandings of their own lives, can shed additional light on the social gears at work underneath the events and relationships captured in quantitative models (cf. Boeri et al., 2009, Hudson et al., 2009, Martin, 2010, Pilkington, 2007a, Pilkington, 2007b, Spooner et al., 2001). Such perspectives can aid greatly in the development of policy and social work responses to young people's marginalization.

Drawing on interview data with 45 patrons of a youth drop-in centre in Ottawa, Canada, we show that drug users articulate a sense of control over their habits, draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable use, and distance themselves from the people in (or near) their neighbourhoods and social circles who appear, to participants, to misuse drugs and alcohol. We argue that drug use is more intricately woven into friendships – affective relationships (see, e.g., Malins, 2004, Malins, 2007) of trust and intimacy, belonging and sharing – rather than simply part of the unidirectional ‘peer pressure’ some young people put on others to fit in to a singular drug subculture. As an important contribution to the youth studies and drug policy literatures, we show that drugs and alcohol furnish marginalized young people with a relatively inexpensive pastime to share with friends, introducing opportunities for intimacy that are otherwise difficult to attain at the individualistic and isolating margins of neoliberal cities, neighbourhoods, communities and institutions. However, a key part of the construction and maintenance of friendship is defining who is not a (desirable) friend. As we show here, young drug users draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable relationships to drugs and alcohol, articulating an important sense of belonging to a preferable group of drug users. Through this ‘borderwork’, they justify and solidify the bonds they share with the people they smoke cannabis and drink alcohol with.

Section snippets

Peer pressure, risk, control and agency in young people's drug use

Several recent studies on young people's drug use have cast doubt on whether the concept of ‘peer pressure’ captures the nuanced roles of friends and friendship in a person's engagement with illicit drugs. An early example is the work of Bauman and Ennett (1996), who found that in many instances young drug users “selected” friends who also used drugs, rather than using drugs because their friends initiated it. In other words, the drug-using peer groups followed from the initiation to drugs and

Friendship, trust and affect

The question of what friendship “is” has fascinated philosophers for over 2000 years (Pahl, 2002: 413). Aristotle, for one, was especially interested in defining friendship, and his conception of “pure” friendship continues to shape contemporary understandings (Pahl, 2002: 414; e.g. Agamben, 2009). Thus, in the last decade, many well-known social theorists have argued that real friendship is declining in significance, or at least taking on new forms, comprising new constellations of affection,

Data and methodology

In 2009 and 2010, we conducted 45 interviews with young women (20) and men (25) between the ages of 16 and 24, recruited through a local drop-in centre dedicated to aiding disadvantaged and homeless people in that age group. In terms of family backgrounds, most maintained some contact with parents (or one parent), although the majority described strained familial relationships. Most participants were living in one of Ottawa's young women's or men's shelters, or with roommates. Most (30)

Drugs and everyday life

Interviewees were usually quite candid about their drug use, whether it was in the past or ongoing, something they wanted to change or something they considered recreational. It came up at times as a reason for being unmotivated, doing something unwise or getting into trouble. Sometimes it was serious trouble, such as when 19-year-old Eric got high and stole thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics from his high school, and sometimes the infractions were less serious – for instance, Sam (20,

“We have the same interests” and “we count ourselves as brothers”: drugs and friendship

Among interviewees, there were certainly friendships and relationships with others that did not revolve around drugs or other criminalized activities. But by and large, when it came to relationships with friends and family members (and in rare instances caseworkers and other institutional authorities), two dominant scenarios emerged: participants either endured toxic, tenuous or even abusive relationships, or they were, to their minds at least, alone. The relationships they did have were often

Borderwork: drugs, inclusion and exclusion

The only participants who claimed to not use drugs or drink alcohol were Tanya (24) and Marina (19), who each had a young daughter, and new parents Nina (19) and Anton (20). Their stories provide the first toehold into the concept of borderwork. Tanya remembered what it was like to feel dependent on drugs, and presented her decision to stay away from them as a commitment to being healthy:

“When I was on drugs it was a big challenge to even think about a day without drugs. I’ve gone now a little

Conclusion

This article demonstrated the difficulty of disentangling drug use from friendship, and the inadequacy of simplistic peer pressure models of where illicit substances fit into social networks and relationships. Our interviews suggest that drugs and alcohol often underlie the intimate moments and feelings of trust that marginalized young people hold dear in the vacuum of trustworthy and caring familial connections.

We also showed how young people's borderwork challenges both “skeletal” (Foucault,

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