Sex, Drugs and Coercive Control: Gendered Narratives of Methamphetamine Use, Relationships, and Violence

While many of the motives people provide for using drugs transcend gender, there are also notable gendered differences. These differences in motive talk aid in stigma management, shape gender performances, and can encourage or constrain behavior. Using data from a photo-ethnography with 52 people who use methamphetamine in rural Alabama, we find that men and women articulate their motives for drug use in distinctly gendered ways. Most notably, men emphasized the benefits of sex on meth while most of the women did not. Men’s stories of meth as a sex drug shaped how they interacted with women often leading them to use violence and coercion to control when, where, and with whom women used meth. Women were less likely to say that increased sexual feelings was their primary motive for using meth. They drew on gendered themes of femininity (e.g., motherhood, home keeper) when explaining their drug use. They also sought ways to resist coercive control that were intertwined with their gendered narratives of drug use. The findings point to the importance of gendered narratives in shaping interactions, and significantly, how narratives can contribute to harm and reinforce gender inequality in drug markets

When peaceful people fight: Beyond neutralization and subcultural theory

Fights are widespread in society, but for most people it happens once or twice and is not part of a consistent pattern or lifestyle. Using a narrative criminological framework, we study the stories of violence among people who otherwise seldom engage in violent behaviour. The young Norwegians we interviewed, emphasized that their fights emerged as a response to insults, was fuelled by drinking and could be exciting. Participants had negative evaluations of their fights, took the blame for them, talked down their importance and self-critically used humour to ridicule their involvement. Our study demonstrates the shortcomings of subcultural and neutralization theories when it comes to understanding violent behaviour among those who rarely engage in it

Narratives of the mystical among users of psychedelics

We are now witnessing a radical revival in clinical research on the use of psychedelics (e.g. LSD and psilocybin), where ‘mystical’ experiences are at the centre. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 50 psychedelic drug users, we document how they draw on archetypical mystical narratives, comprising three key dimensions: (1) the transcendence of time and space; (2) deep euphoria; and (3) the perception of being at one with ‘a larger whole’. We suggest that the evolving new cultures around the use of psychedelics contain a variety of narratives, with clear roots in traditional mystical thinking. At the same time, these narratives reflect current cultural and political influences, including the narratives of oneness with plants and animals and our perceived need to protect nature. We conclude that the way people experience mystical occasions due to psychedelic use have archetypical patterns, but culturally specific storylines