Research paper

Beyond ‘peer pressure’: Rethinking drug use and ‘youth culture’

In sharp contrast to this increasingly nuanced debate in the West, Russian sociological writing on drug use is characterised by a concern with charting ‘narkotizm’ (prevalence of drug use) among young people (Stozharova, 2003) or the ‘narcotisation’ (growth in, and extension of, the prevalence of drug use) of youth (Zhuravleva, 2000) whilst often failing to distinguish between different kinds of drugs being used, or between ‘drug use’ and ‘drug addiction’ (although exceptions to this rule include: Malikova, 2000; Omel’chenko, 1999, Omel’chenko, 2000). Explanations of this process tend to be structural and broad-brush; drug use is presented as the consequence of a combination of changes experienced by Russian society to which young people are particularly ‘vulnerable’ (Aref’ev, 2002, p. 1). Even where sociologists take a consciously ‘cultural’ approach, drug use is understood as an ‘illness’ reflecting an individual's failure to ‘adapt’ to society (Bykov, 2000, p. 48), or as ‘deviant behaviour’ which compensates for poverty of experiences (Zhuravleva, 2000, p. 43) or reflects the ‘moral dead end’ of post-Soviet society (Stozharova, 2003, p. 108).

Western academic discourse on drug use in Russia to date has focussed on the relationship between injecting drug use and one of the fastest growing HIV epidemics in the world (Grassly et al., 2003, Kramer, 2003; Platt et al., 2004; Power, Khalfin, Nozhkina, & Kanarsky, 2004; Rhodes et al., 1999; Rhodes, Sarang, Bobrik, Bobkov, & Platt, 2004). The link between IDU and HIV has been captured poignantly in the photographs of Ranard (2002) and is the primary focus of international agency concern. The Russian situation is presented as the product of the convergence of two events: the rapid expansion of drugs markets (due to heroin trafficking from Afghanistan and Central Asia); and the emergence of widespread poverty and social dislocation arising from post-1991 economic transition. Attempts to draw more definite causal relationships between these phenomena have suggested that the rise in substance use is driven by the social anomie arising from economic transformation (McKee, 2002). ‘These societies,’ McKee (2002, p. 456) argues in a way not dissimilar from Zhuraleva above, ‘produce people… whose outlook is characterised by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, emotional emptiness and despair’.

Rhodes and Simic provide a more comprehensive review of the structural dislocations arising as a consequence of ‘transition’ as they elaborate a ‘risk environment’ approach to understanding (and intervening in) the rapid spread of HIV and the risky drug use practices associated with it. They consider a range of environmental – economic, social and policy – influences that act at both the macro- and micro-level. Social factors, for example, at the macro level include the weakening of civil society and fragmentation of community, while at the micro level they are visible in the prior existence of an injection culture and traditions of ‘aggressive street policing’ (Rhodes & Simic, 2005, p. 221). Thus, unlike McKee – who recognises cultural practices and the supportive social networks that maintain them as conspicuous by their absence (McKee, 2002) – this approach takes seriously the significance of local drug using practices (and the external factors that shape them) in the production of risk (Rhodes et al., 2003).

In a recent, and challenging, intervention in the debate, Fitzgerald takes the cultural approach a step further. Drawing on cultural theories of subjectivity and the body, he argues for a radical rethink of the relationship between economic ‘transition’, drugs markets and drug use (Fitzgerald, 2005). In contrast to what he describes as the ‘orthodox’ understanding of drug use in transition societies as social pathology (whereby individual responses to economic hardship and social dislocation fuel the development of drugs markets), he suggests that, on the contrary, drugs markets may be integral to the development of new market economies in ‘transition’ societies and that drug use in such societies is attractive to young people because it provides the opportunity to engage in western consumer practices and to develop the new subjectivities that this offers. Flaker (2002), referring to the case of Slovenia, appears to adopt a similar approach, suggesting that drug use is simply ‘a new way of organising life around the (post-modern) values of individuality and subjectivity, primacy of consumption over production, and so on.’ (p. 470). However, Flaker's vision is one of a deeply polarised society in which neo-liberal ideologies mean that the benefits of a consumer driven economy enjoyed by one part of the population can only be maintained if another section of the population are condemned to unemployment and poverty. Thus, in Flaker's vision, nonetheless, young people, their cultural contexts and their active choices, disappear while market forces join social dislocation and epidemic disease as the active agents pushing youth into the dead-end of drug addiction.

The empirical research drawn on in this article was undertaken as a collaborative exercise by a team of British and Russian sociologists. It sought to bridge the gap between academic discourses on drug use in the West and in Russia as well as to understand why Russian discourse on drug use was so radically at odds with young Russians’ own narratives of drug use encountered in previous research (Omel’chenko, 1999, Omel’chenko, 2000, Pilkington, 1994, Pilkington, 1996; Pilkington, Omel’chenko, Flynn, Bliudina, & Starkova, 2002). To this end the research was designed to allow drug use to be understood as it occurs within everyday lives but also to ensure full account was taken of the structural locations that make some young people particularly vulnerable to drug use. Thus, while the approach was consciously ‘cultural’, ‘youth culture’ was envisaged neither as the sum of individual consumer preferences nor as ‘deterritorialized’ (Miles, 2000, p. 159). On the contrary, it was premised on the possibility that drugs markets in different localities facilitate the formation of distinctive drug cultures and routinize (if not ‘normalise’) different kinds of drug use. However, youth culture was not considered to be a mere reflection of structural location but to consist of a range of practices and forms that simultaneously embody, reproduce and negotiate locally configured social inequalities. In the empirical sections of the article, the importance of drug markets, social dislocation and inequality in shaping young Russians’ drug using practices in a particular location are outlined before the ways in which youth cultural practices themselves transmit and reproduce, but also constrain and resist, structurally rooted propensities to drug use are explored.