MDMA Use among a Group of Friends in Oslo, Norway, between Self-Development and Social Participation

Dilemmas of a Pharmaceutical Normalcy

Bibliographic Data

ID11057005
AuthorsPer Kristian Hilden (0000-0003-3606-8202, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume36
Issue1-2
Pages137-173
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueContemporary Drug Problems (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0091-4509 • E-ISSN: 2163-1808
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/009145090903600108
OpenAlexW2040953464
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited46

This article presents a case of self-staged, therapeutic use of MDMA (Ecstasy) in a small group of friends in Norway. The analysis focuses on the ways in which legitimacy is built for the practice, and therefore attends to tropes, assumptions, and conceptual and practical conditions of possibility involved in the participants' reflections over their drug taking. Three dimensions of these reflections are emphasised: the significance attributed to the setting of drug use, the differential representations of the psychotropic effects of MDMA and LSD, and the pharmaco-therapeutic rationality with which their MDMA use was organized and conceived. The article argues that, amid “pharmaceutical normalcy” as cultural paradigm for how health and responsibility is conceived in late modern societies, a tension arises between sociable and self-developmental modalities of motivation for recreational drug use

Ecstasy · Legitimacy · MDMA · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Rationality · Recreation · Sociology · Cross-Cultural and Social Analysis · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Psychedelics and Drug Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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