Hooked on Heroin

Drugs and Drifters in a Globalized World

Philip Lalander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859737675
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Alarmingly, heroin is growing in popularity amongst young people. This is despite the fact that it is - more than any other drug - associated with failure, death, misery and poverty. This book explores why people are tempted by heroin and how globalization has played a key role in increasing the number of abusers. Rather than offer lofty and abstract theories on addiction, the author grounds his study firmly in the day-to-day lives of heroin users themselves. Norrköping in Sweden is a mid-sized former industrial city like countless others throughout the world. It has suffered high unemployment as a result of its rapid decline as a hub of commerce. Once well known for housing the giant telecommunications company Ericsson, it sadly gains more notoriety today through its associations with heroin, which continues to be the drug of choice for Norrköping's young people. Through privileged access to users themselves, Lalander is able to show us the real motivations and lifestyle choices behind addiction. Personal testimonies candidly expose the underground activities of a thriving subculture and spark vexing questions as to why these young people choose to flirt with fatality. What media representations influence heroin users? Is this phenomenon the inevitable by-product of modern life? What are the root causes at play?Lalander's in-depth investigation overturns many of the stereotypes associated with heroin use. Accessible and gripping, Hooked on Heroin brings a disturbing reality closer to home and shows how global and local practices are intimately linked.

– 1 –
Under the City's Shell

The world you live in’s just the sugar-coated topping.
There’s another world beneath it, the real world . . .
Quote from Blade, played by Wesley Snape
in the vampire film Blade from 1998.

Introduction

This book is about a special group of young people who have sought out objects and activities that are seen as dangerous, unethical and disgusting. They have developed a lifestyle in which drugs and criminal activities are everyday ingredients and in doing so, have done exactly what their parents, school and other representatives of modern society have warned them not to do.

They live in Norrköping, a former industrial city of 122,000 inhabitants that has, since the early 1990s experienced both high unemployment and a tight municipal budget. The city has been hard hit by closures and especially well known, the closure of a factory of the giant company, Ericsson. However, Norrköping has also had high points during the 1990s in the form of football, basketball, annual carnivals, and cultural events as well as a complete renovation of the old industrial area. Norrköping is a city of contrasts, between the old industry and modern department stores, and has, since the 1970s, increasingly shown one of the indications of a large town, in the form of a thoroughly urban centre. The building of this centre during the 1960s to 1990s led to the old buildings and historical markers being demolished.

Alcoholics and drug abusers are visible in Norrköping. They gather at the New Square, outside the off licence on Queen’s Street, where the tram tracks roll past, near Film City on the Old Town House Street or at the shopping centre in the suburb Hageby. It is mostly a matter of mixed abuse: alcohol, pills and amphetamine. Many have swollen faces while others are thin and haggard. They are ‘outsiders’ and serve as a warning, as an example of what can happen if you don’t take care of your job or your studies or if you have difficulty with regular hours and timekeeping. Police vans are often parked near these areas and mark established society’s advantage over and fear of public disorder and trouble.

Even if these public alcohol and drug abusers are worth a book, they are not the main focus of this one. This book is about young people who have sought and created an almost invisible subculture. They act in places that ordinary people don’t know about, and at times when most well-behaved and ordinary citizens of Norrköping are getting their beauty sleep in order to be fresh and healthy for the next working day. The book is about young ‘horsers’/heroin users who live an alternative and secret life in Norrköping, even if they can move on the city’s streets and in the workplaces without drawing attention to themselves in the way their colleagues-in-abuse, the alcoholics and the mixed abusers, do.

Changes in Drug History

Scene One: Autumn 1994, the popular night club Tellus, on King’s Street, in Norrköping’s newly renovated industrial area, on a late Saturday night. A large number of young people have gathered to have fun. They are dancing, talking and generally enjoying life. Strobe lighting and the smoke machine keep time with the techno sound blaring from the speaker system. Many of them are high on amphetamine. Others have taken ecstasy and still others are under the influence of hash. None, or only very few, have come in contact with heroin.

Scene two: Autumn 1996, a flat in central Norrköping. Around ten young men aged seventeen to twenty-two have gathered in a flat to ‘base’ – to smoke heroin with foil. The TV is on, and a video film is playing on the screen. They are chatting and smoking and having a pleasant time together. They feel close to each other. They look like young people usually do; well dressed, clean and tidy. Heroin is something they use at weekends.

Scene three: Autumn 2000, a flat in Norrköping. Three young men aged twenty-two to twenty-four are ringing round to different dealers trying to find some heroin. It is difficult and they have a limited number of contacts. After about ten calls they get a result; they can go and buy a little, just enough to get them by for the time being. All three have initial withdrawal symptoms and they would do almost anything for a little heroin. They are worried and stressed. When they have got their heroin they quickly look for a place where they can ‘shoot up a fix’/inject heroin.

The scenes above describe the changes in Norrköping’s drug history. During the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, heroin was unusual, both in terms of use and selling. Max began using in 1993:

It was Molly and me and then there were two or three others, but they no longer live here. It was mainly only us in all of Norrköping who took heroin. It often happened that I bought in Stockholm, maybe, and I would sometimes buy for them and sometimes they would buy for us and we would take it occasionally, but it happened fairly quickly that we started taking it more often. Still, there were very few who took it then, you knew more or less who they were.

Max and Molly have the longest experience of heroin use among the active users in Norrköping. There wasn’t any established ‘heroin circle’ including chains of dealers. On the other hand, amphetamine was easy to get. In 1995–6 the heroin circle built up: consumers, dealers and runners. It was mainly brown heroin that was introduced to new groups. The majority of the young heroin users in Norrköping were born between 1975 and 1980.

A similar change could be detected in other Swedish towns and cities, like Karlstad, Västerås, Örebro and Umeå, which prior to the 1990s had been spared from any widespread heroin use. These towns and cities have in common with each other populations of approximately 100,000, and that, previously, drug abuse was almost exclusively centred on amphetamine. In Norrköping it was initially mostly a matter of ‘basing’, for which brown heroin is particularly suitable. However, the majority later went over to injecting and developed the type of dependency described in the third scene. Basing became increasingly rare. What began as an experiment driven by curiosity developed, for many, into a serious dependency and an existence centred entirely on heroin.

In 1997 the media began to pay attention to the heroin wave in Norrköping. In a series of articles in the nation covering newspaper Aftonbladet (3–6 November 1997) Norrköping was described as a ‘heroin city’. Through detailed reports the journalists described heroin from the police’s, relatives’ and users’ perspectives. John, who was involved when ‘the wave’ started, has this to say about Aftonbladet’s article series: ‘It had been around for several years before. I knew all of them who were in the paper, everyone in the article, but it took such a long time before people became desperate, before it really showed.’

The local papers called attention to what the police dubbed a ‘heroin wave’ and in 2000 the number of heroin users was estimated at 248 (see Kartläggning av narkotikasituationen 2000 (Mapping of the Drug Situation 2000) 2001). Different agents have tried, since the middle of the 1990s, to handle the heroin problem; the police’s street dealer group try to disturb the business as much as possible and also to identify drug users through urine testing. The police’s detective force tries to find out who sells and which sales channels are used. Social services, the county council and volunteer organizations work at helping the young heroin users to stop using heroin.

Heroin, more than any other drug, is related to death. Fugelstad and Rajs (1998) made a compilation of the dominant drug amongst deceased drug users from Stockholm: as many as 62 per cent have heroin as their main drug. Few people in our society are unaware of heroin’s relation to death. Even those who start using heroin are aware of its deadliness.

Drugs – A Threat to Modernity

When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. He is regarded as an outsider. (Becker 1963/1973: 1)

Norrköping’s young heroin users were defined as a problem in 1997. The collective worry is partly as a result of an emotional engagement in the young peoples’ future and health. It is also an effect of the city being viewed as a trouble spot, a place being threatened by something that is hard to control due to little being known about it.

The drug user is seen, in our culture, as highly problematical and that is largely because narcotics are taboo-ridden. Drug use has been society’s ‘enemy number one’ (Christie and Bruun 1985) and the drug user has served as a picture of what happens if we do not behave ourselves. Narcotics were first defined as a problem in Sweden during the 1950s to 1970s and have, since then, had very negative associations in most people’s minds. Before this period they did not have a particularly important place in people’s consciousness, and to use what today are viewed as drugs was not illegal. Lindgren (1993) refers to a study by Leonard Goldberg where it is shown that as many as 200,000 Swedish people used amphetamines during the years 1942–3. They most probably did not regard themselves as serious drug addicts, as drug addicts or drug users, because a negative reference frame had not yet been established. Lindgren writes that narcotic problems began to be defined as serious problems during the 1950s. He states that narcotic abuse was viewed as a ‘. . . problem with particular relevance to antisocial and criminal youths’ (1993: 189). The parliament decided on measures to combat the problem in 1968, measures which to a great extent are unchanged today. The picture that most people have of narcotics is as a consequence of the problematizing process that happened in Sweden during that time.

Drugs, like sexuality, are connected with desire and therefore threaten modern society. Individuals in a modern society should not, ideally, be driven by desire, but rather by rationality (Bauman 1991). They should, furthermore, put the future and not the present first. If they don’t put the future first they will not regard it as plausible to cope with society’s education system. But alcohol is also coupled to desire, and it may be sold. The reason certain substances are classified as narcotics and forbidden is because they are associated with something unknown and alien, whereas alcohol is something we know about and with which we are familiar.

Alcohol has been necessary for the realization of modern society. It has been used at celebratory meals to ritualize the family. It also functions as a symbol for a demodernized existence. Drink represents, to many, a necessary ‘time out’ from the discipline of modern society (Gusfield 1987). Narcotics on the other hand, do not have this family stamp but rather are described as evil. Alcohol consumption does not make someone an outsider, as it is not particularly problematic in relation to modern society’s ideals and respectability norms. To drink alcohol is seen as normal, but to do drugs is seen as a very decisive action, as a sign of much more than is actually seen on the surface.

In the book Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Bauman describes the modern state as a ‘garden’, and in a garden one is always interested in keeping a certain amount of order, but there are always plants and weeds which encroach, and threaten its structure, form and content. The gardeners, in the shape of different social institutions, try to fight these threats to order. Use of narcotics and dealing in them is seen as a serious threat to normality in modern society. The modern state carries on a ceaseless campaign against those who threaten its constitution and who deviate too much from the ideals considered desirable. Drugs threaten modern society, as they are not symbolic of production but rather consumption without production, and, besides, a ‘black’ consumption outside of the state’s control.

Drug Users as Irrational Victims

Modern society’s representatives tend to explain away drug use by claiming the drug user cannot think rationally. The newspapers described the first wave of heroin users in Norrköping as victims: ‘Does a normal 20-year-old Swede not know that heroin is a fatal poison rather than a drug you take to feel good? Yes, they know, but they are victims of the drug barons’ marketing tactics, fooled into believing that smoking heroin is not the same thing as using syringes’ (Aftonbladet 3 November 1997, the author’s translation).

The threat diminishes if society reacts as above. Reasoning which is other than legitimate is masked and made irrational and an effect of extreme forces. Many researchers (for example Bejerot 1980) talk about ‘epidemics’ as if drug addiction were an infectious disease. In that sense Norrköping would have suffered from the dreaded heroin virus in 1995–6. They also speak of a serious dependency, almost as if there was an all-powerful force within the individual that dictates the conditions for the individual’s actions, which leads to carers placing great emphasis on removing the ‘desire’, through medication like Subutex and Methadone. An article about two young heroin users had the headline: ‘They were caught in the grip of heroin’ (Norrköpings Tidningar, 4 January 2001). This is a further example of how drug use is transformed into an active and thinking ‘subject’ and people concerned become the ‘object’. The drug is symbolic of the horrible witch who keeps the dear children Hansel and Gretel as prisoners and who fattens them up in order to eat them later.

Drug users are seen as losers who live a meaningless existence full of irrational decisions and forces, and perhaps this viewpoint leads to a realization of the Thomas theorem: if we see something as true, it becomes so (Thomas and Thomas 1928). To view drug users as irrational is a strategy used by society to combat the undesirable, that which threatens modern society (compare Foucault 1972/1992).

Many people automatically ascribe certain qualities to heroin users/drug users, that they expect heroin users in the main to have. It may be developmental problems, childhood or background problems, negligence, unreliability or a manipulative streak (compare Taylor 1987 and Lindgren 1993). People react with serious anxiety when faced with the unknown. ‘How could someone who is so nice be a drug user?’ or ‘What kind of problems do they have?’ People in general know very little about narcotics and narcotic addiction, but what they do know, because they have been socialized with a certain image of narcotics and narcotic use, is that they are frightening, threatening and monstrous.

In this sense, the drug user is seen as a stranger, double-natured, like different literary and film characters, such as Frankenstein’s monster, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Werewolf and Dracula among others. Dr Jekyll is both good and evil; Frankenstein’s monster is half human, half machine; The Werewolf is both wolf and man and Dracula is a human who hates light and lives on others’ blood. The drug user is both human and something else, unknown, dirty, terrifying. The drug user is both like us and not like us. Kristeva (1982) calls these dual creatures ‘abjects’ and means by this that which is not classifiable as belonging to any particular category. The image of the drug user should be seen as an effect of the process that has occurred during the second half of the twentieth century, where drug users have been relegated to the role of second-class citizens. The female ex-heroin user Tam Stewart (1987: 103) writes: ‘Heroin addicts are society’s “nouveau queers”. They have replaced homosexuals and conscientious objectors as the undesirable, antisocial figures who inspire public contempt.’

Subculture and Globalization

When a group of people come together and begin to transgress different types of respectability norms and ideals, they form a ‘subculture’. ‘Sub’ means under, and is related to power structure. They create a culture through contact with each other and as a consequence of established society’s morals and respectability, where they build in different sorts of transgressions as a central part of their lifestyle. Furthermore, they construct slang, a language with words to describe t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Under the City's Shell
• 2 Before Heroin
• 3 The Secret Cave
• 4 The Threats that Divide and Unite
• 5 Doing Drugs with Honour and Style
• 6 Who is Directing?
• 7 The Subculture's Gender Code
• 8 The Whole World is Yours
• Appendix - Method and Researcher's Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index