A Dizzying Array of Substances.pdf - department of anthropology

VOICES OF DRUG USESET 1: THERAPEAUTIC POSSIBILITIESIn the following pages we explore several life histories, recollections of spaces, and currentsocial practices around drug use in the Canal Communities area. Through two main narratives,interspersed with ethnographically-informed discussions of a number of key issues, such as ‘space’and ‘dealing’, we review about twelve years of local changes in drug use, more or less at thestage of life and the point in the history illustrated by Examples 2 and 3 in the ‘Ages and Epochs’section above. All of these people formally appear ‘in treatment’, but they also show the immenseamount of usage that goes on under this label. Crucially, though, they are ‘in treatment’ in a moremeaningful social sense in that they expect their lives (at least potentially) to change for the better.In other words, these stories are about individuals who acknowledge that at some point they had asignificant issue with heroin, and they understand their treatment largely through this lens.Being Sandra: A Normal LifeSandra entered the drop-in centre, close to where she lived in accommodation provided by theHomeless Persons Unit on a temporary basis. She lived there with her nine year-old daughter.Sandra’s daily routine included getting her daughter to school, scoring coke if she had money, goingto her clinic for her methadone and ‘dropping in’ to the community services for a couple of hours,killing time until her daughter met her there after school. When she was ‘strung-out’ she would livefrom day to day, focused on scraping and scrounging money or selling her Dalmane or Ensures 11 toget a bag of cocaine. 12Sandra grew up in ‘the flats’. By thirteen, she was addicted to Dalmane, and by fifteen she hadbecome a regular heroin-user, joining the large number of her peers in the explosion of heroinpopularity in 1990s Dublin. At sixteen, she was admitted to a methadone programme, taking herdose before going to school. She actually managed to get off heroin and methadone in her lateteens, but after moving to London she became strung out on heroin again. She was also introducedto crack there. That was almost ten years ago. When she came home a few years ago, she enrolledagain in a local methadone programme.For a while, Sandra had made a decent living out of dealing heroin when sites for using and dealingwere more concentrated in the built environment. The local Snooker Hall was one such spot:I used to sell heroin and I used to make thousands, jaysusmake like hundreds a day, I’d be [in clothes shops buyingtracksuits and Nike runners every day] and the young wan’dbe saying fuckin’ hell, where did you get the money? Likeshe’d be saying you must be rich and me Ma’d be sayingwhere are you getting this money, are you selling drugs overin the snooker hall and I’d be saying I didn’t, I sold a bottleof phoy: it’s a hundred pounds. I used to get meself loads oftracksuits and runners and me [daughter would] be dressedthe best and the babysitter, I’d have mindin’ [her], she’d getNike runners and whatever. I’d have money saved at home for,Fifty-three of our ninetytwosurvey respondentsreported selling drugsin the past. Seventeenof these currently solddrugs. Of these seventeenall were using illicitsubstances. Fifteen usedheroin, fifteen streetbenzos and eleven crackor cocaine powder.11 Dalmane, a minor tranquillizer, yields about €1 per tablet. Ensure is a high calorie food supplement, twenty packets of which sell for €15.12 A bag of cocaine for intravenous use costs about €20.38A DIZZYING ARRAY OF SUBSTANCES