Pundare, jonkare och andra: med narkotikan som följeslagare

Sammanfattning: This study describes the everyday life of a group of drug users during a few years in the early 1990s. The material, which has been collected through ethnographic fieldwork in the milieus where the drug users spend their time, is primarily based on observations, conversations, and in-depth interviews. Everyday life is studied from three aspects: The action aspect , that is, questions concerning work and leisure, how life is structured, how different stimulants are handled. The belonging aspect ; where a person hangs out, the people he is in contact with, the culture that he belongs to. Also the expression aspect ; how the drug addicts view themselves and how others view them, the lifestyle they follow, and how the picture of the drug addict emerges. I have reversed the traditional question, "Why do drug addicts not give up drugs?" to ask instead why they continue to live as drug addicts. I have looked for the answer "out there", in their daily life, and not in their pathology or in the defects or merits of the care system. My study shows the relative advantages that life of addiction can have, and the disadvantages that the alternative, "ordinary" life often entails. Drug users have their reasons for staying in the addicts' world. Although it means misery being let down, a lack of solidarity, illness, suffering, and death, it has other features - the sociality, eventfulness, the short perspectives, the everything-will-work-out-fine attitude, the sense of competence. having something to do (in the form of criminal ways of making a living), and the artificial pleasure of the drugs. This can be contrasted with the alternatives offered to them by ordinary life: solitude, unemployment, poverty, idleness, the sense of being superfluous. Despite the difficulties, many of the informants make constant attempts to break into ordinary life. They have the same basic goals in life as people in general: to live a normal life and be respected by normal people.