Yet Another Junkie Story? Lived Experiences of Drug Policy in Norway and Why They Matter

Norway is one of those European countries with the highest rates of drug-related deaths. In attempt to improve the situation, Norwegian government chooses a medical approach to substance abuse and removes responsibility for the field from social welfare services. Treatment of abuse became defined as specialized health service, and the abusers’ rights became articulated in a new language – language of patient. As a project with moral undertones, the reform created not only new epistemological and organizational framework for treatment, but it also tried to construct new identities. It was designed to “liberate [the abusers] from the established stigmatizing label as a social client”. What is the abusers’ experience of these changes?

There is little research on how users relate to the various models of substance abuse and addiction. How do they navigate in a landscape of the seemingly incompatible discourses of disease, social pathology and choice? What are the social, psychological and physical effects of these discourses? Life stories of long-term abusers give us interesting answers not only about their own lives, but also about the “social problem” they inhabit, with its powerful institutional, political and moral structures.

By focusing on the internalisation of and resistance toward the various discourses in personal narratives, I will contribute to two ongoing debates. One is on how policies shape relation between user/patient and social/health worker. The second one asks how social and political categories influence the various aspects of abuse: the subjective embodied experience, the physiological dynamics, the cultural and social constructions, and the social transformations perpetuating abuse and addiction.

Following the analysis of the “inside stories”, I will discuss how these stories can be used in social, political and therapeutic interventions. At the same time I will discuss the methodological and moral pitfalls related to life story interviewing of vulnerable individuals.