Voluntary Risk Taking and Individual Emancipation

Background:. In France, the important proportion of teenagers who develop a repeated consumption of cannabis, tobacco or alcohol consumption worries the security and public health authorities. The consumption practices among young people are categorized by social and scientific discourse as a risk behavior. Many scientific researches try to explain why they develop a health, social and penal risk behaviors. However, very little one has analyzed the way that experience of consumption is lived by youth. How do teenagers perceive their consumption behavior, what meanings that they attach to their behavior ? 

Methods: In order to apprehend the subjective experience of drugs consumption, we have led a qualitative investigation. We carried out 42 biographic interviews to twenty-one girls and twenty-one boys between seventeen and twenty years old. They live in Ile-de-France. These interviews have permitted us to apprehend subjective signification about their consumption experience and analyze the dynamic by which the have developed the substances use.

Results: The public health categorization on consumption by youth does not tally with what happen in reality. The perception of the teenagers on their consumption moves away from the epidemiologic categorization. The drugs use means to the participants festivities or conviviality. Moreover, teenagers, who are currently looking for an autonomous identity, develop consumption, not to oppose to their parents or social and penal norms, limits. We observe that if the youth people develop the consumption of cannabis, alcohol and tabaco it is especially to build a personal and individual identity. It is in a context of individual emancipation (Kaufmann, 2004) that we consider voluntary risk taking is part of individualization process.

Conclusion: There is a contrast between the collective and scientific perception and perception of teenagers on drugs consumption. Voluntary risk taking is a subjective and positive experience which responds to his quest for identity