Locality and the Moral Inequality of MDMA Users in Taiwan: A Case of a Newly Democratized Country

The ‘normalization thesis’ has been developed to explain the massive increase of drug consumption in recent years, because of the growing popularity of dance/club drug within the young people. Different from most of the criticism, this paper thinks it short of ethical prudence and sociological insight: it incites moral panic for its effect to legitimizing the drug use without identifying the social attributes of drug user. Seeing these weaknesses, this paper presents a figurational approach to explore moral narrative of different social space, and their response to drug regulation. Data were collected by reinterpreting the existing researches in Taiwan, as well as by the fieldworks implemented in Taipei City and Pingtung County by way of semi- structured interview. It is confirmed that individual pleasure is the reason to take MDMA in both regions and ‘peer pressure’ plays no role in their use of MDMA. Taking relational ontology, this paper finds that there are two kinds of moral narrative in term of their attitude toward the moral centre. Those who live in Taipei City are more interested with, and capable of challenging the moral discourse that MDMA is illegal and dangerous, while those living in Pingtung County take a relatively detached view from the moral centre. In other words, the closer are the MDMA users to the moral centre, the more likely they take an active way to defy the centre; the farer are they from the centre, the more possibly they take a passive stand without the intention to do with the moral centre. By way of the figurational approach, this paper concludes that there exists two kinds of individualization developed along with the democratization, and their capacity to challenge the moral centre is unequal.