Temporal Reconfiguration and Social Change: Time Flexibility and Acceleration As New Normative Order. Polydrug Users’ Perspective.

This work analyzes temporal dimensions that modulate senses and practices of polydrug users of psychoactive substances (PS) in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The emphasis is placed on the various conceptions of time and temporal reconfigurations within the framework of reflective modernization. Social changes that have put everyday activities in tension and whose most outstanding attribute is the process of acceleration and social time flexibility.

From 29 in-depth interviews to poly drug users (legal and illegal) of middle sectors, analysis emerges that their practices require a special attention on the uses of the times to denote a flexible subjectivity that allows them to consume without being consumerist, to take drugs without being addicted.

There are a set of implicit rules, classifications and temporal hierarchies that are socially shared. Not sharing them, or not complying with the current social-temporal rules, makes the offender's behavior suspicious, and therefore deviant or problematic. Criteria based on hierarchical temporalities (employment vs. leisure), divided into watertight compartments (from Monday to Friday vs. Saturday and Sunday) and sequential (do not recognize simultaneity of practices) are used to define problematic consumption.

From the perspective of drug users we assume that time is a classifier of practices as normal/adequate and deviant/inadequate. But their everyday experience shows that there is a temporal reconfiguration in terms of time flexibility and acceleration. Thus it is worth asking: In this context of social change, are redefined the ways of classify as problematic or non-problematic the drug use?