Writing drug cultures

The paper juxtaposes the cultural mediation of experience through drugs with that performed with text. As a sample of the currently radically changing relations between professional and lay knowledge in the field of drug interventions, the website of a Copenhagen institution for young drug users is discussed. In particular, six different readings are offered of the coexistense of (professional) “facts” and (lay) “narratives”: Taking off from the two opposite, critical-modern readings where one cancels the other, and the parallellist reading that acknowledges the two cultures as simply unrelated, a fourth reading identifies a post-modern convergence between science and common sense. An ideology critique of the pragmatic construction of such common sense reveals it as a disengagement of language from material aspects of practice that produces a dichotomy of authenticity and pretense, and serves to regulate exclusion. This leads to an alternative articulation of the website as contributing to the construction of collectives that challenge the culture of consumption in which addiction is embedded. In conclusion, it is claimed that in order to grasp and facilitate such a more substantial recognition, it is necessary to transcend the standpoint of civil society and embrace a transformative welfare-state collectivity.