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Drinking and Drug Use in Youth Cultures: 1. Building Identity and Community

This is the first of two issues of Contemporary Drug Problems on qualitative studies of drinking and drug use in youth cultures. The papers are revised from papers presented and discussed at a conference at Skarpo, Sweden, on 23-26 April, 2001. The conference, funded by the Swedish National Public Health Institute, was hosted by the Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs, Stockholm University, and was a thematic meeting of the Kettil Bruun Society for Social and Epidemiological Research on Alcohol. Some main themes for the conference were set out in its call for papers: Among teenagers and young adults in the modern world, there is considerable cultural differentiation. Young people seek identification and are identified with a wide range of youth cultures and social worlds. These youth cultures and looser social groupings may reflect differentiations by age, class, ethnicity, gender and/or region, but the youth cultural patterns also often cut across such differentiations. Often youth cultures or social worlds are oriented around choices about leisure time: for example, music and dancing styles, sports, and politics. Research on such youth cultures and social worlds is a prominent part of an emergent international literature of cultural studies. Such studies emphasize not only the expressive commonalties within youth cultures, but also the expression of boundaries and distinctions. Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" conveys the idea that membership in a cultural group, and specialized knowledge that comes with it, is often highly valued and can be dearly won. Particularly valued is the "inside" knowledge associated with a group, which an outsider would not know. Patterns of alcohol and drug use or non-use can be important in expressing and defining youth cultures and social worlds. Choices about drinking and drug use may express different personal preferences and orientations to pleasure and to the balance between the present and the future. As a largely social behavior, drinking together is often an expression of collective solidarity. Drug use is also frequently a collective cultural activity. Beyond this, the fact of alcohol or drug use (or non-use) and the behavior associated with it is often a marker of identity and membership in a social world. And knowledge about alcohol or drugs is part of the cultural capital of the youth culture or social world. That illicit-drug use and underage alcohol use are not accepted by the adult world can give a special value to alcohol and drug lore. The aim of the conference is to bring perspectives and approaches from various traditions of cultural and subcultural studies to bear on issues related to drinking or drug use in different youth cultures/ subcultures. In addition to empirical studies, both qualitative and quantitative, the papers at the conference included some review papers. The papers in these two issues of Contemporary Drug Problems are selected and revised from the qualitative and the review papers. As the call for papers intimated, one conference aim was to bring to bear in the alcohol and drug field some of the new perspectives and approaches in general cultural studies of youth in recent decades. The magisterial paper by David Moore (2002) in this issue goes a long way toward fulfilling this aim, with a critical consideration of perspectives and recent controversies in the main traditions of research on youth both in contemporary industrialized societies and in "other times and other places." Moore ends his paper with some suggestions about how the perspectives and approaches from the wider literature may best be infused into social alcohol and drug research. The other papers in this issue represent concrete empirical work on the place of drug use in particular youth cultures. These papers, we feel, go a considerable way toward meeting the challenge set by Moore, bringing to bear on their empirical data a variety of ideas and conceptual frames from the wider literatures. …