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Article Excerpt
Drug use in the context of dance clubs and "raves," often referred to as club culture, dance culture and rave culture, has established a permanent position in Western youth cultures and youth leisure time during the past two decades. Although the phenomenon is global, the prevalence and local cultural forms vary significantly among countries (see, e.g., Thornton 1995:3). In Great Britain, where the club culture (1) in question originated, it has gained popularity to the point that recreational drug use is in many instances considered a normal part of a young person's life (Parker et al. 1998; Spruit 2001). Meanwhile, the scene in Finland remains an example of a marginal nightlife and drug use subculture (EMCDDA 2001b; 2002).
In this article we analyze how the Finnish drug users in the context of club culture distinguish themselves from other night-life subcultures and from mainstream popular culture. We also try to categorize the distinctions of this group into more general discursive structures that define their group identity. Drug use in the club cultural context is analyzed not in terms of deviant behavior (e.g., Becker 1963), of resistance (e.g., Willis 1978) or of development psychology (see Moore 2002), but as modern symbolically significant consumption as a way to create and maintain social categories and distinctions (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Thornton 1995). This means studying what kind of symbolic distinctions drug users in the club cultural setting create to distinguish themselves from other youth cultural contexts.
It should be noted that symbols such as the use of certain drugs are given meaning only in relation to the context of use of those symbols. "Context" refers to the objective milieu where drug use takes place, including elements such as music, people, decoration, clothing, and social and cultural codes that set the ways of behaving within the context. According to Norman Zinberg (1984), context sets social rituals and sanctions that regulate the way drugs are used. The meaning of context is important and varies on both a global and a local level. As an example, according to an article by Colub et al. (2001), club culture in the U.S. attracts younger people than in Europe, and LSD is often substituted for Ecstasy. According to Collin (1998:2-3) and Reynolds (1998), in Great Britain the subculture represented working-class hedonism in neo-liberal hard times and at the same time represented entrepreneurship. In Finland it came to represent technological pioneerism, bohemian life style, and student elites. In a broader sense the whole club culture can be seen as a context for drug use (see Calafat et al. 2001, 183); but in order to understand various symbolic distinctions of, in our case, drug use in Finnish club culture, one needs to be aware of the specific local context.
The time focus of this article refers mainly to the late 1990s and early 2000, which could be described as the last years of the boom period for the Internet and communications technology and increased market integration of the EU and other global powers. This article does not pursue a detailed and representative picture of all that club, rave and dance culture has meant in Finland, and it ignores some recent developments (for example, alcohol use is more popular than a few years ago). Instead, its aim is to contribute to understanding drug use as culture and, as such, as a means for acquiring social position. We do this by highlighting some of the main symbolic categorizations and discourses within the cultural sphere in this case, without claiming that these apply to its every sector and to each participant.
Data
The data used in this paper were collected 1998-2002. They were based on 60 theme interviews conducted among people who have participated in club culture, covering the following eight themes: personal background information, the interviewee's drug career, settings where the interviewee uses drugs, reasons for drug use, influences of drug use in the interviewee's life in general, the interviewee's values and the values of the drug culture(s), the meaning of control in drug cultures, and issues of health and risk.
Two different kinds of survey data were also available. The first survey (N=96), conducted using the Internet in the spring of 1998, focused on participants in drug-using club culture. The second survey (N=400),...
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