The First Visits

This chapter explores how the women encountered drugs for the first time, and where they went after those first encounters. Attention is paid to how these movements in space relate to class. The interviewees describe their use in spatial terms, and I elaborate on the metaphor of a gateway into drugs and the Swedish metaphor of a knarkträsk—a drug swamp—signifying problem-use contexts, as cultural reference points. A queer phenomenological analysis of the feeling of one’s feet sinking into the ground as a feeling of homeliness and orientation is compared to the complexities of sinking into drug use and/or swamp-like social contexts.