Appropriate Drugs

This chapter investigates the interviewees’ perceptions of the legitimacy of their own and others’ drug use. Here, the initial focus is on prescribed drugs and their connections to legality and propriety, but also to sickness and control. The division between medicines and drugs, and thus also their effects and cultural frameworks, is analysed as elusive and as the responsibility of patients to assess for themselves. The interviewees’ approach to drugs is analysed in a particular time and place, contemporary Sweden, where psychiatric medication is common and often prescribed. However, some interviewees resist such medications. For them, the use of illegal drugs, paradoxically in the light of their reputation, represents health and self-control. These women describe the use of illegal drugs in an appropriate way as having to do with personal strengths, but a closer look reveals that these “strengths” are in fact class-based resources.