crossing the rubicon: youth transitions, poverty, drugs and social exclusion

Crossing the Rubicon: youth transitions, poverty, drugs and socialexclusion

Robert MacDonald *, Jane Marsh

School of Social Sciences and Law, University of Teesside, Borough Road, Middlesbrough TS1 3BA, UK

Abstract

Descriptions of the ‘socially excluded underclass’ have listed illicit drug use amongst the plethora of social pathologies said to

typify their behaviour. Few studies, however, have explored in detail the impact of drug use on the transitions of ‘socially excluded’

youth. This paper reports research undertaken between 1999 and 2001 in a severely ‘excluded’ locale in Northeast England, which

had this as an aim. Qualitative interviews with 88 young people, and with professional ‘stake-holders’ who worked with them, are

used to interrogate some current debates within the drugs research literature. Firstly, a three-fold typology of the drug-using

behaviour of the sample is used to critique simplistic notions of ‘normalisation’. Complete drug abstinence (coupled with wholly

anti-drug views) co-existed alongside apparently widespread ‘recreational’ and ‘problematic’ drug use. At best, our evidence would

support a theory of differentiated normalisation. Secondly, a broad concept of transition, that explores youth experiences

holistically and that situates the shifting ‘choices’ of individual young people in the context of the legitimate and illegal opportunity

structures that prevail locally is used to investigate the emergence of careers of ‘problematic’ drug use. Our evidence supports the

conclusions of Parker and colleagues [New Heroin Outbreaks Amongst Young People in England and Wales (1998a)] that

normative, cultural barriers between ‘recreational’ and ‘problematic’ drug use may be being eroded and that increasing proportions

of ‘socially excluded’ youth are ‘crossing the Rubicon’ in drug careers that extend to heroin use. The paper concludes by emphasising

the value of research that seeks to situate the biographical analysis of drug careers in context (particularly of the opportunities

provided by local economies and changing drug markets) and of drugs strategies that seek to tackle the social and economic

conditions that give ‘poverty drugs’ their appeal. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Normalisation; Drug career; Problematic drug use; Social exclusion; Drug markets

Introduction

Few discussions of ‘social exclusion’ or ‘the under-

class’ have prioritised discussions of youth drug use.

Murray (1990) the champion of neo-liberal, cultural

theories, lists drug using amongst the plethora of social

pathologies which, he says, defines the welfare depen-

dent underclass in the US and UK, while the UK

Government Social Exclusion Unit (1998) has presented

drug misuse as a motif of ‘socially excluded’ places.

There has been little close analysis, however, within this

literature*/or that related to the study of youth

transitions*/of exactly how, and the extent to which,

illicit drug use can become a central element in the

‘social exclusion’ of young people (see Foster, 2000, for

an exception). This is despite the fact that rates of illicit

drug use in the UK tend to be much higher in poor

neighbourhoods (Advisory Council on the Misuse of

Drugs, 1998), that use of some of the most ‘serious’

drugs (such as heroin) has tended historically to be

concentrated in some of Britain’s most deprived areas

(Parker et al., 1988b; Pearson, Gilman & McIver, 1987)

and that ‘‘most of the new young users taking up heroin

can be described as socially excluded’’ (Parker, Bury &

Eggington, 1998a: vi, our emphasis).

This paper reports recent qualitative research that

explored youth transitions in a locality experiencing

social exclusion in extremis . Although, primarily con-* Corresponding author. Tel.: �/44-1642-342351.

E-mail address: [email protected] (R. MacDonald).

International Journal of Drug Policy 13 (2002) 27�/38

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0955-3959/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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cerned with critiquing underclass theory (MacDonald,

1997) and the social exclusion paradigm (Watt &

Jacobs, 2000; MacDonald & Marsh, 2001), illicit drug

use emerged as a central, substantive element of suchtransitions.

It should be noted at the outset that we are not

completely satisfied with the analytical purchase pro-

vided by the concept of ‘social exclusion’ (see MacDo-

nald & Marsh, 2001; Levitas, 1998). At best, we regard it

as a general metaphor to refer to the range of socio-

economic problems which poor places and their resi-

dents might face. At worst, and like the underclassconcept before it, it has become a confusing and slippery

‘catch-all’ phrase meaning ‘all things to all people’

(Atkinson, 1998: 6). Rather than use inverted commas

around this term throughout, we note some of our

reservations here. The same applies to the terms

‘recreational’, ‘dependent’ and ‘problematic’ drug use,

concepts which also have various and contested mean-

ings (see Goldberg, 1999).The paper is organised as follows: next we describe

the methods and area of the study. Then we map the

sample’s drug-using experiences into a three-fold typol-

ogy and make a brief foray into debates about drug

normalisation. Our first two categories of drug-using

behaviour*/drug abstinence and recreational drug use

are fleshed out in turn, drawing in qualitative accounts

from across our set of interviews. Then the thirdcategory, problematic drug use, is illustrated with one

cameo, demonstrating (we hope) the value of a more

longitudinal, biographically focused analysis of drug

careers. The evidence here suggests erosion of the

cultural barriers that previously separated recreational

from problematic drug use. Finally, we seek to explain

these apparently shifting patterns of drug career, paying

particular reference to changing drug markets and to thecontext of social exclusion that gives ‘poverty drugs’

their appeal.

A socially excluded area

The project was funded under the ESRC’s Youth,

Citizenship and Social Change Programme and under-

taken in ‘East Kelby’ in Teesside, Northeast England

between 1999 and 2001. The site chosen is comprised ofnine council housing estates and has a population of

30 000 people. As recently as the 1960s, Teesside was a

thriving centre of heavy industry and virtually full

employment. Economic success underpinned social

cohesion and stability. Since then large-scale restructur-

ing and redundancies have led to persistent, structural

unemployment and long-term, concentrated poverty

(Tees Valley Joint Strategy Unit, 2000). East Kelby’sresidents live in one of five ‘poverty wards’ (Glennerster,

Lupton, Noden & Power, 1999); wards that are in the

top 5% most deprived in the country (DETR, 1998). A

report on resident dissatisfaction identified two of them

as amongst the most ‘unpopular places’ to live in

England (Burrows & Rhodes, 1998).

East Kelby has some of the lowest levels of educa-tional achievement in the country. In three of its

secondary schools, less than 15% of pupils leave with

five or more GCSEs graded A�/C, compared with

almost 50% nationally (DfEE, 1999). Less than one-

third of young people continue in education after age 16

and in Orchard Bank the figure is as low as 17% (Future

Steps, 1998). In addition to problems of youth and adult

unemployment and educational underachievement, EastKelby experiences the other objective indicators of

socially excluded places (Byrne, 1995). A lone parent

heads almost half of all families and almost one in five

people suffer from a serious health or disability pro-

blem. Car crime, burglary and drug-related offending

blighted the area during the 1990s (Kelby Borough

Council, 1999; Johnston, MacDonald, Mason, Ridley &

Webster, 2000). Teesside has been dealt a full-house ofarea regeneration programmes and many of these have

been based in East Kelby: New Deal for Communities,

New Start, Sure Start, a Crime Reduction Programme

run by the Home Office, a Health Action Zone, an

Employment Zone, an Education Action Zone, and

various Singe Regeneration Budget and European

Social Fund projects.

In short, East Kelby suffers from all the ‘joined up’problems of social exclusion and has undergone the

spiralling decline that concentrates the problems of poor

areas and further separates them from more prosperous

ones (Wilson, 1987; H.M. Treasury, 1999; Power, 1998;

Lee and Hills, 1998). It provides a good, if extreme,

example of the ‘several thousand neighbourhoods and

estates whose condition is critical, or soon could be’

(Social Exclusion Unit, 1998: 1) and it should be notedthat Murray (1994) picked out Kelby as a prime

example of an area in which his ‘new rabble’ underclass

might be found.

The fieldwork and sample

The first strand of fieldwork involved interviews with

40 professional ‘stake-holders’ who work with young

people (e.g. probation officers, drugs workers, NewDeal advisors). The second was participant observation

carried out over 1 year in youth clubs, unwaged groups

and ‘on the street’. The third and major element was a

set of detailed, qualitative interviews with 88 young

people aged between 15 and 25 years (45 young women

and 43 young men). Virtually all were ethnically white

and all were from ‘working-class’ backgrounds (i.e.

typical of the population of East Kelby). This samplewas selected purposefully so as to reflect a wide range of

youth experiences. It included youth trainees, single

parents, young offenders, clients of drug advice centres,

R. MacDonald, J. Marsh / International Journal of Drug Policy 13 (2002) 27�/3828

the employed and unemployed, college and University

students and ‘New Dealers’. They were recruited via the

first two strands of fieldwork and through ‘snowbal-

ling’, whereby an interviewee would suggest others to beapproached. The interviews, which took place in, for

instance, people’s homes or workplaces were normally

tape-recorded and usually lasted for up to two hours.

Second interviews were completed with around 60% of

the sample within a year of the first. Notwithstanding

the problems often reported in gaining research partici-

pation from excluded youth, we feel that we have

generated a sample that is large and varied enough(for a qualitative study) to allow for a relatively rare

insight into the place of illicit drug use in processes of

youth transition and social exclusion.

Mapping illicit drug use: three categories and some brief

reflections on the ‘normalisation thesis’

As a starting point for our more qualitative discus-

sion, we sketch out some basic statistics. Seventy-seven

people (from the core sample of 88) provided accounts

that were deemed reliable and detailed enough to use as

the basis for a quantitative description of patterns of

drug using behaviour. Three categories of drug-using

behaviour were apparent. Firstly, 27 people reported

never having used an illegal drug. Secondly, 39reported recreational drug use (i.e. any life time use of

at least one of the following: cannabis, amphetamines,

ecstasy, amyl nitrate, LSD, ‘magic mushrooms’ and

illicit use of prescription tablets). Eleven can be de-

scribed as problematic drug users (i.e. they reported

sustained and dependent use of heroin and sometimes

cocaine).

Some points of clarification and caveats need to bemade.

First, ours was not a representative sample of East

Kelby youth and we cannot use this description of

prevalence to comment on those from representative

surveys. It is simply a starting point for a more

qualitative analysis.

Second, any typology necessitates the drawing of

discrete boundaries around sets of experiences that arenot necessarily discrete. There are differences within

these sub-groups and the boundaries between them are

not hard and fast. Another way to present these findings

would be in the form of a continuum with the complete

absence of drug use at one extreme, through one-off

experiences of cannabis use, through more committed

recreational use and*/in a few cases*/‘persistent’ use of

some of these such as amphetamine, through to one-offuse of ‘serious’ drugs such as heroin or cocaine (the two

cases of this in our sample have been categorised as

recreational drug use) to, finally, individual lives being

organised around sustained, long-term ‘problematic’ use

of heroin and cocaine.

Nevertheless, and third, most individuals could be

placed squarely within one of these three categories. Thetypology helps us to convey the complexities of our

qualitative material and to orient it toward common

categorisations and debates within the drugs research

literature.

Fourth, this cross-sectional mapping presents a static

picture of young people’s drug-using behaviour. The

nature of the interviews (which sought retrospective

accounts of transition) and the sample (which containedpeople of different ages, from 15 to 25 years) allowed us

to examine changes in individual’s drug-using behaviour

over time (i.e. their drug career). Combining cross-

sectional (horizontal) description of drug-using cate-

gories with quasi-longitudinal (vertical) description of

drug careers provides, we believe, a powerful means of

understanding the changing relationship of young

people to drug use and its consequences for otheraspects of youth transition.

Drug normalisation?

How does this schematic typology fit with popular

theories about the ‘normalisation’ of recreational drug

use amongst British youth (see Parker, Measham &

Aldridge, 1995; Parker, Aldridge & Measham, 1998b;

Measham, Newcombe & Parker, 1994; Parker & Mea-sham, 1994)? There are various foci within the drug

normalisation literature. At the simplest level, it is an

argument about the prevalence of illicit drug use by

young people. The findings of a range of national and

regional social surveys are claimed to show that the use

of an illicit drug by early adulthood is becoming a

statistical probability. A second theme concerns the

normative context of youth drug use: that there is anincreasing trend towards the normative tolerance of

drug use amongst youth. A third emphasises the

increased availability of drugs (e.g. drug offers) in youth

cultural worlds. A fourth theme refers to the prolifera-

tion of symbolic references to drugs and drug use within

the consumer cultures occupied by young (and adult)

people (Blackman, 1996; South, 1999).

On the one hand, our data seem to offer some supportfor the normalisation thesis (especially the first and

second elements of it). The largest, single category was

people who had been involved in recreational drug use.

As we document later, they operated with a cultural

orientation that emphasised its unproblematic and

taken-for-granted nature. Yet, on the other hand, there

co-existed alongside this group another significant sub-

sample who displayed complete drug abstinence andwho, as we shall also see, were normatively opposed to

drug use of any sort. Finally, this evidence suggests

relatively high levels of problematic drug use amongst

R. MacDonald, J. Marsh / International Journal of Drug Policy 13 (2002) 27�/38 29

(some sections of) East Kelby youth (in comparison

with the findings of national surveys: Shiner & New-

burn, 1999). To reiterate, this was not a randomly

representative study. Nevertheless, the simple fact of theexistence of the first category type, especially when

coupled with the coming qualitative analysis of their

views on drug use, lead us to seriously question

simplistic notions of normalisation (for more detailed

criticisms, see Perri et al., 1997; Shiner & Newburn,

1997, 1999; South, 1999). At best, our study would

support an approach that sought to theorise differen-

tiated normalisation and that paid attention to the waythat different sections of a heterogeneous youth popula-

tion are oriented towards different forms of drug-using

behaviour (Shildrick, 2001).

Observing ‘the straight law’: (just) saying no and anti-

drug attitudes

Whilst we found relatively large proportions of youngpeople involved in recreational and problematic drug

use, there remained a large group of young people (27 in

number) who proclaimed complete non-involvement in

drug use of any sort, at any time. They spanned the age

range of the sample and, as such, their reported non-use

cannot be read as an age effect (i.e. younger members

who might later turn to drugs). Typically, this group

displayed wholly anti-drug sentiments, personally dis-tancing themselves from their use and from other young

people who were users. Perhaps surprisingly, within this

group there was also a minority who professed to know

no one who used drugs and to know little or nothing

about drug issues (e.g. in terms of the real or street

names of illicit substances, pharmacological effects, and

local outlets). Leanne, who was 16 and on the point of

leaving school, said that she had never used drugs andnor had she been in a situation where they had been

offered:

‘‘I do not know about, like, knowing the names

and that. In my family, nobody. In my friend’s

family, they smoke that marijuana stuff. Some of

them will know the names and stuff. None of my

friends have tried it, none of them’’.

Most of the non-users did , however, have some

knowledge of local drug use, even if at times their grasp

of the differences between drugs, and their effects, was

shaky. The following interview extracts give some of the

typical viewpoints of the non-users:

‘‘I do know people who have sort of took drugs,

yeah. Not me friends. I have seen them*/not

taking them, but I can tell when they have been on

‘em. I never touched it. That was my straight law ,

yeah. I did have a can of lager, a drink, a laugh

with your mates but they did smoke mari. . .blow

or anything’’ (Linda, 23, parent: our emphasis).

‘‘Well, it might sound strange but I never ever had

an appeal for drugs. It never appealed. It was

never something I’d want to do. Whether it was

the fact that I might be disappointing my father if

he found out, whether it be the fact that it was

expensive and I always had better things to spend

my money on, or whether it was just stupid todo. . .’’ (Fox, 19, New Deal trainee).

‘‘One, it’s illegal and it just damages your brain,

you can get a blood clot and everything on your

brain, so. . .I would never touch it’’ (Lindsay, 17,

YT trainee)

Whilst this group of abstainers expressed opposition

to all illegal drug use, the strongest condemnation wasreserved for ‘harder drugs’ (typically heroin) and those

who used them. The flow of their commentaries

suggested that their views about heroin and heroin users

coloured their feelings about all illegal drug use. Ricky

and Kayleigh, who were both 17-year-old YT trainees,

summed up some of the vituperative feelings expressed

by many in the sample:

‘‘We hate smackheads. They’re horrible, aren’t

they? It’s just a dirty thing, innit? Injecting,

injecting yourself with shit’’. (Ricky)

‘‘I wouldn’t touch it [heroin]. I look at them and I

think ‘‘I don’t wanna be like them cause they don’t

look scruffy and they do not look after themselves

and they’re just mingin’ [stinking] and horrible’’.They have no life. They just walk about like

a. . .they do your head in’’. (Kayleigh)

Whilst abstinence was explained in a variety of ways

(and Fox, above, notes most of them), the most

frequently given explanation related to the negative

health risks that they associated with the use of drugs,particularly heroin. Heroin was the worst case drug and

several interviewees reported heroin-related deaths of

which they knew. In this sense again, they did not

differentiate clearly between the physical consequences

of different types of drug use. Drug use meant heroin

use which meant danger: non-drug use meant safety.

To understand this equation, we need to appreciate

the local cultural significance of heroin users. Theproliferation of heroin use was a central, if not the,

central theme of the interviews as a whole. There was an

over-riding consensus that area decline could be ex-


plained in terms of the influx of heroin. Young adults

favoured often quite draconian ‘policy responses’:

‘‘shoot all the dealers! That causes all the crime; the

drugs, it’s the drugs’’ (Emma, 25). Again, it is hard tosquare the idea of the increased availability of drugs

with the idea of normalisation, given the violent

opposition of many to this increased drug prevalence.

With the exception of (most) of those to whom the

label applied, young people universally detested heroin

users, as did the majority of the professional ‘stake-

holders’ that we interviewed. They were described as

‘criminal’, ‘addicted’, ‘smelly’, ‘scruffy’, ‘slouching’,‘spotty’, ‘pale’, ‘weak’ and ‘infected’. One could ‘spot

them a mile off’. At the time of our study, ‘smack heads’

had become the popular folk devils of East Kelby,

blamed for all its social ills and the decline of the place

over recent years. And in normatively disassociating

themselves from these ‘wasted youths’, to use one young

man’s phrase, this sub-sample of non-users distanced

themselves from all drug use. As a consequence, themajority of this group also distanced themselves from

theories that posit the ‘normalisation’ of drug use

amongst young people:

‘‘No, it’s not a normal part of growing up. If they

wanna be daft and take that stuff [drugs], they can

be daft, to be honest with yer. . .it can hurt yer, kill

yer. . .you don’t know what you are doing, do yer?

Not interested at all’’. (Leigh, 17, YT trainee)

RM: Some people say that using drugs is now a

normal part of growing up. . .

Whitey (16, YT trainee): ‘‘No, it’s not a normal

part of growing up. Because it is not, is it? Nowt

normal about taking drugs through yer life.’’

RM: I suppose it means normal in the sense of

common. That if you asked 100 young people,

over half would say that they have used some sort

of drugs. Normal in that sense.

Whitey: ‘‘I don’t think it’s normal.’’

‘Normal’ was interpreted as meaning ‘morally accep-

table’, ‘understandable’, ‘correct’ and was rejected in

these terms, even when an alternative definition was

offered. Whilst people like Whitey acknowledged youngpeople’s widespread use of illegal drugs (he said ‘‘it’s

swarming with drugs round here’’), they resisted offering

support for a thesis that they felt condoned what they

saw as reprehensible, dangerous behaviour and which

positioned them , the non-users, as unusual and abnor-

mal.’’

‘I wouldn’t be a normal person if I didn’t: the joys of

recreational drug use

The same question was put to Martin, a 20-year-oldjunior manager:

JM: A lot of academics have talked about how

drugs are now a normal part of growing up, would

you agree with that? Has it become a normalactivity?

Martin: ‘‘Yeah, I mean. . .//. . .

I think I did try one or two things. I have

experimented with things, even me. It’s just one

of these things you go along with. Everyone knows

someone on the street that’s actually tried some-

thing. . .it’s not peer pressure. I have never been

stuck on that. I was just inquisitive. . .

I mean I wouldn’t be a normal person if I didn’t’’.

Martin was typical of a larger group within our

sample (n. 39): those who had experience of recreational

drug use. By this we mean those people who reported

any life time use of at least one of a variety of substances

(see earlier). In line with other studies, cannabis was

reported as by far the most frequently used illicit drug,

followed by amphetamines, ecstasy and so on. There

were differences in the degree of recreational drug useamongst these 39 people. A handful of them had only

ever used one drug (cannabis) on a few occasions and

had then moved away from drug use. At the other end

of the continuum of recreational drug use was the

persistent use of amphetamine. ‘Persistent drug use’ is a

term coined by Simpson (2000) to try to capture drug-

using behaviour that is not recreational but that is also

not the problematic drug use associated with opiatedependency. A handful of our interviewees reported this

sort of sustained, daily use of substances that are not

normally regarded as inducing physical dependency.

For instance, a small group of female interviewees

claimed to be ‘addicted to speed’. Two sisters, Gail (17

years) and Carrie (21), initially announced that they did

not and had not ever used drugs. A back and forth

conversation between the two of them and the inter-viewer revealed, though, that prior to becoming a

mother Gail had been a regular amphetamine user and

that Carrie had been using speed to control her weight:

‘‘Roger [her partner] told me that I had got a fat

arse. I did lose a lot of weight. I used to take it and

not eat at all but now I can eat and sleep. It was

just to burn the excess fat, I think’’.


Since there were few obvious, overall differences

between young women’s and young men’s drug-using

behaviour and attitudes we have not dissected young

people’s drug use by gender here (see Henderson, 1999).The use of amphetamines to aid weight loss was one

such difference (and mentioned by a few young women)

as was an apparently complex relationship between drug

use and motherhood. For some women, pregnancy and

childbirth signalled the termination of drug use. A few,

however, talked about using amphetamine to help cope

with the increased physical and mental demands of

motherhood (especially where combined with employ-ment).

For recreational users, however, the typical picture

was of individuals who had consumed two or three

different substances often over a period of years,

starting in their early to mid-teens. This form of drug

use can be classed as recreational in the sense that these

young people associated these drugs with a particular

social and temporal context. Drug use was occasional(in both senses of the word): it was restricted to

particular leisure events or occasions and used regularly

but intermittently, rather than on a daily basis, as one

element in the repertoire of young people’s consumer,

‘leisure-centred lifestyles’ (Perri et al., 1997: 7). Canna-

bis, amphetamine and ecstasy use became an established

element of the youth cultural routines of ‘going out’ to

pubs and clubs at weekends; ‘‘a normal part of theleisure-pleasure landscape’’ (Parker et al., 1995: 25).

Interviews emphasised the fun, the pleasures and the

joys that came from the use of these drugs in these

contexts.

Unsurprisingly, the normalisation thesis received a

much warmer reception here than amongst the non-

users. One young woman argued that she only knew one

person who did not use drugs. Susan echoed theconclusions of Parker et al. (1995) about non-drug users

becoming a statistical minority in the future. She said:

‘‘if no kid has a go at drugs, I know it’s horrible to say,

but they are not normal cause everybody’s had a go of at

least one drug’’. Cannabis use in particular was regarded

as very common and unremarkable, to the point that it

sometimes did not register in interviewee’s minds as an

illicit drug:

Elizabeth (19, New Deal participant): I’ve never

used no drugs.

JM: Not even smoked tack [cannabis] or anything?

Elizabeth: ‘‘Oh yeah, but I don’t see that as. . .that

doesn’t harm anyone and I don’t see that as a

proper drug anyway. . .//. . .

It just doesn’t hurt anybody. You don’t see people

going round doing things after they have had a

joint, burgling houses just to get some money,

whereas with smack. . .’’

Abstainers like Linda (earlier) observed a ‘straightlaw’ of never using any illicit drug. This group were also

keen to ‘draw a line’ around their drug-using behaviour,

limiting it to recreational use. They were also equally

critical of the use of ‘hard drugs’ like heroin:

‘‘I have tried cannabis, ecstasy, you know every-

thing like that. . .But I dunno, heroin, you’re

shooting it into your veins aren’t you? I wouldn’tdare put a dirty needle in my arm. I mean you have

seen ‘‘Trainspotting’’ haven’t you? It’s more or less

what goes on. It’s disgusting. I think heroin is an

evil drug. E’s and whizz when you have it a rave or

summat, that’s alright. When you come off it,

that’s it. Heroin*/you are constantly and con-

stantly on it. You have just got to have it. It’s

disgusting.’’ (Allan, 21, unemployed)

So far our analysis has been cross-sectional. We have

reviewed non-use and recreational use as it occurred

across the sample with little attention to changing

patterns of drug-using behaviour by individuals over

time. Our typology included a third, smaller sub-group:

problematic users of heroin and cocaine. In the follow-

ing section, we turn to an analysis of their experiences.We will argue that it is difficult to comprehend them

without adopting a more longitudinal perspective on

individual drug careers. After all, none of these indivi-

duals commenced their drug careers with heroin and

many, like the informant below, previously shunned

‘dirty junkies’ in the same way as rest of the sample.

‘Once a smackhead. . .’: Richard, heroin and drug careers

Our third category refers to those 11 people who had

displayed sustained and what they regarded as proble-

matic and dependent use of opiates. They had used

heroin, in some cases combined with cocaine and/or

crack cocaine, usually on a daily basis over months and

years. The central elements of their accounts were

strikingly similar and here we discuss one such accountin order to describe in detail some of the factors we

consider of importance in analysing drug careers of this

sort.

Richard’s story

Richard was 20-years-old when we first interviewed

him in a Young Offenders Institution. We talked to him

again, 10 months later, in a probation hostel in Kelby.His mother (who worked as a cleaner) and his stepfather

(a bricklayer) brought up Richard in a council house in

Primrose Vale, East Kelby. His natural father left the


family when Richard was 4-years-old and worked

abroad as a scaffolder for much of Richard’s childhood.

More recently some contact had been re-established,

with the pair occasionally meeting for a drink on Fridayevenings.

Richard spent much of the first few years of compre-

hensive schooling involved in ‘loads of truancy’ with

friends, sometimes doing a little shoplifting to relieve the

boredom (receiving two police cautions for these

offences). He said of this period: ‘‘I think I went off

the rails a bit with my Dad being away’’. His mother did

what she could do deter his truancy: ‘‘she used to giveme a good hiding’’. At 14, Richard desisted from crime

to concentrate on his schoolwork. He gained five

GCSEs*/‘‘not great, not rubbish grades’’*/but he

could not remember exactly what these were. His post-

school labour market experiences were pretty represen-

tative of the majority of the sample: he spent time

unemployed, in the occasional low-level, low paid job

and on several Youth Training and New Deal schemes.The frequency of Richard’s changes in labour market

status (e.g. the number of times he swapped between

uncompleted schemes, employment and unemployment)

may have been higher than the majority, but the nature

of his school to work career (i.e. leaving school with

poor educational qualifications and then circulating

around the various ‘options’ available at the bottom of

the local youth labour market) was unexceptional.What set him apart from the majority of the others in

the sample*/and united his experiences with an im-

portant minority*/was his engagement with a concerted

criminal and drug-using career. Richard describes how

he and his friends made the shift from cannabis to

heroin use:

‘We had all been smoking tack [cannabis] for ages.

Ever since we were 14 or 15. We did smoke it allday and it did get to the point where it had no

effect. It was not getting us stoned. . .[so]. . .me and

my friends thought we did have a daft go at it

[heroin] and before we knew it a few of us were

[cold] turkeying and then we all were. Hooked. It’s

dead hard to come off. . .they say ‘‘once a smack-

head, always a smackhead’’. Maybe they’re right’.

He became more fully embroiled in shoplifting to

support what was now an addiction: ‘‘I was nicking

pretty quickly. I had no choice about that really. It was

the only way I had of funding the smack’’. He estimated

that he committed around 150 separate thefts from

shops in different towns around the Northeast during

this period (having been ‘barred out’ of Kelby town

centre by private security guards that were aware of hiscriminal record). At one point he was making around

£300 per day from the selling on of stolen goods and

‘‘most of it was going on heroin’’.

Richard was ambivalent about heroin. He acknowl-

edged that it was ‘‘a bad drug’’ in terms of its wider

consequences for him and his family, but he quickly

added that he:

‘‘liked it. . .I thought it was good and I was having

it everyday. I thought it was brilliant. Just made

you sleepy and dead relaxed. A good feeling. It

made all your worries and that go away. . .//. . .but

when I look back now I just wish I had never done

it. . .//. . .it’s affected me mentally as well as physi-

cally. It just puts me to shame. I feel a lot of guilt. Ijust feel sick for what I have done to her [his

mother], like what I must have put her

through. . .You just don’t think about what you

are doing when you are on smack. You don’t think

about anything else at all. All you think is

heroin*/where do you want to go for a mooch

[to thieve], where to score a bag [purchase heroin],

where to do it [to administer the drug]. If youpinch off your sister, you don’t think about it. It’s

a vicious circle. When you stop, you start to think

about it. I don’t want to get into it no more’’.

When he was 18, Richard tried to get off heroin. He

had some short-lived success, with the help of a

methadone programme accessed though the local drugs

service. In late 1999, his mother accused him of stealing

some her jewellery (which Richard denied) and askedhim to leave the family home. He became homeless,

staying with his sister and then sleeping rough in a

derelict house for several weeks. At this point he was

hospitalised following a violent assault by a group of

young men. His doctor arranged for Richard to move

into hostel accommodation, shortly before Christmas.

This step in his housing career precipitated a further

stage in his drug and criminal careers, as he explained ina tearful interview:

RM: So what went wrong?

Richard: ‘‘Well, I was just like down, you know,

‘cos it was the first time me Mam’s kicked me

out. . .I felt low and sick cause I wasn’t with meMam over Christmas. . .I was in the hostel for

Christmas and New Year and I got mixed in with a

few lads who were on drugs and, like, I was having

a go now and again and I ended up an addict so I

had to go out and burgle for it and that’’.

RM: So straight back into heroin?

Richard: ‘‘Yeah, and I ended up getting caught

‘cos I was no good at it, as I now know!’’


Richard was charged with commercial burglary

(smashing a window and stealing a pair of shoes from

a shop). The first interview with him was when he wason remand awaiting a court appearance on this charge.

He saw imprisonment as a ‘definite choice*/to do me

rattle [the physical withdrawal from heroin dependency].

The solicitor said that I could get bailed to me Mam’s,

but I wanted to go inside to help me get off it’. He

received a 3-month sentence and was released in April

2000. Shortly afterwards he was prosecuted for a further

shoplifting offence and spent another period on remand.Perhaps because of a particularly sympathetic report

from a Probation Officer (which Richard showed us), he

then received a non-custodial sentence, part of the

conditions for which involved residence in a bail hostel

and participation in a methadone treatment programme.

We interviewed him for a second time in this hostel,

where he reported making a determined effort to ‘go

straight’ and to resist the lure of heroin, which was mademore difficult by the constant temptation provided by

co-residents continuing to use (without the knowledge of

Probation staff). Asked why he recurrently had relapsed

into heroin use, he said:

‘‘It is ‘cos I do not occupy myself. No job to keep

me busy. It does me head in just wandering

around. Nothing to do. So I end up knocking

around with me old mates. I just get back into it. Idon’t have enough to do. I just hang around here.

Play pool. Go to me sister’s. I need more purpose.

I want to go to college. I wish it would come

around quicker. . .’’

His aim to re-enter education was a vague one. He did

not have a particular college or course in mind. He spent

his days completing some basic literacy worksheets(provided by his Probation Officer), administering a

daily methadone dose, undergoing tests (to detect illicit

heroin use), visiting his sister and looking forward to

occasional drinking sessions with his father. His main

ambition remained to be re-united with his mother, who

still resisted contact with her son, and to ‘‘have grand

kids for her one day’’.

Enter the dragon: youth transitions, drug careers and drug

using categories

We suggest that the sociological concept of ‘career’

(Becker, 1963; Berger & Berger, 1972; Coles, 1995) to

map changes in drug-using behaviour within an indivi-

dual biography provides for a more powerful theoretical

approach than can be found in studies that onlyconsider patterns of drug use cross-sectionally, across

youth populations. Individual factors (e.g. family back-

ground, degrees of engagement with peer networks)

interact*/at different points in time-with the structured

opportunities facing youth (e.g. access to decent employ-

ment or training, to health/drugs services, to local drug

markets, etc.) in shaping the form and direction of drugcareers. This perspective can also reveal the way that

school to work, housing, family, drug and criminal

careers act interdependently with often unpredictable

consequences (see also Johnston et al., 2000; MacDo-

nald, Mason, Shildrick, Webster, Johnston and Ridley,

2001).

Our study suggests, for instance, that ‘critical mo-

ments’ in family or housing careers*/in Richard’s casebeing ‘thrown out’ of the family home*/can have

dramatic, negative consequences for individual’s drug

careers (in his case, periods of homelessness and hostel

dwelling that precipitated re-immersion in problematic

drug use). Unravelling and understanding the processes

whereby young people take*/or do not take*/the sort

of steps in their drug careers recounted by Richard is

one of the main contributions that qualitative studies ofthe transitions of socially excluded youth can make.

Of particular importance is the investigation of

transitions between recreational and more problematic

drug use (Gilman, 1992, 1998). Perri et al. (1997): 45)

describe young recreational users as being as ‘‘sociable,

sensible, and morally aware as non-users’’. On the other

hand, more problematic, dependent drug users have

been defined as being socially excluded and ‘‘from theedges’’ (Parker et al., 1998a). The received wisdom in the

UK drugs research literature, certainly until the mid-

1990s, saw these two categories of drug use/young

people as being largely distinct. Parker et al. (1998b):

132) claim that most young people view ‘‘taking hard

drugs and actually injecting as anathema: a Rubicon

they will never cross’’. Yet our study of East Kelby

youth shows how recreational drug use in the early tomid-teens can, as in Richard’s case, progress into heroin

dependency shortly afterwards, even when the young

people in question originally ascribed to the common,

normative view of heroin users (i.e. ‘dirty, smelly

junkies’). Local drugs workers also report seeing (in-

creasingly younger) clients whose first experience of

illicit drugs use was of heroin and nationally the age of

onset of heroin use also seems to be falling (comparedwith the 1980s) (Parker et al., 1998a).

Parker and colleagues describe how ‘‘heroin uptake is

primarily found in the poorest estates’’, how it is

associated with poverty, educational under-achievement

and unemployment and how the ‘‘basic identi-kit of the

most likely heroin user’’ is one of ‘‘poor school

performance and attendance, light parental supervision’’

and having grown up ‘‘at the wrong end of town’’. Theyconclude by saying that:

‘‘the least worst scenario is that heroin ‘trying’

does not become accommodated within the far


larger ‘recreational’ drugs scene but remains pre-

dominantly associated with ‘degrees’ of social

exclusion. The whole issue needs careful monitor-

ing and profiling’’ (1998: 45�/46, our emphasis).

The problem, though, for places like East Kelby is

that this profile of those at most risk of heroin uptake

would perfectly match a large proportion of the young

people who live there. They all experience ‘degrees of

social exclusion’. Some, as we have seen, resist entry into

drug use of any sort and for many drug careers, for the

present, extend only to recreational drugs. This andother studies have, however, unearthed accounts from

young people which would suggest that the Rubicon

dividing recreational and dependent heroin use is being

bridged by an apparently growing number of young

people in poor areas of the Northeast (Simpson, 2000;

Johnston et al., 2000). Rebecca, a local drugs worker,

said:

‘‘I see a lot of heroin users who went through that

thing in the late 1980s/early 1990s when E [ecstasy]

was out, who did the dance thing, who did that

rave scene, and did all that and then fell into

heroin use later on. They say ‘‘I cannot believe I

am here, I am so ashamed of being here because,

you know, I used to call them [verbally abuse

heroin users] and now I am one’’. If I had a poundfor every time they say that! They really honestly

think that they can [just] try it; it’s the trying, the

trying. . .’’ (her emphasis)

Changing drug markets and the appeal of ‘poverty drugs’

The micro-processes of youth transition that we have

described do not, however, occur in a social vacuum and

it is necessary to understand the spatial and temporalcontext in which they are shaped. Here we stress the

significance of changing local drug markets (see Pearson

et al., 1987; Parker et al., 1998a; Taylor, 1999).

Until the mid-1990s, Kelby was regarded as not

having a major heroin problem (Pearson et al., 1987).

It was one of those smaller urban centres that tended to

be missed out of a UK drugs research literature that

focused on the major cities and larger conurbations.Now this place ‘‘. . .not only hosts [heroin] outbreaks but

is the dealing/distribution base for surrounding towns’’

(Parker et al., 1998b: 37�/8). It is claimed to have the

cheapest heroin in the UK (Munro, 1999) and high rates

of acquisitive crime are said to be driven by heroin

(Johnston et al., 2000; see also Bennett, 1998; Foster,

2000). Drugs workers confirmed the newness of stories

like Richard’s. They said that the profile of their workhad changed over the 1990s: a shift towards serving

recreational users in the early 1990s had been reversed in

the mid to late 1990s because of an upsurge in new

heroin and (crack cocaine) referrals. One agency had

increased its staffing from 3 to 19 to cope with up to 20

new clients a week seeking consultations about heroin

use. They also described how crack cocaine ‘arrived witha vengeance’ in Kelby in 1998 and how clients now

reported using it in combination with heroin.

Police, drugs workers and young people told us how

heroin entered the Teesside ‘scene’ in a substantial way

in the mid-1990s: at exactly the moment identified as the

start of ‘‘the second wave of heroin outbreaks’’ in

Britain (Parker et al., 1998b). Heroin was available in

Kelby prior to this date but, since then, the area haswitnessed a surge in availability. Some of those inter-

viewees who were in their mid-20s and who had long-

term recreational drug using careers, reported no con-

tact with heroin when they were passing through their

teens. Other drugs (or solvents) had become their

‘‘drug(s) of choice’’. Conversely, younger interviewees

like Richard had encountered heroin at critical points in

their drug careers (and their transitions to adulthoodmore generally). By 1996, when Richard was aged 16,

heroin had become widely available in East Kelby and

he and his peer group made a speedy transition from

recreational to problematic drug use.

He said:

‘‘Heroin came into Kelby in about 1995, didn’t it?

I had a go at it in 1996. I didn’t even know it was

heroin. It was just brown powder on a bit of foil.Like tack. No one was bang on to it [knew much

about it] then. Didn’t know it was heroin or what

the risks were’’ (his emphasis)

Pearson et al. (1987) and Parker et al. (1998a) have

suggested that this lack of knowledge about heroin, the

dearth of health education campaigns about it since the

late ‘80s and the availability of cheap, smokeable heroinmay all have been factors behind the apparent suscept-

ibility of young people to this new heroin outbreak.

Local drugs workers also saw changes in drugs markets

as critical in explaining the new outbreak. One of them,

Rebecca, had been working in this field for several years.

She described how police had successfully targeted local

cannabis dealers (following tip-offs rumoured to have

come from a major local heroin supplier) and produced‘‘an absolute drought in 1996’’, how at the same

moment ‘‘someone had targeted this fucking town for

heroin’’ and how street dealers switched from trading

cannabis to trading ‘dirt cheap’ heroin to their ill-

prepared clients (under the name of ‘brown’ and bearing

a physical resemblance to cannabis resin).

This rapid transformation in the nature of the local

drugs markets*/and the apparent lack of preparednessof young people when faced with the choice of heroin*/

highlights the need for re-evaluation of national and

local drugs policies and services. Perri and colleagues


argue that effective drugs strategies must work at

‘‘empowering local networks to work with young people

in ways that engage with local youth cultures’’ (1997: 45)

and that we cannot design such strategies unless ‘‘weunderstand that the motivations of young people are

rooted in opportunities and constraints that can only be

understood at local level’’ (8). The paradox uncovered

by our research in East Kelby shows these observations

to be astute ones. Co-existing in the same neighbour-

hoods at the same time are substantial numbers of

young people who seem to have made clear anti-drug

choices and, living next door to them (sometimesliterally), young people whose lives have become

fully absorbed into problematic drug use. To understand

how and why some overcome the local cultural barriers

to problematic use where others do not, we also need to

appreciate, as Taylor notes, the particular appeal and

‘‘conditions of existence’’ of different forms of drug use

‘‘among differentiated fractions of the youthful popula-

tion’’ (1999: 86, cited in MacGregor, 2000).An important distinction emerged in young people’s

descriptions of drug use. As we noted earlier, some

described their recreational drug use in terms of the joys

of ‘leisure and pleasure’ lifestyles. Heroin users reached

for quite different words to explain its attraction. Like

Richard earlier, they talked variously about ‘‘not having

a care in the world’’ after using heroin, about it ‘‘taking

all [their] worries away’’ and it ‘‘wiping away all the badthings that have happened’’. Given the profile of the

new, young heroin users of the 1990s as the ‘socially

excluded’, and the meanings given to its use by these

informants, it is not too difficult to understand heroin’s

appeal in this context as a poverty drug; a form of self-

medication for the socially excluded, a drug that they

find compelling because its pharmacological effects

‘blank out’ the day to day realities of their socialexclusion. One of the respondents to Foster’s study of

a poor estate in Northeast England described how

‘drugs fill the void [and] make life bearable’ (2000:

322). Goldberg put it well. He says:

‘‘much of what I have observed in the field can be

best explained by the attempts of problematic

consumers to escape*/escape from the past,

from the present, from society, from their feelings,from everything that passes through their heads,

and from not having any future’’. (1999, 133)

The particular political orientation and levels of

resourcing of drugs services and strategies are of course

important in seeking to limit the personal and social

damage that can come from sustained heroin depen-

dency. For us, though, one of the long-term and morefundamental aims of a truly ‘joined up’ drugs policy

would be to tackle the social and economic conditions

that give poverty drugs their appeal; that have ‘created a

class of losers and discarded youth who continue to

provide new recruits to the ranks of problematic drug

misusers’ (MacGregor, 2000:315).

Summary and conclusions

Illicit drug use is often listed as one of the multiple

social pathologies said to typify the socially excluded

underclass. Yet our study showed that young people

who reside in a place that faces all the objective

conditions of social exclusion in extremis can possess

markedly different orientations to illicit drug use (i.e.abstinence, recreational drug use and problematic drug

use). This led us to question simplistic theories that

imply the homogeneity of young people and of drug

using behaviour and, at best, to support notions of

differentiated normalisation. The first two sub-sets*/

those who observed ‘the straight law’ and abstained

from all drug use and those who enjoyed the pleasures of

recreational drug use*/shared transitions in which illicitdrug use was largely unimportant in processes of social

inclusion and exclusion. Whilst the majority had the sort

of school to work careers said to typify the socially

excluded, this was not an outcome of their drug-using

behaviour but more a fact of the economic marginality

experienced by all young people growing up in this place

at this time (MacDonald & Marsh, 2001).

Drug use was, however, much more clearly implicatedin the exclusionary transitions of our third sub-set:

problematic users of heroin and cocaine. For a minority

of the sample, heroin use had become central to an

understanding of their unfolding biographies. For

Richard, dependency fuelled increasingly desperate

acquisitive criminality. By the age of 20, his inter-linked

drug and crime careers had progressively closed down

options for a more ‘mainstream’ lifestyle (Bennett, 1998;Edmunds, Hough, Turnbull & May, 1999; Foster, 2000;

Simpson, 2000; Davies, 2001). He had failed to complete

several government training programmes, had been

employed only once (and briefly), had been unemployed

recurrently, had become estranged from his family, had

been homeless and slept rough, had a lengthy and

worsening record of offending, had been imprisoned

twice and, at the age of 20, was living in a bail hostel,struggling to maintain his commitment to a methadone

programme and scratching around trying to find ways,

beyond heroin, to fill tedious, direction-less days.

Whilst we are not completely convinced by the

descriptive purchase provided by the concept (MacDo-

nald & Marsh, 2001), we would argue that if anyone is

‘socially excluded’ Richard is. Cases like his represent

perhaps the most entrenched forms of social exclusionand the hardest challenges that face government policy

in this field (Social Exclusion Unit, 2000). We stressed

the theoretical value and policy potential in attempting

to understand, through qualitative research, how young


people’s multiple and interdependent careers take shape

in relation to the legitimate (and illegal) opportunity

structures that prevail in a locality. Of key importance

here was the changing local drug market and the influxof heroin at a particular historical moment; a moment in

which Richard and others were leaving school and

facing the depressing limitations of the formal labour

market. Educating young people about the hazards of

problematic drug use is, of course, a laudable exercise,

as are attempts to control their supply. But given that

the social and economic experiences that gave root to

Richard’s heroin career are shared by all young peoplein East Kelby-and that more ‘excluded youth’ now seem

to be pursuing drug careers that extend to heroin use-for

us the most fundamental, long-term political challenge is

to combat the conditions of social exclusion that create

the demand for poverty drugs.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the ESRC who supported this

study (grant reference: L134251024), to the University

of Teesside, to Mark Simpson, Tracy Shildrick andColin Webster for their comments (and whose own

research has influenced our ideas), to the journal’s editor

and reviewers for their valuable criticisms and, particu-

larly, to the people who took part in the study. All

names of people and places have been changed.

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crossing the rubicon: youth transitions, poverty, drugs and social exclusion

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