Acting through anecdotes: Stories of drug use as coping in view of narrative criminology

Sammanfattning: The framework of narrative criminology promotes the perspective that narratives,in addition to shedding light on past conduct and experience, have the ability toserve as actions themselves, but also to influence behavior (Presser, 2009). In thisstudy, I applied the theoretical and analytical framework of narrative criminologyto identify and examine notable characteristics in stories, or narratives, of illicitdrug use as a coping strategy. To elicit these stories, I conducted threesemi-structured interviews in the context of Malmö, Sweden centered around thetopic of drug use as coping, and identified three narrative ‘themes’ common to allthree stories. I further analyzed these themes to locate 1) cultural narratives, 2)how the participants negotiated agency and 3) how they employed narrativestrategies to make sense of their relationship to drugs as of today. The findings ofthe current study lend support to many of the cornerstones of narrativecriminology, suggesting that cultural narratives present in the dominant discoursecan be located in individual accounts, but also that the adoption of certainnarratives can promote change. I have highlighted that a narrative focus mightserve as useful in drug treatment and that harm reduction and the promotion ofmental wellbeing should be the main concern of Swedish drug policy, and thatwhile narrative criminology is a useful framework for locating the effects onstories on behavior and drug use specifically, it should still be utilized in tandemwith other available theoretical devices in criminology.