Students’ non-medical use of pharmaceuticals to manage time in everyday life crises

Abstract

This article examines students’ narratives of lived experiences with non-medical uses of prescription pharmaceuticals (NMUP) and analyzes how their experiences of time in everyday life influence the meanings they ascribe to their NMUP. The analysis draws on sociological notions of time and 28 in-depth qualitative interviews with young adults (age 20-30), who have used pharmaceuticals non-medically while enrolled at a university or college in Denmark. The article focuses on how a majority of students associate their NMUP with situations in which they experience urgency and a crisis of temporal agency due to their inability to pursue perceived necessary rhythms of studying or resting. It examines how these students consider NMUP a normative exception yet employ pharmaceuticals to manage their embodied and everyday life rhythms in order to relief senses of urgency and re-gain temporal agency. The article suggests the notion ‘everyday life crises’ to account for how students reflect that the time pressure associated with the experience of urgency relate to their everyday lives’ temporal practices, structures and norms. In conclusion, the article suggests that the analysis of NMUP as a practice embedded in everyday living highlights the relevance of conceptualising NMUP as ‘time work’ and suggests that future prevention campaigns should focus on students’ experiences of temporal conflicts in everyday life.

Keywords:

• Non-medical use of pharmaceuticals
• temporality
• students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to Professor Geoffrey Hunt and Assistant professor Jeanett Bjønness, both from The Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, for very helpful comments and constructive feedback on earlier drafts of the article.

Notes

1 This article uses the term ”non-medical use of pharmaceuticals” (NMUP) to refer to the use of prescription drugs without a prescription, or for other purposes, or in other ways than it has been prescribed by a doctor. This is in line with a larger share of the research literature on non-medical use whose definitions of the phenomenon refer to either modes of acquisition or motives for consumption. Yet the definition can be problematic (Dertadian, 2019) as it can cover practices with diverse lived meanings: such as the boundaries between what users or professionals consider to be medically legitimate and illegitimate uses or acquisitions of drugs and between what users or others experience or define as recreational and therapeutic uses (Dertadian, 2019, p. 79). While a definition of something termed ‘non-medical’ might better include specific empirical definitions of the term (e.g. Degenhardt et al., 2008, p. 8), a qualitative study like the one presented in this article who draws on the commonly used definition can provide useful insights into the role of lived experience and social and cultural context on the meanings of drug use.