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Abstract
In 2007, a young woman, Annabel Catt, died after consuming a capsule sold as “ecstasy” that contained para-methoxyamphetamine. In this paper, we describe how this death was depicted in online drug-user communities and illustrate how the meanings of drug use are negotiated in online settings. News articles, public online discussions, and online fieldwork formed the data. This paper demonstrates how dominant drug discourses may be resisted by drug users, drawing on theories of health resistance and Kane Race's concept of counterpublic health. Online environments may offer ways of engaging people who use drugs that acknowledge both pleasure and safety. The study's limitations are noted.
THE AUTHORS
Monica J. Barratt, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, based in Melbourne, Australia. Her research primarily explores the role of networked digital technologies in the lives of people who use drugs. Her research interests include: novel psychoactive substances, anonymous online drug marketplaces, impacts of legislative change, social supply, small-scale cannabis cultivation, online participatory research, and digital ethnographical and mixed-methods approaches.
Matthew Allen, PhD, is Professor and Head of School, Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. Matthew is a researcher of the social and cultural consequences of increased public communication and information exchange in the era of the Internet and related networks. Most recently he has been working on the meaning of Web 2.0, and is currently undertaking research into the way identity and presence are established online. He is a former President of the international Association of Internet Researchers and was inaugural Head of the Department of Internet Studies at Curtin University.
Professor Simon Lenton PhD, MPsych(clin) is a Deputy Director at the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University and works part time as a Psychologist in private practice. His research interests include bridging the gap between drug policy research and drug policy practice, illicit drug use and harm reduction, naloxone for peer administration, drugs and the Internet, impact of legislative options for drugs, and drink and drug driving.
GLOSSARY
Bluelight: Bluelight.ru is an international message board hosting drug discussion. It began in 1999 as a small forum focused upon harm-reduction information for ecstasy users. Since then it has grown to encompass a wide range of drug and social discussion.
Counterpublic health: peer interventions based upon embodied ethics that assume the drug-using subject seeks pleasure. In contrast, most public health interventions are based upon hegemonic moral codes that erase or demonize corporeality and, therefore, do not acknowledge pleasure.
Health resistance: the rejection of health campaigns due to their confirmity with dominant moral values (e.g., the duty to be healthy and well, regardless of one's desire for corporeal pleasures).
Internet forums: Forums are websites that host asynchronous discussion about specified topics. Usually, only forum members can post, while anyone can read the discussion. Forum content and membership are managed by moderators and administrators. Also known as online forums, message boards, or just forums.
Multi-sited ethnography: An ethnography that traces networks of people through different sites rather than focusing on one single site of fieldwork.
Neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is associated with radical free market economics achieved through facilitating free trade and market deregulation, and with challenging the welfare state. As a political rationality, neoliberalism extends market values to all dimensions of human life, including health. In societies dominated by neoliberal discourse, people are expected to care for their own health through changing their individual behaviors, attitudes, and emotions to realize optimal health and prevent illness, with little acknowledgement of alternative ways of understanding health or of environmental and systemic factors influencing it.
Para-methoxyamphetamine (PMA): An amphetamine derivative with hallucinogenic properties, PMA has been sold as “ecstasy,” but is more likely to be associated with severe harm than the MDMA that is expected to be in “ecstasy” pills.
Pillreports: An online database which hosts pill reports submitted by users (pillreports.com). Reports can be searched by type of pill, location, and outcome of report (e.g., whether the pill was thought to be adulterated).
Publics and counterpublics: A social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourses, with publics representing dominant discourses to which counterpublics are held in contrast or conflict.
Trashbag: According to the most endorsed definition on urbandictionary.com, “trashbag” is an Australian concept, describing a person who “engages in excessive behavior while partying, and generally makes a disgrace of themselves –in a good way.”
Virtual ethnography: An ethnography that occurs in online spaces and follows online networks and interactions.