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Abstract
The article examines the relationship between cannabis use and identity in interviews with 25 experienced users working to control and limit their cannabis use. The participants had reduced their cannabis use, but they did not disavow cannabis or their previous lifestyle involving frequent use. Cannabis added to their identity by signalling independence and free-thinking, and quitting was not a desired or legitimate goal. Reducing cannabis use is a bittersweet process, connected to leaving an unrestrained lifestyle behind, and accommodating reduced drug use within more traditional lifestyle frameworks. It also involves a struggle to maintain an identity as cannabis user while changing drug-using practices. The findings call for an understanding of the relationship between cannabis use and identity that is different from what is typically described in natural recovery studies. The cannabis users in this study did not fit the descriptions of recovering addicts with spoiled identities in need of repair. Instead, they were cannabis users who did not smoke (as much) at present but still identified with the drug and their former use of it.
Notes
Notes
1. For a critical discussion of the use of the term ‘spoiled identity’, see Neale et al. (Citation2011).
2. Hans Jæger (1854–1910) was a Norwegian writer and anarchist. He was the leader of a bohemian group living in Kristiania (Oslo) in the 1880s, and he was prosecuted for several sexually explicit novels and literature of social protest.