‘You can tell by the way they talk’: Analysing the language young people in Russia use to talk about drugs

Abstract

The widespread use of drugs-related vocabulary and language is a key factor in the ‘normalization’ of drug use, and one of the main obstacles to effective drug prevention policies is a significant gap in communication between young people's cultural discourses and narratives and official or state discourses concerning drugs. This is as true of post-Soviet Russia as it is of the United Kingdom. Moreover, in the Russian case, there is considerable diversity in the ‘drugs talk’ of different groups of young persons. The gap between official and the various youth discourses impedes interaction and the development of effective social policy with respect to drugs and drug use.

Notes

1. This research was conducted with the financial support of the ESRC (Ref. R000239439). The project was a collaborative one between the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK and ‘Region’, Ul'yanovsk State University, Russia. The project was designed and led on the UK side by Hilary Pilkington and, on the Russian side, by Elena Omel'chenko. For a full report on the findings of the project see Hilary Pilkington, ‘“Everyday” but not “normal”: Drug Use and Youth Cultural Practice in Russia’, Final Report, (2004), available electronically at < www.crees.bham.ac.uk/research/everyday/FReport.pdf>.

2. See Hilary Pilkington, in the present collection, for a detailed discussion of the findings of the project and their relation to the theory of normalization.

3. This article focuses primarily on the language and discourses surrounding drugs and drug use in contemporary Russia; for a discussion of the findings of this project in relation to young people's drug use practices see Pilkington, in this collection.

4. A more detailed analysis of the specifics of the medicalization and criminialization of domestic drugs discourses can be found in the following edited volumes: Elena Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag: sotsiologiya narkotizatsii (Ul'yanovsk: Ul'yanovsk State University, 2002), and Elena Omel'chenko (ed.), Normal'naya molodezh': pivo, tusovka, narkotiki (Ul'yanovsk: Ul'yanovsk State University, 2005).

5. See Natasha Goncharova, ‘Pravo govoryashchego: Analiz literatury po problemam narkomanii v fokuse sotsial'noi politiki’, in Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag; Irina Kosterina, ‘Kriminal, skandaly, reklama i propovedi: narkomaniya i narkotiki v prezentatsiyakh SMI’, in Omel'chenmko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag; Ol'ga Dobroshtan, ‘Internet i K: Obzor anti-narkoticheskikh saitov’, in Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag; Natasha Kremneva, ‘Programmnoe reshenie problemy narkomanii’, in Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag; Tat'yana Levagina, ‘Smysl v lovushkakh slov’, in Natasha Goncharova (ed.), Polevaya kukhnya: kak provesti issledovanie (Ul'yanovsk: Simbirskaya kniga, 2004), pp.67–78.

6. That is, the language used when discussing drugs in a range of easily accessible, mainstream media: for example, the mass media or educational and governmental publications.

7. For a more detailed discussion of the stages and forms of personal drugs use, see Pilkington, in this collection.

8. Levagina, ‘Smysl v lovushkakh slov’; Omel'chenko (ed.), Normal'naya molodezh'.

9. A concern with and the possibility of going beyond the academic environment and attempting to utilize findings from empirical research within practitioner and policymaking spheres was central to the ESRC seminar series ‘Transnational Issues; Local Concerns’, as outlined in the introductory article to this collection (by Flynn and Oldfield).

10. Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: The ‘East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

11. See Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (London: Penguin Books, 1994), Russian edition, translated from the English by S. Yerofeev (Kazan': Izdatel'stvo Kazan'skogo Universiteta, 1997), p.38.

12. ‘Anna’ is a pseudonym.

13. Yevgeniya Luk'yanova ‘“Aktivy” i “passivy” regional'noi antinarkoticheskoi politiki: otsenki ee effektivnosti s tochki zreniya kontseptsii sotsial'nogo kapitala’, in Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag, p.146.

14. In this section analysis of texts from two books, Geroi(n) nashego vremeni and Trinadtsatii shag, carried out by Tat'yana Levagina is drawn upon: see Elena Omel'chenko (ed.), Geroi(n) nashego vremeni (Ul'yanovsk: Ul'yanovsk State University Press, 2000), and Omel'chenko, Trinadtsatii shag). The author would like to offer her sincere thanks for help in the preparation of this article.

15. For example, the new youth media (magazines, television programmes, and internet sites) emphasise drug use as a form of relaxation and entertainment. Drug use is presented as a reality of life, as something ordinary and everyday. A central theme is ‘adults will never understand you anyway’. For further discussion of this see Dobroshtan, ‘Internet i K’.

16. Luk'yanova, ‘“Aktivy” i “passivy”’, p.146.

17. Our research findings showed that 45 per cent of schoolchildren and students who took part in the survey had friends or acquaintances who had tried drugs. Of these, half knew of people within their friendship group who were either currently taking drugs regularly or had done so in the past. A quarter of respondents had been offered drugs free of charge and 11 per cent had been in this situation more than once. Fifteen per cent of our respondents had friends who had offered to sell them drugs, and five per cent knew of people in their group who had been forced to take drugs. Almost a third of respondents know that drugs are available or around in the places where they generally spend their free time; 16 per cent had seen drugs being sold as well as being used in these places. Twenty-six per cent of the young people involved in this study had got so used to this that they no longer paid attention to the presence of drugs either within their friendship group or in the places where they spend their free time. Finally, 21 per cent had tried drugs themselves, for the most part various forms of cannabis. However, two per cent had already experimented with heroin, and about the same number with tablets: Yevgeniya Luk'yanova and Natasha Goncharova, ‘Vchera – rekord, segodnya – norma!’, in Omel'chenko (ed.), Normal'naya molodezh', p.28)

18. Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag, p.79.

19. Tat'yana Levagina, ‘Gosudarstvennaya antinarkoticheskaya politika: epokha perekhoda’, in Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag, p.98.

20. Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag, p.70.

21. Omel'chenko (ed.), Trinadtsatii shag.

22. Luk'yanova and Goncharova, ‘Vchera – rekord, segodnya – norma!’.

23. Gopnik is a term used (mainly by ‘alternative’ youth) to refer to provincial (or capital peripheral) ‘louts’ who gather around the courtyard of their block of flats, close to their school, or in the basements of houses: see Hilary Pilkington, Elena Omel'chenko, Moya Flynn, Ul'iana Bliudina and Elena Starkova, Looking West: Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002), p.253.

24. Churki primarily refers to migrants from the Caucasus (Azeris, Chechens) and to a lesser extent from Central Asia (Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens). Chechen-, Turkmen- and Afghanophobia is characteristic of a mythologized discourse where moral panic in relation to drugs combines with a xenophobic mood that exists in relation to migrants in Russia.

25. The word tusovka, related to the verb tusovat'sya, refers to a form of youth cultural activity where a group ‘gathers’, ‘gets together’ or ‘hangs out’: see Hilary Pilkington, Russia's Youth and its Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.226.

26. See Pilkington, in this collection, for a more detailed discussion of attitudes towards heroin among young people, both those with and those without personal experience of heroin use.

27. This refers both to contradictions between adult and youth discourses, and to contradictions between different adult discourses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Omel'chenko

Professor Elena Omel'chenko has been director of the ‘Region’ Research Centre, Ul'yanovsk State University, since 1995. Her research interests include contemporary practices, including drug use, among contemporary Russian youth. She is joint author (with Hilary Pilkington, Moya Flynn, Uliana Bliudina and Elena Starkova) of Looking West? Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures (2002).