ABSTRACT
The chapters in this fourth part of the volume focus upon aspects of the cultural practices associated with illicit and licit drug consumption. Each explores examples of the ways in which drug consumption can be understood as a popular cultural practice, embedded with other practices, as part of everyday life (South 1999). In each chapter, we find that concepts of identity have an important bearing upon how drug use is understood and related to other elements of popular culture. Each chapter provides important clues as to the processes at play when individuals integrate their ‘drug styles’ within the self-narratives that, according to the contemporary social theories discussed in Chapter 1, they continually construct and re-construct. While Chapter 11 considers the relationship between ethnicity, urban music and drug use, Chapters 12 and 13 place gender in the foreground. Chapter 14 retains a focus upon gender, but returns to the question of how distinctions between the licit and the illicit in drug use are policed but also subverted.
