MDMA Use among a Group of Friends in Oslo, Norway, between Self-Development and Social Participation: Dilemmas of a Pharmaceutical Normalcy?

Abstract

This article presents a case of self-staged, therapeutic use of MDMA (Ecstasy) in a small group of friends in Norway. The analysis focuses on the ways in which legitimacy is built for the practice, and therefore attends to tropes, assumptions, and conceptual and practical conditions of possibility involved in the participants' reflections over their drug taking. Three dimensions of these reflections are emphasised: the significance attributed to the setting of drug use, the differential representations of the psychotropic effects of MDMA and LSD, and the pharmaco-therapeutic rationality with which their MDMA use was organized and conceived. The article argues that, amid “pharmaceutical normalcy” as cultural paradigm for how health and responsibility is conceived in late modern societies, a tension arises between sociable and self-developmental modalities of motivation for recreational drug use.