Everyday Intoxications: A Qualitative Analysis of Young People's Alcohol and Other Drug Consumption

Much sociological research on young people's drug consumption seeks to push past the narrow public health focus on risk and harm by centering pleasure as a key dynamic shaping the motivations and outcomes of these practices. This scholarship demonstrates the limits of a myopic focus on danger by examining, for example, meaningful forms of intimacy, social connection, and generative embodied pleasures that form alongside drug consumption. This often relies on examinations of acute forms of intoxication and ecstatic pleasures, extraordinary consumption possibilities that, by positively transforming everyday life, starkly contrast with narratives of risk and harm. In this article, we ask whether focusing on ecstatic pleasures contributes inadvertently to reproducing boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary in ways that position drug consumption as exceptional—outside the realms of ordinary life or the “everyday.” Combining insights from the sociology of the everyday as the site of the mundane and the exceptional with conceptualizations of intoxication as without fixed meaning or consequence, we analyze how more mundane aspects of alcohol and other drug consumption are articulated in interviews with 40 young Australians aged 16–20. Although alcohol and other drug consumption was not an everyday practice for most of these young people in the temporal sense, we examine how they articulate it as part of everyday life by emphasizing: (1) less florid forms of intoxication; (2) routine intoxicated sociality; and (3) solitary pleasures that form part of the fabric of everyday life. We argue that these accounts trouble boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary and offer an account of youth alcohol and other drug consumption and intoxication that grapples with its potential to be considered an uncontroversial aspect of the everyday.