buffer-overrun

“Punk also has a tendency to romanticize drug use and mental illness, and Ive met plenty of people who have pretended to have anxiety or depression because everyone in the scene isn’t supposed to be normal.”

[Note: I have some experience in various punk and druggy scenes in the 90s, but I think I’m basically talking about the biases of the larger culture, and particularly youth culture, and the way they get reproduced in subcultures.]

I am really ambivalent about the idea of “romanticizing” or “glamorizing” drug use. I’m assuming the poster is talking mostly about coke, speed, heroin, etc. (since I’d don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about romanticizing weed, at least not since the Club des Hashishins). So you’re talking about really stigmatized activities.

There may be a certain air of mystery around, particularly, injection drug use and maybe there’s a mythos of noble adventure, of one man (always man) against the rest of the world, but that doesn’t seem to apply to actual drug users. 

I knew a girl (more raver than punk) whose well-respected punk boyfriend pulled a knife on her when he found out she’d been shooting heroin. And people were like, yeah, heroin’s pretty bad. And I, as a woman who was also shooting heroin, just worked that much harder to hide it from that guy, instead of standing up and yelling THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

And drug users themselves may romanticize their use, but it’s not like they were the ones who created the air of mystery. About ten years ago, I was doing street outreach in Tompkins Square Park, and it seemed to me like getting injection advice from an older lady who was outside the scene had a sort of demystifying effect for a lot of traveler kids. It’s not an occult rite; it’s a lay medical procedure with pretty significant risks and a lot of ways to screw it up. Risk mitigation is pretty unromantic.

And, I don’t think I ever met anyone who was faking mental illness, particularly not depression and anxiety, which in my opinion basically affects everybody in our messed up culture.

Maybe there was a normalizing of self-medication. A general equating of professional mental health care with The Man. Though, at least in the 90s, the mental health care that dual diagnosis people got was pretty abusive and terrible, particularly if you didn’t have good insurance. A lot of bad shit had happened to a lot of people I knew, particularly if they were queer and/or women and/or had been homeless for any period of time, and there just weren’t a lot of good resources, whether or not they were “too punk for that shit.”

I’m actually really conflicted about romanticization. Like, we know stigma is hurting people. Making it harder for them to quit or even get their drug use to a level they can handle (plus any interaction with the criminal justice system is just going to make people’s life worse). But there’s some point where a person’s behavior is objectively bad for them, and framing the discussion in terms of societal stigma just isn’t helpful. And I’m sure that drug use seemed pretty fucking romantic to me when I was a pup, or, duh, I wouldn’t have tried it. And then once you’re using drugs, it seems like the only alternative to romanticizing is public shaming. And not even about bad things you’ve done, but just the drugs themselves.