Out of sync: Time management in the lives of young drug users

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

The paper analyzes young cannabis users’ experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees’ underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees’ social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal “outsiders” to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark.
Original languageEnglish
JournalTime & Society
Volume26
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)244–264
ISSN0961-463X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

ID: 136721873