Social representations of drugs among young Russians: shared common views and social positions

Abstract

IntroductionFundamental ideas about human life are inevitably related to health and illness. In the modern world, health is an important value. On one hand health could be defined in terms of absolute values: it is important to be in good health. On the other hand, good health and a long lifespan are not the only objectives of human activity. Very often, people face situations where they completely ignore grave risks to their health because they are interested in achieving other goals, and a paradoxical situation appears: while people highly value their health, their behaviour does not correspond to this value. In order to overcome this contradiction, people develop some explanations of their behaviour which defy formal logic. This argument is in favour of theoretical models that allow for the analysis of commonsense knowledge in the domain of health and illness. The contradictions can coexist perfectly with this kind of knowledge.Health also could be defined in terms of instrumental values, because good health affords people many opportunities; for example, to be included in society, to work, to have family and friends etc., in other words to have a full and varied life.As paradoxical as it may seem, illness could be also seen as a kind of value. Of course, absolute or instrumental aspects could not be distinguished in this case, illness has another signification. An ill person has the right to not work temporarily and still receive a salary (albeit in a reduced form), as well as to obtain care from others and security from society. Thus, illness indicates the relationship between a person and society; it reveals the quality of life in society and it underlines the importance of a person to society.From the macro-psychological point of view on health and illness, it was shown that when the psychological state of society lowers, people adopt a more reckless attitude towards their health. This has been clearly demonstrated in the case of alcohol and drug consumption (Makropsihhologicheskoe..., 2009).A. V. Yurevich followed this line of analysis, which he applied to the actual state of Russian society. He pointed out that anomie plays an important role among the motives of suicide and also has direct relation to the depressing statistics of drug addiction, alcoholism, and accidents... (Yurevich, 2009, p. 76). According to statistics for 2011, the groups of registered drug addicts include the following: 1) the lion's share of addicts have an opioid dependence, and account for almost 85.6% of addicts; 2) people with a cannabis dependency account for 6.8%; 3) people who use other kinds of drugs in different combinations account for only 6.2%.At the same time, there are some indications which enable us to conclude that there has been an increase in overall cannabinoid addiction during the past six years. In 2005, cannabinoid addicts accounted for 15.4 out of every 100,000 people; by 2011 this number had risen to 16.1. It represents 4.5% growth in six years (Osnovnye..., 2012). At the same time, it should be taken into consideration that the past statistics on drug users are only the iceberg, because epidemiological estimates for the real prevalence of IDUs may be 4-5 times higher than the official ones. Moreover, in some regions of Russia, the number of drug addicts may be as high as 1-3% of the total population (Kirzhanova, 2009).The current situation highlights the importance of further scientific activity in order to create effective preventive measures that will target young people. Preventive programmes in the field of public health should be based on the results of socio-psychological studies on the problem (Gurvich, 1999). In this paper we propose that effective measures could be based on the results of studies which explore the representations theory (Moscovici, 1961). According to one of many definitions of this concept, theoretically social representations could be defined as commonsense knowledge about general topics (e. …