Students’ non-medical use of pharmaceuticals to manage time in everyday life crises

Abstract

This article examines students’ narratives of lived experiences with non-medical uses of prescription pharmaceuticals (NMUP) and analyzes how their experiences of time in everyday life influence the meanings they ascribe to their NMUP. The analysis draws on sociological notions of time and 28 in-depth qualitative interviews with young adults (age 20-30), who have used pharmaceuticals non-medically while enrolled at a university or college in Denmark. The article focuses on how a majority of students associate their NMUP with situations in which they experience urgency and a crisis of temporal agency due to their inability to pursue perceived necessary rhythms of studying or resting. It examines how these students consider NMUP a normative exception yet employ pharmaceuticals to manage their embodied and everyday life rhythms in order to relief senses of urgency and re-gain temporal agency. The article suggests the notion ‘everyday life crises’ to account for how students reflect that the time pressure associated with the experience of urgency relate to their everyday lives’ temporal practices, structures and norms. In conclusion, the article suggests that the analysis of NMUP as a practice embedded in everyday living highlights the relevance of conceptualising NMUP as ‘time work’ and suggests that future prevention campaigns should focus on students’ experiences of temporal conflicts in everyday life.