Caring for “Hassle‐Free Highs” in Amsterdam

Abstract

In this article we present some of our ethnographic findings from the city of Amsterdam, where health authorities and practitioners have implemented harm reduction strategies that build on and reinforce young drug users' practices of selfregulation and care. Amsterdam's harm reduction policies build on the premises that harm is not a direct, always present consequence of recreational drug use and that harm reduction strategies will be more effective when they engage with the collective, material, and affective practices constantly evolving within drug-using communities. This approach to caring for drug-using youth is "unsettled" in two ways. In light of both, the city carefully tailors drug information campaigns to speak to the lived experiences of drug users. First, it concerns finding the right balance between warning drug users about negative effects and acknowledging that they are seeking and experiencing positive effects. Second, it concerns the ever-changing market for recreational drugs. Ethnographic fieldwork in the ChemicalYouth project sought to better understand the lived experiences of young drug users and what they do to minimize risks. We identified five distinct and interlocking self-regulation techniques that youth themselves employ and share with their peers in their quest for "hassle-free highs." [Amsterdam, care, drugs, harm reduction, youth] Caring can be unsettling when it concerns caring for young people who use psychoactive substances for fun. As schools, parents, municipal health institutions, and drug authorities try to protect teenagers and young adults from harm, they must navigate between the Scylla of criminalizing recreational drug use and the Charybdis of unintentionally endorsing it. The theory and practice of harm reduction emerged out of efforts to combat the spread of HIV among injecting drug users and evidence from successful needle exchange programs in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia in the 1980s. Although the needle exchange programs did not stop people from shooting up, the nonjudgmental provision of information and

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