This open access book explores the increasing role of psychoactive substances in contemporary
everyday life focussing on women's use. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Sweden it uses
cultural studies and queer phenomenology to analyse the women's narratives of drug use relating
to themes that encompass social legal cultural embodied and gendered perspectives on drugs
in the contemporary Western world. It examines topics such as stigma happiness children the
body gifts the drug market medication sickness and health and also the orientation of
themselves towards others to social and cultural norms to drug laws and to the substances. It
discusses how drug related spaces and directions be analysed in terms of gender and class and
how in turn the directions of contemporary society and culture can be affected by drug use.
It speaks to academics in Sociology Criminology Ethnology Gender studies Law and History.
