A new article by DruGS Program Lead Adrian Farrugia in collaboration with Mats Ekendahl (Stockholm University), Helen Keane (Australian National University) and Mary Lou Rasmussen (Australian National University) explores young people’s articulations of alcohol and other drugs and intoxication as part of everyday life.

This article responds to a research dynamic in which much sociological scholarship on young people’s drug consumption seeks to move beyond the narrow public health focus on risk and harm by centring remarkable intoxicated pleasures, exploring, for example, forms of intimacy, social connection, and generative embodied capacities that emerge alongside drug consumption. This research often relies on examinations of acute forms of intoxication and ecstatic pleasures, extraordinary consumption possibilities that, by positively transforming everyday life, starkly contrast with narratives of risk and harm.

While an earlier publication from this project examined similarly evocative accounts of pleasure and fun, these young people also described drug use and intoxication in different terms: as a routine, even mundane, part of everyday life. Combining insights from the sociology of the everyday, which attends to both the mundane and the exceptional, with conceptualisations of intoxication as lacking fixed meaning, this article examines accounts that trouble the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary often used to categorise youth alcohol and other drug consumption. In this way, it grapples with the possibility that such consumption may be understood as an unremarkable aspect of everyday life.

Turning attention to these less remarkable (or remarked upon) experiences, the article suggests that a research focus on extraordinary risks or pleasures may not only obfuscate these other possibilities, but contribute to a sense in which young people’s consumption is exceptional to everyday life and, as such, necessarily calls for similarly extraordinary forms of intervention regardless of how these practices have (or have not) impacted other parts of life. As lead author Adrian Farrugia says,

Over the years, many young people have directly told me that their drinking or drug use is ‘no big deal’. Taking this idea seriously, we decided to explore its implications for both public health and critical sociological research on youth alcohol and other drug use. Overall, we hope this article offers some preliminary steps toward approaches that engage with the many ways these practices take shape in young people’s lives, rather than assuming they inherently warrant intervention.

Other publications from the same project

Farrugia, A., Pienaar, K. & Dennis, F. (2026). Narcofeminist affects: Gender, harm and fun in young women and gender diverse people’s experiences of alcohol and other drug consumption. The Sociological Review, 74 (3), 583 – 602.

Farrugia, A. (2025). Agency, sex and drug education: Examining the response-ability of education responses to consumption, sex and harm. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 29 (6), 821 – 837.

Farrugia, A. (2025). ‘Something serious’: Biopedagogies of young people, sex and drugs in Australian drug education. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 33 (3), 905 – 201.

Farrugia, A. (2024). ‘Drug education as a site of sexuality education’ in L. Allen and M. L. Rasmussen (Eds.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of sexuality education (pp. 1 – 9). Palgrave MacMillan, Cham.

Farrugia, A. (2023). Under pressure: The paradox of autonomy and social norms in drug education. International Journal of Drug Policy, 122, 104194.