Chemical Highs

Chemical Highs looks at how young people themselves develop and share with their peers a multitude of ways to maximize the pleasures and minimize the risks involved in getting high, an empowering practice that we refer to as “harm reduction from below.” Ethnographies from the Amsterdam festival and afterparty scene illuminate two patterns: young people’s efforts to creatively self-regulate to achieve “hassle-free highs,” and the potentially positive role of government policy. This context is contrasted with that of youth in Indonesia, who also seek out hassle-free highs with their peers, but live under a government that is waging a deadly war against drugs, where they have little access to harm reduction information and tools. Our team discovered that Indonesian youth are turning to psychoactive prescription drugs (PPDs) to get high, which they consider safer than illicit drugs that can lead to the death penalty, but which are also highly addictive.

Chemical Whiteness

Here we explore the chemical practice of skin whitening, a prevalent practice among young service sector workers in the Philippines and Indonesia. Chemical Whiteness investigates this problematic practice in everyday interactions, where people with darker skin are undervalued and those with lighter skin, which is considered pleasing to employers and clients, attain a higher value in the workplace. These workers are pressured to portray the good life they are selling to their clients, performing the “pleasing personality” that their companies want to associate with their services. To lighten their skin, our interlocutors apply range of expensive and often harmful products, often involving daily reapplication. While skin lightening is commonly associated with women, we discovered that in the Philippines, young men competing for positions in sales and customer service had also developed their own beauty routines with skin whitening products. While such practices are meant to increase young people’s worth in the service sector economy, like many other chemical practices explored in this book, they can lead to the further precarization of young people’s lives.

Chemical Sexualities

In this chapter, we present ethnographies from the Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and France that together show how young people use chemicals to shape their bodies, enhance their sexual pleasure, and foster their sexual hygiene. Through these intimate stories, we show how young people use chemicals to try out different sexual identities, connect with partners, enhance sexual experiences, and prevent unwanted pregnancies, as well as enhance their sexual performance. In this way, chemicals are used both as a way to relate to others and also to explore themselves. In Chemical Sexualities, we show how young people use chemicals to address their sexual needs and explore their sexual desires in four distinct ways: to shape their bodies, to enhance sexual performance, for sexual hygiene and STI prevention, and to abort unwanted pregnancies. Each of these “do-it-yourself” chemical sexualities involves various practices, which we compare and contrast across field sites to gain a better understanding of what is at stake in young people’s sexual lives.

Chemical Creativity

The microdosing of mind-altering substances, like LSD and magic mushrooms, is a trend among young creatives, who report enhanced creativity, improved focus, and other productivity-enhancing effects. This chapter, Chemical Creativity, describes how both users and researchers have been exploring the range of effects of microdosing, including through more experimental ethnographic research. Using virtual ethnography, we analyzed drug users’ narratives of their personal experiences, practices, and motivations with microdosing. We also collaborated with participants using online platforms focused on drug experimentation to generate data, combining their collective experiences while acknowledging individual expertise. Finally, we reviewed research on clinical trials that compare the effects of psychoactive substances, like LSD, with placebos. What emerges is a clearer picture of the benefits of microdosing, how dosages are tweaked, and how users engage in “harm reduction from below” by spreading their cautionary tales within the microdosing world. In so doing, we offer a glimpse into how this relatively new practice develops, as it gains popularity with both laypeople and the academic and scientific communities.

Chemical Futures

Here we turn to the strategies that young people use to prevent chemical harms, not just those related to single chemicals but also those related to the feedback loops and compounding effects generated by the multiplicity of chemicals in daily life. Chemical Futures takes as an example youth activists in France, the Générations Cobayes, and their mobilization against endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We examine what contributes to the relative invisibility of toxic risk, pointing especially to the role of corporations in generating uncertainty about scientific evidence. The ChemicalYouth project engaged in a range of collaborative, youth-led projects that demonstrate the many ways youth may be engaged in “harm reduction from below.” We suggest that a ChemicalYouth 2.0 project might involve a wider range of researchers, advisors, and laboratories, to make more visible the multiple toxicities that make up young people’s everyday lives. Finally, we argue that governments should team up with youth and complement their efforts with “harm reduction from above” initiatives to regulate unsafe chemicals and support youths’ efforts to observe the effects of chemicals on their bodies and share information with others.

Introduction

The everyday lives of contemporary youth are awash with chemicals to boost pleasure, energy, sexual performance, appearance, and health. What do pills, drinks, sprays, powders, and lotions do for youth? What effects are youth seeking? The ChemicalYouth ethnographies presented here, based on more than five years of fieldwork conducted in Amsterdam, Brooklyn, Cayagan de Oro, Paris, Makassar, Puerto Princesa, and Yogyakarta, show that young people try out chemicals together, compare experiences, and engage in collaborative experiments. ChemicalYouth: Navigating Uncertainty: In Search of the Good Life makes a case for examining a broader range of chemicals that young people use in their everyday lives. It focuses not just on psychoactive substances—the use of which is viewed with concern by parents, educators, and policymakers—but all the other chemicals that young people use to boost pleasure, moods, vitality, appearance, and health, purposes for using chemicals that have received far less scholarly attention. It takes the use of chemicals as situated practices that are embedded in social relations and that generate shared understandings of efficacy. More specifically, it seeks to answer the question: how do young people balance the benefits and harms of chemicals in their quest for a good life?

Chemical Supplementing

This chapter, Chemical Supplementing, presents ethnographies of young people who use a variety of supplements in order to optimize their health. In the Philippines, boys take multivitamins with the hope of increasing their height, reflecting the importance of stature in their society, and young professionals take expensive supplements to improve their stamina for their demanding distribution jobs in a multilevel marketing company. In fitness centers, young women use proteins and fortified shakes to achieve an idealized, lean, and muscular body. In health and vitamin stores in Amsterdam, growing numbers of young people are buying, sharing, and promoting their personal concoctions of proteins and vitamins. These supplementing practices stem from young people’s various needs: to respond to the demands of service sector labor, to recover from the strain of night work, to indulge in the pleasure of weekend raves, and to manage growing concerns about environmental toxins. By zooming in on supplementing practices of these different groups of young people, we get a clearer understanding of their shared sense of vulnerability, and of the need for better regulation of the supplements industry.

Chemical 24/7

This chapter shines a light on what happens in the dark: specifically, we present ethnographic insights from the nightlife economy and how chemicals enable youth to work “24/7.” Producers, promoters, DJs, hosts, artists, performers, drag queens, musicians, stage managers, bartenders, hospitality girls, and dancers from Amsterdam, Brooklyn, Bira (Indonesia), and Puerto Princesa (the Philippines) share with the ChemicalYouth team the various stimulants they use to stay awake and perform their jobs during non-typical working hours, and the other chemicals that they take in order to be able to sleep and recover afterwards. In Chemical 24/7 we compare and contrast the chemical practices of youth working at leisure industry sites in the global North to those of the low-income service sector and manual workers in the global South, and discuss how these different working conditions perpetuate chemical use. Our interlocutors rely on a range of chemicals for their work and social lives, and they develop practices to moderate their use in order to avoid adverse effects. Yet their practices differ depending on the availability, marketing, and policing of the substances.

Chemical Breath

Chemical Breath presents two focused ethnographies that look at the relationship between young people and the inhaling of tobacco and synthetic cannabinoids. The first comes from a group of young people in Paris who smoke electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), who refer to themselves as “vapoteurs,” and the second comes from a group of young people in Makassar who smoke synthetic cannabinoids. The young people partaking in these popular practices value the social bonding they experience; they are also bombarded with social media messages encouraging the use of these products. And both face harms that may increase the precariousness of their lives: the Makassarian youth face imprisonment if discovered, and the health consequences of these synthetics are not fully understood. Similarly, the Parisian youth also risk lung damage, as vaping, while advertised as “safer” and sought out as a means to reduce the harms associated with cigarette smoke, exposes consumers to chemicals that either are understudied or known to be threats to health. The chapter concludes by pointing how these young people’s lives would benefit from sensible government regulation.