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This paper addresses the lacuna in research on chemical use by nightlife workers by exploring harm reduction strategies among queer nightlife workers in Brooklyn, NY. Based on interviews and ethnographic research, my findings suggest that harm reduction can be effectively imagined and implemented by individuals and social groups themselves. Chemical use enables queer nightlife workers in Brooklyn to perform and produce pleasure for others, challenging the notion that functional chemical use is opposed to or separate from pleasurable chemical use. Just as nightlife workers see chemical use as made meaningful through how it enables or inhibits productivity and pleasure in specific circumstances, they often view risk and harm as conditional and emergent. Night workers already practice their own, tacitly informed harm reduction strategies, such as being self-reflective about their use, moderation and dosing, scheduling use around other responsibilities, only using chemicals at work that aid productivity, getting enough sleep, avoiding chemicals they don’t enjoy, and taking breaks from use when they feel it is necessary. Future harm reduction research and policy should begin by examining what practices of harm reduction from below already exist and attempt to strengthen them.

The use of cognitive enhancement drugs (CEDs) among university students has raised widespread concerns about non-medical prescription drug use, safety, exam cheating, and study-related stress. While much of the empirical research to date has been conducted in the United States and Australia, this article examines perceptions and experiences of CED use among university students in the Netherlands and Lithuania. Our data come from two qualitative studies and one mixed-methods study and comprise 35 semi-structured interviews (20 in the Netherlands and 15 in Lithuania) and open-ended online survey responses from a convenience sample of 113 students in the Netherlands. Employing a crowded theory approach to interpret our qualitative data, we found most of our informants turned to CEDs to enhance their studying through better concentration and time management. Students used a broad range of pharmaceuticals (with and without a physician’s prescription), recreational drugs, and nutritional supplements as cognitive enhancers, were generally well informed about the safety and efficacy of the substances they used, experienced both beneficial and adverse effects, and self-regulated their CED use to balance these effects, ensuring that their use remained moderate and thoughtful.

This article focuses on how recreational drug users in the Netherlands and in online communities navigate the risks and reduce the harms they associate with psychoactive drug use. To do so, we examined the protective practices they invent, use, and share with their immediate peers and with larger drug experimenting communities online. The labor involved in protective practices and that which ultimately informs harm reduction from belowfollows three interrelated trajectories: (1) the handling and sharing of drugs to facilitate hassle-freedrug use, (2) creating pleasant and friendly spaces that we highlight under the practices of drug use attunements, and (3) the seeking and sharing of information in practices to spread the good high. We focus not only on users’ concerns but also on how these concerns shape their approach to drugs, what young people do to navigate uncertainties, and how they reach out to and create different sources of knowledge to minimize adversities and to improve highs. Harm reduction from below, we argue, can best be seen in the practices of sharingaround drug use and in the caringfor the larger community of drug-using peers.

This study examines how experimentation with designer drugsis mediated by the Internet. We selected a popular drug forum that presents reports on self-experimentation with little or even completely unexplored designer drugs to examine: (1) how participants report their “trying out” of new compounds and (2) how participants reduce the pharmacological uncertainty associated with using these substances. Our methods included passive observation online, engaging more actively with the online community using an avatar, and off-line interviews with key interlocutors to validate our online findings. This article reflects on how forum participants experiment with designer drugs, their trust in suppliers and the testimonials of others, the use of ethno-scientific techniques that involve numerical weighing, “allergy dosing,” and the use of standardized trip reports. We suggest that these techniques contribute to a sense of control in the face of the possible toxicity of unknown or little-known designer drugs. The online reporting of effects allows users to experience not only the thrill of a new kind of high but also connection with others in the self-experimenting drug community.

With the recent legalization of gay marriage in France, the couple has become the most valued social unit in the gay community. The emergence of the “chemsex” and “slamming” subculture—which involves injecting drugs during sexual encounters—on the fringes of the gay online dating scene has thus aroused new fears and anxieties. While slamming is often portrayed as a risky, extreme, and deviant practice divorced from the sentimental norms of stable relationships, this article aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how practices of injecting drug use—and significantly, attendant practices of managing risks and harms—are entangled with the search for love and willingness to build lasting emotional bonds among young gay men. Drawing on ethnographic immersion on two gay dating sites and 25 life story interviews with gay men who inject drugs in Paris and Lyon, I argue that the link between romantic relationships and injecting drug use is anything but straightforward. The suffering and loneliness that follow romantic breakups can trigger uncontrolled drug use while feelings of “love fusion” between “slammers” can encourage further risk-taking. But romantic relationships can also provide crucial symbolic and material support to place limits on drug use in ways that reduce harm.

This article presents a theoretical critique of the notion of harm reduction on the basis of an empirical investigation of a variety of online manifestations of drug culture. Taking a multicase study approach to drug use–related forums, blogs, and “story sites” focused on novel psychoactive substances/“legal high” use and nonmedicinal prescription drug use, our analysis leads us to describe the culture of “harm reduction from below” in terms of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis. We argue that the peer-to-peer co-creation of knowledge, sharing, and support constitutes an emergent and constantly evolving form of “practical wisdom” with respect to drugs. Drawing on Flyvbjerg’s accounts of phronetic social science as a practice, which proposes a permeable boundary between theoretical and practical inquiry, and Stenger’s account of the “collective voice from below” as always embedded within an “ecology of practices,” we offer an interpretation of the online dimension of drug taking in terms of drug users’ shared aim of “doing drugs well.” The investigation of online life in terms of the multiple contexts of drug-related communicative exchange thus allows us to identify harm reduction from below as an ethical practiceinherent in a variety of online drug scenes.

Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) are growing in popularity among young smokers in France seeking to reduce tobacco-induced harms without abandoning the small everyday pleasures and social relationships that unfold around smoking. But e-cigarettes raise ideological challenges: The World Health Organization and the French Agency for Safety of Medicine and Health Products (Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament) have denied e-cigarettes the status of pharmaceutical substitution products in the cessation of smoking, while their possibilities for pleasure are seen as a threat by France’s public health council, the Haut Conseil de Santé Public. This paper discusses how different actors (policy makers, tobacco companies, and users themselves) have embraced this new technology. I argue that e-cigarettes have become a valued form of substitution precisely because they provide occasions for social bonding, gustatory pleasure, and the non-medicalized management of health with endless possibilities for individualized tailoring.