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42 Chapter 3 The Gendered Drug Career Initiation and Progression in Methamphetamine Use Isabella I met Isabella at a conference I attended near the city and interviewed her in a hotel room. She had heard I was presenting a paper on methamphetamine users and self-identified as a former user. She was only twenty-seven years old at the time of the interview, and her use occurred when she was younger. Isabella was best defined by the suburban youth culture category. Like many of the young suburban users I interviewed, Isabella started using methamphetamine with friends. She was from a wealthy family, and both of her parents were professionals. Isabella spent her high school years in a boarding school, and her mother bought her a house in a guarded community while she attended a two-year college. After four years, her mother finally suspected that her daughter was on drugs and withdrew her support. Isabella possessed social capital that gave her access to both conventional and nonconventional resources. Although her story revealed a weak bond with her family during her drug-using years, she appeared to effortlessly make new acquaintances with people from all walks of life. Her ability to connect across social barriers helped her to become part of a vast drug-using network that included dealers and producers. However, the detached way she talked about her life, including her friends, acquaintances, and boyfriends, indicated that her emotional bonds to these people were not strong. For example, she said early in the interview that she had a “step-sister, a brother, and a halfsister ;” yet she never mentioned them again in her two-hour interview as she talked about intimate details of her life. In contrast, she described years of shifting from one social network to another. It was this ease of making connections that enabled her to associate with a variety of drug dealers, but it also helped her leave her old drug-using networks without looking back. Isabella’s drug trajectory started slowly. She was not part of a popular drug-using subculture in her juvenile years and described being an outsider Initiation and Progression in Methamphetamine Use 43 in high school. When she was first introduced to marijuana at age fifteen, she did not like it. Instead, she said, she “loved” the effects of LSD and Ecstasy, “It was just a new experience . . . it was an escape from reality.” When a friend introduced her to methamphetamine, she liked it immediately. The circumstances surrounding this incident provide more insight regarding her reasons for using this drug the first time. As she described it, her low selfesteem was made worse by an abusive boyfriend: How was he abusing you? Physically? Mm-hmm [yes]. And emotionally . . . If it wasn’t physical, he said things to me. I think it’s partially the reason I started using meth as well. I was just—he had convinced me that nobody else would want me. I was really, really overweight. I was almost three hundred and thirty pounds. And my self-esteem was just nothing. And I think it was a combination of just low self-esteem coming from myself and almost being afraid to leave. He had threatened to kill me, and I mean it was ugly. How were you introduced to methamphetamine? The meth? It was actually [a friend]. We were supposed to, all three of us were supposed to be going to a concert called Oz Fest, and it was the night before we were supposed to go up there to [Big City], and he got very physical with me and left bruises up and down my legs. I just called her and asked her if I could go ahead and come up there ’cause I left. And she just said she was going to get something, and she came back, and she had it [meth]. And I was just like what the heck. You know, I’ll do it too . . . I was euphoric. I mean I just felt like nothing really mattered and I could relax for probably one of the first times in a long time. Isabella said that her mother, who she described as a “psychology major,” took her to the doctor because she suspected she had attention deficit disorder (ADD). She was diagnosed with ADD but appears not to have taken medication for it very long. However, when she described why she liked methamphetamine, she indicated effects similar to those of medication used for ADD...

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