Working on her dissertation is a bit difficult at the moment. Pure bad luck. At one skydivea birthday present from her family, Nikki de la Rie broke the wrist of her left hand in the wind tunnel. “One-handed typing is difficult with capital letters and all kinds of things,” she says. “So now I just write by hand the old-fashioned way.”
Her office at home in Nieuwegein is full of archive boxes and folders that portray a time: coffee shops, hippies, squatters, boxes with inscriptions such as ‘raids’ and ‘house dealer’. All of the alternative youth culture in posters, folders, cassettes, clippings and books.
De la Rie (60) conducts research at the Open University (OU) into Dutch drug subcultures, based on oral historyconversations with those involved and those boxes of sources that fill her office. Her research covers the period between two Summers of Love: those of 1967, the beginning of the hippie era, and 1988, when house music conquered the nightlife and popularized the new drug ecstasy. Historical research into drug use and the subcultures associated with it is a small but growing academic field. The focus of De la Rie’s PhD defense is the question of how the ‘democratization’ of ‘alternative’ drug use got underway in twenty years.
In addition to being a cultural scientist, De la Rie is an expert by experience. From the age of fourteen she was “first half a hippie”, later she played (“barely”) guitar in a punk band and ended up in the gothic industrial scene. “I still like loud music.” In the dissertation she also includes her own drug history, from cannabis to LSD and ecstasy. “There was a comic shop where you had to ask for a certain comic book and then you would get a price list with mushrooms in front of you.” Fortunately, she is “not prone to addiction” but has “tried everything, like many people of my generation.” After working in childcare for years, she obtained a master’s degree in cultural studies from the OU with a thesis on gothic youth culture in Utrecht. Her supervisor encouraged her to pursue a PhD in the subject.
In her research, De La Rie now examines how the entanglement of drug use with an ‘alternative’ lifestyle arose. “We are all drug users, whether we smoke, drink or swallow. What interests me is the stigmatization of certain substances that were once legal but were ‘made into drugs’, whose users could be branded as antisocial or criminal. Conversely, you see a certain romanticization of them in the subcultures where they are used.”
A legacy of the sixties…
“There has always been a relationship between drugs and non-conformism. You see it emerging in the Netherlands in the 1950s with artists and musicians discovering hash and LSD. This intertwining of drug use with an anti-bourgeois lifestyle became established in the 1960s and 1970s, although major differences quickly emerged between subcultures. In my research, squatters preferred to talk only about squatting, or at most anonymously about drugs. While certain groups of squatters were really part of that lifestyle.” She laughs: “Sometimes during meetings it was agreed who would get speed afterwards, that was an agenda item.”
Bad for their image?
“It was wrong with their social self-image: fighting against housing shortage. Drug cultures also have a web of unspoken rules and hierarchies. LSD adepts looked down on the uninitiated, the beer drinkers, in an old, elitist way. They had ‘psychedelic capital’, with a reference to the ‘cultural capital’ of [de Franse socioloog Pierre] Bourdieu. Users who injected heroin in turn looked down on ordinary smokers, they ‘dared more’ and used that ‘injection capital’ to mark their position within their own in-group.”
But capital and stigma are an extension of each other when it comes to drugs. De la Rie noticed this when looking for interview candidates. “People often don’t really want to talk about it. Ultimately it worked because I also come from that world, reached out to my old network and the ball started rolling when people heard from each other that they could trust me.”
When you hear stories about the 1970s now, you sometimes wonder how it was possible
What is the biggest shift?
“The democratization of drug use. There is still some alternative to it, but recreational use has also become the norm for completely other groups. The partitions between subcultures have also become much more porous. It was in the seventies not done to go from blues to disco or vice versa. Now you can enjoy an evening gothic are and then back to one psy tranceparty or something else. Subcultures and identities have become much more fluid. This is reflected in drug use, there is now much more poly-use: people use everything, when and where they feel like it. But still, a relationship with non-conformism or not wanting to be ‘normal’ has remained. You can already see that with coke-snorting Zuidas lawyers who look down on the average Vinex citizen.”
It is a paradox of today, says De la Rie. “Young people can get drugs very easily these days, and the nightlife industry has also grown enormously. At the same time, I have the impression that young people are much less free than when I grew up. The pressure to make it in life is enormous. When you hear stories about the 1970s now, you sometimes wonder how it was possible. A girl bursting into tears in class: sorry teacher, I took LSD. Be careful, girl, was the response. It really was a different time. Of course, many of those teachers were only in their twenties.”
Have the interviewees changed?
“Most have not become anti-drugs, but they do warn that you should be careful with them. Those who have children do that most, indeed.”
When the research is complete you will be 62. No more academic career?
Combative: “Well, that’s what I was planning to do. Then I can continue to work for at least another five years to pass on what I have learned to students. Another prejudice: that you can no longer have a career after the age of thirty.”