The chemo and the mona: inhalants, devotion and street youth in Mexico City

This paper understands inhalant use--the deliberate inhalation of volatile solvents or glues with intentions of intoxication--as a socially and culturally constituted practice. It describes the inhalant use of young street people in Mexico City from their perspective ("the vicioso or inhalant fiend's point of view").

Even if inhalant use is globally associated with economic inequality and deprivation, there is a marked lack of ethnography. Incomprehension and indignation have blocked our understanding of inhalant use as a form of marginalised drug use. The current explanation models reduce inhalant consumption to universal factors and individual motives; separating the practice from its context, these models tend to overlook gustatory meanings and experiences.

The paper is informed by long-term, on-going fieldwork with young street people in Mexico City. Fieldwork was done from 1990 through 2010, in regular periods of fieldwork and shorter visits, often with Mexican colleagues. We created extensive sets of fieldnotes, which were read and re-read.

"Normalcy" is a striking feature of inhalant use in Mexico City. Street-wise inhabitants of popular neighbourhoods have knowledge about inhalants and inhalant users, and act accordingly. Subsequently, Mexico City's elaborate street culture of sniffing is discussed, that is, the range of inhalants used, how users classify the substances, and their techniques for sniffing. The paper also distinguishes three patterns of inhalant use, which more or less correlate with age. These patterns indicate embodiments of street culture: the formation within users of gusto, that is, an acquired appetite for inhalants, and of vicio, the inhalant fiends' devotion to inhalants.

What emerges from the ethnographic findings is an elaborate street culture of sniffing, a complex configuration of shared perspectives and embodied practices, which are shaped by and shaping social exclusion. These findings are relevant to appreciate and address the inhalant fiends' acquired appetite and habit.