An uncomfortable question: what are young people telling us when they use drugs?
We usually discuss youth drug use in terms of alarm: statistics, risks, and campaigns. We rarely stop to ask what that consumption means to those who practice it. The hypothesis we explore here—developed by psychologist Javier Diz Casal in his work on social imaginaries—shifts the focus: what if the street parties, the weekend joint, or the pill were not just a matter of public health, but also a collective message that society is not quite ready to hear?
To support this reading, we must first rehabilitate a much-maligned word: imagination. And a concept derived from sociology and anthropology: the social imaginary.
Where social imaginaries come from
Interest in the imaginary and the symbolic is not new. Aristotle argued as early as the 4th century BCE that “one does not think without images.” But as a systematic object of study, the imaginary was born in 19th-century Europe, primarily in France, and later branched out with force into Spain and Latin America, where two great traditions coexist today: the French and the Hispanic.
Many authors trace the modern beginning to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and to the reflections of Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) on fantasy and the imaginary as legitimate subject matter for thought. From there, the symbolic has been approached from very different fronts: philosophy and phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer and his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), psychoanalysis and depth psychology (Jung with the collective unconscious and archetypes, Lacan), anthropology and ethnography (Gilbert Durand, Georges Balandier), the history of religions (Eliade, Corbin), and the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago School (Mead, Park, Blumer).
Diz Casal also rescues an often-forgotten figure: Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), whose idea of the “psychic unity of mankind” directly influenced Jung’s archetypes. It is a good reminder that many of the ideas we consider modern have long, non-linear genealogies.
Imagination, that undervalued asset
Western culture has treated the imagination with suspicion. Saint Teresa of Ávila called it “the madwoman of the house”; the philosophical tradition has labeled it a “mistress of errors” or the “childhood of man.” Gilbert Durand dedicated entire pages in The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary to denouncing this systematic devaluation.
Against this, it is worth remembering the other side. George Bernard Shaw formulated it with a famous image: if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be, now put the foundations under them. Every practical achievement was once something unreal, an imagined project. To despise the imaginary, therefore, is to give up on understanding part of how we function as individuals and as a society.
The price of that contempt, argues Diz Casal, drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis—a precursor to the concept of social imaginaries—is that we stop seeing the entire symbolic network that organizes the collective beneath the surface. For Castoriadis, the life of the modern world responds to the imaginary just as much as any culture of the past. And the Galician sociologist Juan Luis Pintos defines it precisely: social imaginaries are “those socially constructed schemes that allow us to perceive something as real, to explain it, and to intervene operatively” in what each society considers reality. In short, they are what make visible what is not seen at first glance.
Consumption as an implicit discourse
This is where the tool becomes useful for our topic. If social imaginaries bring invisible aspects of collective life to light, it is worth asking about the implicit discourse behind youth substance use.
The questions multiply: is it just a game, a recreational weekend element? Is there an attempt to express something emotional that finds no other outlet? What social needs—belonging, escapism, identity—are knotted into consumption, especially excessive consumption? What do those who use alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, or MDMA desire or imagine?
Diz Casal also points out a hurdle: drug policies framed almost exclusively through prohibition tend to obscure the objective and unbiased study of each substance. And what is not studied calmly does not disappear: the reality remains, expressed in the habits of youth, even when it appears in high-risk contexts and with patterns that harm personal development.
Critical reading
The proposal is suggestive, but it should be handled with caution. Some keys to reading it well:
- Not all consumption is a message. Reading consumption as a “social discourse” illuminates real cultural dimensions, but it runs the risk of romanticizing or over-interpreting behaviors that also respond to very concrete factors: availability, price, peer pressure, marketing, psychological distress, or dependence.
- Symbol and health are not mutually exclusive. Understanding what consumption expresses does not negate its risks. A pattern can be both symbolically significant and detrimental to physical or mental health, especially during developmental years.
- Beware of generalizing. “Youth” do not consume in a single way. Motivations, substances, and contexts vary enormously, and mixing them into a single narrative can hide more than it reveals.
- The framework matters. Criticism of policies centered on prohibition is reasonable, but the alternative is not the absence of a framework, but rather approaches based on evidence and harm reduction.
From a harm reduction perspective, what is relevant is not only deciphering what consumption says, but supporting those who use drugs with honest information, without moralizing or apology, and paying special attention to signs of problematic use. If the consumption of someone in your circle—or your own—interferes with daily life, it is advisable to seek professional support or public addiction services.
In conclusion
Looking at youth consumption through the lens of social imaginaries does not solve the problem, but it changes the question: instead of limiting ourselves to counting and prohibiting, it forces us to listen. As sociologist Emmánuel Lizcano wrote, “the imaginary educates the gaze, a gaze that never looks directly at things: it looks at them through the imaginary configurations in which the eye feeds.” Perhaps starting to listen to that implicit discourse is the first step to understanding it—and to responding better.
This piece is inspired by Javier Diz Casal’s essay on social imaginaries and substance use, and engages with authors such as Durkheim, Bachelard, Castoriadis, and Pintos. Citations are attributed to their original works without links when a reliable URL is unavailable.
