Paper short abstract:

My paper attempts to explore the concepts of morality, responsibility and agency in relation to psychoactive substances, using the Romanian academic environment and the lockdown and post-lockdown periods (mainly March- December 2020) as a case study.

Paper long abstract:

My paper attempts to explore the concepts of morality, responsibility and agency in relation to psychoactive substances, using the Romanian academic environment and the lockdown and post-lockdown periods (mainly March- December 2020), and in more general terms the deep, multi-layered crisis generated by Covid 19- as a case study. First of all, I intend to analyse how and why the consumption of various psychotropic substances had been accelerated in the mentioned months, underlining its meanings, goals and limitations in the mentioned cultural/social context, using autoethnography and semi-structured interviews as main methodological tools. My main intention is to explore the topic mainly via agency, collecting individual narratives from a small group of students, professors, psychiatrists from Cluj-Napoca (a Romanian/Transylvanian academic centre, where I live and work at present), attempting to find out particular reasons, purposes which motivate the consumption of these substances, as well as various significances attached to it. Secondly, an important part of the paper attempts to focus on the drug consumption related experiences, prior to the above mentioned period, paying particular attention to new meanings and understandings associated to them during the lockdown and post- lockdown periods. This paper also explores the ways and the moments they are consumed (as well as their meanings), valuing both my own experiences in this respect and the interlocutors’ ones. The special dynamics agency/ structure is also analysed at various levels in my paper.