Weekend Offenders: Clubs, Drugs and Deviant Leisure in Post-socialist Romania

During recent years, leisure can no longer be strictly associated with the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘pleasure’: a critical perspective offered by the recent theory of ‘deviant leisure’(Smith and Raymen, 2016; Ayres, 2019) shows how the relationship between leisure, freedom and pleasure is no longer clear, and how, in the context of late capitalism consumption, a part of leisure activities imply harm, exploitation and vulnerability. Throughout the article I tried to follow the deviant cultural component of the drug use leisure activity in the context of clubbing, going through the concept of depressive hedonia (Fisher, 2009). The depressive hedonism scene among Bucharest clubbers is defined by extended club ‘marathons,’ FOMO (‘fear of missing out’), and the ‘injunction to enjoy,’ where harm and hedonism go hand in hand. For Romanian youth, recreational drug use becomes an element of subcultural capital which is different from their parents’ culture, as well as an (experience) consumption marker of class distinction, Western and trendy.