“Twenty thousand stones along the way”: a graphic representation of a drug user career based on his autobiography

The objective of this article is to construct a diagram based on the autobiographical narrative that describes the trajectory of a drug user, to allow visualizing the development of his career and dividing it into successive phases regarding the increase or decrease of self-control over drug use. The construction of a diagram allowed us to visualize the periods of increased and decreased self-control over substance use and the main factors involved. This procedure proved to be an able tool to provide a synthetic and, at the same time, diachronic representation of the user’s career, divided into successive phases regarding the increase or decrease of self-control, which we found to be dependent on the drug consumed and the personal and social context of the user.

Keywords
Drug user’s career; Crack; Autobiography; Diagram; Self-control