Who Did We Interview?

The stories presented on this website are drawn from interviews conducted with 60 people living in cities and regional areas of Victoria and New South Wales, Australia. Detailed information about the people interviewed is presented in the table below.

Elsewhere on the website, basic information about each person interviewed is presented in brackets after their pseudonym. This information includes their gender, age, employment status and main preferred drug, e.g. ‘Louise (F, 19, studying, cannabis) keeps tabs on her cannabis consumption’. In this format, only the person’s preferred drug is reported, but in many cases our participants consumed more than one drug at a time or across time. More information about each person and a summary of their story can be found under Personal Stories.

The website also includes video re-enactments of selected quotes from the interviews with 20 of our participants. The people featured in the re-enactments represent only a small selection of the cultural and ethnic diversity of our participants as we were limited to choosing material from those who consented to their interview extracts appearing in video form on the website.

*Some participants describe consuming only one drug, while others talk about two or more. This table lists the drug that participants identified as their primary preferred drug.

~ Reporting of cultural and ethnic background follows the Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG), developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Cultural and ethnic background was classified according to a combination of self-reported group identification with particular cultural or ethnic groups, the participant’s birthplace and their parents’ birthplaces. For example, if one parent was born overseas and the other was born in Australia, as was the participant, and they identified as ‘Australian’, their background is classified as ‘Australian’. Details of each participant’s self-reported cultural and ethnic background, birthplace and parents’ birthplaces are presented in their biography in the Personal Stories section of the website.