This year the project Tales from the Drug Closet starts, with funding from HERA. The aim is to collect online stories about personal experiences with drug use. The project is linked to the ongoing European research project Governing the Narcotic City, in which Gemma Blok is one of the principal investigators. In Tales from the Drug Closet, Blok works together with two partners: the Amsterdam-based Poppi Drugs Museum and DANS, the national expertise centre and repository for research data. Together, they have developed a web application for digital storytelling.
Tales from the Drug Closet hopes to entice more people to share their stories: “regular” Dutch people who use drugs occasionally, or perhaps (periodically) struggle to limit their use; just as many people do with alcohol. Do people use drugs purely for fun, or do intoxicants also have a function in their self-development, or in relation to work and family? What shades of grey are there between positive and negative experiences? More insight into this is needed for a better understanding of drug use as a social and cultural phenomenon, but also for the formulation of an informed drug policy.
In this project, DANS supervises the drafting of the Research Data Management Plan, and we take care of the archiving of the research data generated using the application. An important point of attention is to guarantee the privacy of the storytellers in the way they agree to.
More information
Read more on Tales from the Drug Closet here.
