Last October, the Daily Mail ran a story about a disappointed 13-year-old who found a message in a bottle on the beach. 'Dan and Dan was here 1/10/16 12.19pm out our nuts on cocaine! Massive love for the sesh! Lots of love sesh gremlins,' it said. His mum was not happy.
Over the past year the phrase ‘the sesh’ has become ubiquitous online. Facebook is full of sesh meme pages. There’s
which has nearly 100,000 followers.
For the uninitiated, the term is a reference to going to a mate’s house with a group of friends - either after a night out or as a night out – and then proceeding to cane loads of drugs for hours at a time: mostly coke, MDMA and weed.
Of course, the sesh is hardly a new thing but it has definitely evolved. Taking drugs was once an activity that people who connected over specific music genres did together whilst in clubs, at festivals, raves or gigs, now it’s not necessarily attached to specific scenes. The sesh has become a scene in its own right. ‘It used to be that you were a clubber or you identified with a certain scene,’ says Anna Ross, who runs the Scottish Drug Policy Conversation Think Tank. ‘Now - from what I know - taking ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis appears to be quite normalised. It’s fairly normal for people to take class As along with alcohol at uni’. Getting mashed is, itself a subculture now.
Ross - who was involved in drug culture in the '80s and '90s - says people have been on the sesh since party drugs were invented. She reckons its appeal is ‘replicating your childhood in an adult setting’ by ‘talking for eight hours through the night, combined with all the body rushes you're getting... and getting up to antics’.
She explains this creates a sense of family amongst the people in the room. ‘The more often you do it together, the more you see each other in quite vulnerable states,’ she says. ‘It brings you together. You have a crew and you look out for each other. It’s a really intimate experience.’
It’s something Jenna*, 28, can relate to. Her last proper sesh found her staying up doing coke and drinking until 1pm the next day with one of her best mates and some work friends.
‘You can end up with a lot of in-jokes and funny memories,’ she says, explaining she’s got a WhatsApp group made up of people she's been on the sesh with. ‘It's basically a mix of friends and friends of friends who I’ve met through the sesh. It's mainly just sharing funny (not always sesh-related) memes and links and I like it so much because nobody takes it seriously, it's just loads of hilarious chat and pictures being shared back and forth.’
It would make sense that people who enjoy fun shared experiences, would then want to share them on social media - especially at a time of political fear and digital isolation. Professor of Media and Culture Dave Boothroyd has done research into online drugs cultures and says that their growth is largely down to the nature of the internet. ‘It facilitates a way of finding like-minded people who can decide the group that they belong to on the basis of nuanced attitudes towards things’ he tells me.
His research has mainly been into traditional online drug taking communities like those on Bluelight and Reddit, where the discussions tend to revolve around practical ‘best use’ drug advice and safety tips. It’s the opposite to the Facebook groups, where the bonds are built over the joy of being irresponsible and connecting over specific sesh moments that people who don’t take drugs won’t relate to. He says: ‘It’s a bit like sitting next to somebody else in a club and acknowledging “oh, and you too?”.’
Jenna agrees. ‘There's all these people with “second lives” who go out and spend the weekend getting on it,’ she says. ‘Then they just work through the week and do it again. I think it's become a bit of a subculture really.’
There's also a shift in the 'respect' drugs are treated with on Bluelight vs Facebook. While Bluelight’s users are more concerned with using drugs ‘properly’, sesh memes celebrate getting fucked up in a way that would have previously been used to talk about getting wasted with alcohol.
There’s a meme in Facebook group The Sesh that shows a girl with her face covered in flour. The picture’s captioned ‘me: I’m not doing drugs tonight’ ‘me: five hours later’. More than a thousand people have tagged themselves, with public comments reading: ‘this was you all summer ya cunt never wanting to go halfs’ and ‘and this is why I am not coming rave with u’. This is an even bigger shift in the way drugs are talked about in the open online.
On Bluelight and Reddit, the chats are all anonymous. Now, Facebook group members share memes that get thousands of people publically tagging their friends in them - running the risk of their family, friends, colleagues seeing their interest in drugs. It’s surely a sign that - even if drugs laws are becoming more conservative - drug-taking itself is becoming more culturally acceptable in the UK.
I think this is partly because of the MKAT boom ten years ago. The legal high was so cheap and readily available it probably introduced lots of people who'd never have touched Class As before to club drugs. More recently, social media has played a big part in normalising drug culture. It allows talk about drugs in popular culture to shift away from the scare stories that ran in newspapers in the early noughties when our generation was entering our teenage years and towards a more public narrative that drug-users have control of - one that represents their more fun side, conveyed via shareable memes.
The more people who tag themselves in sesh memes, the more people see them, the more normalised drug culture becomes, and the more people are willing to try drugs and talk about it publicly afterwards.
Something striking is that the sesh Facebook groups brim with frustratingly sexist memes about ignoring your girlfriend when you're on sesh or women trying it on with you at the house party just to steal your drugs. What’s interesting is that senior criminology lecturer, Dr Caroline Chatwin, thinks the proliferation of public sesh culture could be a good thing for women. She thinks that women’s active involvement as a positive step for sociological research into drugs.
‘It always frustrated me that people talk about these things as “male” things’ she says, ‘because when people do research on forums like Bluelight and Reddit women don’t come forward and it’s led to research that’s male focused’. Does she think women were previously quieter about their drug use? ‘Maybe it’s just because they don’t like using Reddit, but it could also be because women have got more to lose by admitting to those behaviours.’ To Dr Chatwin, the sesh meme groups are interesting because they're home to women publically declaring that they’re interested in behaviours like getting mashed. It’s the equivalent of ‘wine mom’ memes making it more acceptable to be a mum and get drunk.
This evidence is especially important when you consider how regularly women are skipped out of MDMA studies, despite the drug being potentially more dangerous for us. However, all of this – let’s call it the mainstreamification of drug culture - and separation from music genres hasn’t been totally positive. All the experts I talked to said that people mix their drugs more now - and that doing so is troublesome.
Anna Ross says that when she was taking drugs: ‘We'd go to a club and take one pill and you'd be dancing for six hours and your body felt quite pure. Then you'd go back to an after party and have a massive session and that would involve rum and everything. But now drugs are just an add on to drinking – “Oh, we'll get a gram of coke and we'll also go out and drink five bottles of prosecco”.’ The obvious problem with this is that it can have potentially negative consequences on our health.
Amy, 26, last got on the sesh on Saturday, when she stayed up until 6am drinking cans of G&T and doing coke. She says that she worries about the impact of mixing on her health, but she pushes those worries to the back of her mind. She says: ‘I know I should drink less and take less drugs for my heart. I stopped smoking which was hard, but I'm glad I did.’ Fellow sesh-lover Jenna says she's concerned too: ‘I used to either do drugs OR drink and now, I end up just drinking loads and feel really bad the next day.’
It’s certainly a mixed bag but, ultimately, sesh memes seem to have given people the opportunity to talk about drugs in a way that’s not confined to the serious or scaremongering - and that is, on balance, a positive thing.
‘I was very pleased to see that people still look like people are having as good a time as 20 years ago,’ says Ross, who says her drug days are behind her. ‘You'd stay up all night and walk home on a Monday morning sparkling and all these grey people walking to work like: “Ohh god”.’
In the words of Dan and Dan... 'Massive love for the sesh! Lots of love sesh gremlins.'
**Some names have been changed *
*Obviously, don’t do drugs guys - if you, or someone you know needs support for drug dependency, you can seek help via the NHS.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.