Drug Use and Self-Medication

Drug Use and Self-Medication describes a practice with more than one function: Steef explicitly presents marijuana as his daily means of coping, while Peter encounters drugs through renewed companionship, curiosity, and the pressure not to stand apart. The contrast matters. Substance use offers a temporary route out of isolation, but the novel places that release alongside unresolved grief and the risks concealed by Steef’s confidence and professional authority.

Steef’s Daily Medicine

Steef describes marijuana not as an occasional indulgence but as his daily medicine, saying it has carried him through his deepest lows. He also presents different substances as serving different settings: ecstasy belongs to parties, where it makes people feel intensely attracted to one another, and cocaine is something he uses only occasionally, in what he considers the right company. His account gives drug use a practical, self-soothing logic, but it also links that logic to sociability and heightened pleasure rather than to a single, clearly bounded medical purpose.

His relaxed account is complicated by his work as a police officer. When Peter asks how an officer can obtain drugs, Steef explains that drugs can come into police possession during arrests and seizures. He says large quantities are handed over, while a portion may be kept for private use rather than destroyed; he also recounts that drugs have been left in his pocket during a search and suggests that some colleagues share what they find. The story presents this as Steef’s own explanation, not as independent confirmation of police practice. His casualness blurs the boundary between law enforcement and personal access, making his assurance of expertise part of the invitation—and part of its unease.

Smoking as Companionship

A joint creates one of the novel’s quieter forms of intimacy between Steef and Peter. Steef rolls it, adds a makeshift filter, lights it, and passes it over. Peter has not smoked for sixteen years, but recognizes the warmth in his throat and the spicy smell; he finds the experience pleasurable. They smoke down to the improvised filter, and their silence feels to Peter like a wordless pact between men. The moment is not presented as a cure for either man’s difficulties. Its immediate effect is social: a shared ritual makes closeness possible without requiring either of them to explain himself.

That pact is interrupted when Rebecca calls Steef back to his own party. His laughter and quick movement toward her restore the scene to the larger group. The transition shows how the joint operates within a social world of touch, teasing, and shifting attention, not in isolation from it. Later, when Peter reflects on grief, he says that he and Eva have made new friends, that he has returned to music and motorcycling, and that they seem to have found a new balance. Yet visits to Hetty bring the misery of the past back into view. The text places this fragile resumption of ordinary life beside the drug scenes without claiming that smoking itself has resolved Peter’s bereavement.

An Invitation to Try Ecstasy

The possibility of ecstasy enters through a group conversation. Eva says she would like to try it, and Steef offers to arrange it. Rebecca immediately recommends that the four of them take it together in a trusted setting, with music, food, and drinks. She warns against buying pills in a nightclub, saying that she knows a reliable source and that she and Steef have experience. Her proposal turns drug use into a planned shared occasion, framed as safer because of familiarity, company, and controlled surroundings.

The scene’s broader atmosphere matters: Peter has been getting used to being naked among other people and describes the experience as freeing and slightly rebellious. When Eva accepts the joint, he is surprised by how readily she smokes. Her request to try ecstasy extends that movement toward new experiences, while Rebecca’s plan binds the four adults together in a private social arrangement. Peter does not immediately agree; he laughs and takes another drag to buy time. The hesitation preserves a difference between being drawn into the group and having settled on what he wants.

Peter’s Half-Pill

At the Amsterdam ArenA, the plan becomes an immediate decision. After the group has eaten burgers outside, Steef searches his pockets and unfolds a piece of paper containing two small pink pills. He offers one to Peter because he cannot take it inside. Peter laughs nervously. Steef tells him that ecstasy will intensify a good mood, advises against taking it when depressed or paranoid, and reassures him that they are together and nothing can happen.

Steef breaks a pill in half, and Peter accepts the piece. Peter does not identify a considered personal reason for taking it; instead, he wonders whether every foolish act needs a good reason and says he does not want to be a killjoy or a conventional civilian. Steef takes a whole pill, and they share the last of the bottled water before joining the queue. The details make Peter’s choice neither a solitary act of self-treatment nor simply the result of a prior plan: it happens in Steef’s company, at the threshold of a concert, under the pressure of belonging and the assurance that someone experienced is beside him. The passage records the decision and its circumstances, rather than establishing a subsequent effect.

Grief, Bodily Memory, and Limits

The book sets these episodes against the continuing presence of Lieve’s death. Peter returns to her grave after staying away since the funeral; there he places a white rose against her stone and feels guilt rather than the love he thinks he ought to feel. Eva maintains the grave and later visits it with him, keeping her grief close through the flowers and the ritual of speaking to their dead child. These scenes do not show either parent using drugs to manage that grief. They instead prevent the reader from mistaking sociability, pleasure, or renewed activity for the disappearance of loss.

Eva’s distress also persists in ordinary routines. At work, the children distract her from bodily sensations that make her fear she could be pregnant; on difficult mornings, she holds a photograph of Lieve and draws strength from the thought that she can still visit the grave. Her account of coping is therefore grounded in work, memory, and repeated contact with the loss, not in Steef’s chemical means of relief. Across these contrasting responses, drug use is neither a universal answer to suffering nor a single moral category. It can be Steef’s stated daily support, a shared gesture that gives Peter temporary access to companionship, or an impulsive step taken to avoid standing apart. The novel leaves those functions distinct, and leaves the grief that surrounds them unresolved.