Normality,Belonging and Welfare Inclusion among Young People with Drug Problems: A Commentary

“Am I worth it?” by Andersen, 2025 offers an analysis of how social investment discourse operates not merely as a policy paradigm, but also as an interactional frame shaping encounters between young people with drug problems and welfare institutions in Denmark. By focusing on how young citizens come to present themselves as either “good investments” or “wastes of money”, the study moves the social investment debate beyond questions of policy efficiency and measurable outcomes, toward the lived moral consequences of governing through economic rationality.

This commentary approaches the study's contribution through a focus on normality and belonging. While these concepts are not explicit in the article, the analysis show how social investment discourse shapes who is defined as a worthwhile participant in welfare programs and who risks being positioned as out of place. From this perspective, the study sheds light on how welfare programs for young people with drug problems actively draw moral boundaries around inclusion and exclusion.

A central contribution of the article is how it shows welfare encounters as spaces where expectations about normal life trajectories are made visible. Within a social investment framework, young people are assessed not only on the basis of need, but also on their perceived capacity to move toward education, employment and self-sufficiency (Walther, 2006). In the study, this is reflected in the distinction between being positioned as a “good investment” or a “bad investment”. Young people framed as good investments appear as redeemable and future-oriented, and capable of returning to a socially recognized everyday life, while those framed as bad investments are marked as deviating from these expectations and positioned as too unstable, too risky or too costly to fit the anticipated trajectory. For young people with drug problems, this distinction is particularly consequential because drug problems already places them at the margins of what is commonly considered normal youth behavior (Karlsson et al., 2019; Shildrick, 2002).

When read through the lens of normality and belonging, the article highlights a key tension in contemporary welfare provision for young people with drug problems. On the one hand, social investment frameworks aim to promote inclusion by supporting young people in returning to education, work and stable lives. On the other hand, by attaching support to expectations of future returns, they risk narrowing the space for those whose lives do not easily align with these expectations.

This tension raises broader questions about Nordic welfare ideals. Welfare systems in the Nordic countries have traditionally been built on principles of universalism and needs-based support (Kersbergen & Kraft, 2017; Kildal & Kuhnle, 2007). However, this analysis invites reflection on how social investment rationalities sit with these principles when translated into everyday welfare practice. When belonging within welfare programs becomes contingent on perceived future worth. There is a risk that support shifts from being a shared social responsibility to a selective investment. For young people with drug problems, this may mean that access to care is subtly shaped by moral judgments about normality, responsibility and potential.

What is particularly striking, is how Andersen (2025) study inspires questions about how normality and belonging emerge not through explicit exclusion, but through subtle assessments of fit. The distinction between being seen as a worthwhile or a questionable investment does not only affect access to services. Instead, it shapes how young people come to understand whether their lives are moving in the “right” direction, or whether they are falling further away from what counts as an ordinary life. In this sense, welfare programs become sites where young people's everyday struggles with substance use problems are evaluated not only as problems to be addressed, but also as indicators of whether they can still be imagined as part of a shared social future.

“Am I worth it?” captures a question not only implicitly asked by welfare institutions, but also increasingly by young people themselves. By showing how social investment discourse can make this question central in welfare programs for young people with drug problems, the article draws attention to how ideas of normality and belonging quietly structure who feels supported, who feels marginal, and who feels able to imagine a future within the welfare system. For Nordic alcohol and drug studies, the article invites further reflection on how welfare programs can support young people with drug problems without reinforcing narrow expectations of normality or future academic, economic or social achievement, and without undermining young people's sense of being able to live an ordinary life on their own terms.