Editors' Introduction Complexity: Researching Alcohol and other Drugs in a Multiple World

Abstract

In August 2013, Contemporary Drug Problems held its second conference entitled Complexity: Researching Alcohol and Other Drugs in a Multiple World in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference focused on the increasing interest in in social science and epidemiological research over the last decade. (Kate Seear's review of the conference, originally published in the September 2013 newsletter of the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs, appears as an Appendix to this special issue.) As social problems of all kinds prove less amenable to change than is sometimes suggested by the reductionist demands of orthodox positivist approaches, theory and method have turned to ways of articulating the elusive, uncertain and complex. The work of science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol and John Law (2002) has highlighted the important connection between complexity and simplification. For them, research methods almost invariably simplify that which is elusive, complex and uncertain as a means of producing apparently useful statements about issues and enacting order. In so doing, research methods (and academic writing) work to constitute reality as singular, neat and stable, eschewing the elusive, uncertain, incoherent and complex. For Mol and Law, it is vital that we, as researchers, attend to these processes of simplification, by resisting the urge to obscure the elusive and complex, and by identifying the political consequences of simplification. Issues of complexity and simplification are of direct relevance to alcohol and other drug problems, especially where processes of simplification operate to produce particular realities and truths about alcohol and other drugs, drug the risks associated with drugs and the people who use them. Qualitative and quantitative research of all kinds is, it seems, implicated in these processes. Diseases commonly associated with drug use - especially the blood-borne viruses HIV and hepatitis C - challenge simple epidemiological estimates of incidence and prevalence and straightforward understandings of the social, behavioral and biological dynamics of transmission and prevention. Quantitative methodologies wrestle with tensions between elaborative and parsimonious modeling, especially in relation to large populations conceived as a diversity of sub-groups. It is a major challenge for researchers to capture the complexity and richness of qualitative data while simultaneously generating ordered, succinct and direct conclusions. How, then, might ideas of complexity and simplification be usefully mobilized in the study of alcohol and other drugs? How and where does simplification take place? What is made through such processes? What political effects might result from these simplifications? And how might things be otherwise?The articles published in this special issue of Contemporary Drug Problems were originally presented at the Aarhus conference and all explore questions of complexity and simplification in relation to alcohol and other drugs. In the opening article, one of three keynote presentations delivered at the conference, Kane Race explores how Connolly's (2004) concept of emergent causality might be used to challenge linear (and somewhat simplistic) accounts of cause and effect that remain so prevalent in arguments for and evaluations of drug prevention. Race examines these ideas through reference to recent controversies in the policing of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, Australia, including the use of sniffer dogs to authorize stop and search measures targeting patrons. Race critically examines these practices and claims about their deterrent effects, and in so doing, makes a case for attending to the experience and activity of a multitude of elements (both human and nonhuman) that shape consumptive practices and effects. Race draws our attention to some of the unexamined assumptions about materiality, affect, and space that presently inform and shape drug policy and practice, proposing a new agenda for research practice along the way. …