Abstract
Programs and policies are increasingly framed by the logics of “evidence-based policy,” a term subject to critical scrutiny and change after it emerged as an explicit valuing of specific types of quantitative data as objective, and a devaluing of most types of qualitative data. The transfer of “evidence-based” approaches to drug policy was mobilized by a distrust of people who use drugs, and of people who work with them. This distrust remains important, but contemporary policy also mobilizes individual narratives and lived experience through the growing use of biographical stories. Contemporary drug policy, like other policy areas, is also increasingly constituted by changing forms of technology, through new types of data use and data linkage, and of digital and social media. In this article, we consider the current and likely future impacts of changes to policy. We examine two Australian policies: the Australian Priority Investment Approach to Welfare (Try, Test and Learn), and the child protection reform, Their Futures Matter. Both use the “investment approach” to calculate policy costs and aims, represent important developments in the policy figuring of populations, and affect the well-being of many people who use drugs. Based on analysis of these policies, and interviews with people who use drugs who participated in a qualitative study on blood-borne virus serodiscordance, we ask, what are the likely effects, risks, and benefits of these changes for people who use drugs and others subject to public scrutiny and distrust? We argue that as long as the stigmatization of drug use remains prevalent, it is unlikely that the potential for more sophisticated and just recognition of the complexity of drug use will find a place in the forms of information and knowledge recognized in policy as evidence.
Highlights
Drug policy is constituted by policy formation and implementation across several sectors, including health, justice, human services, housing, and education
Evidence-based policy emerged from the discipline of medicine as an explicit valuing of specific types of quantitative data as objective and generalizable, and a corresponding devaluing of most types of qualitative data
The transfer of “evidencebased” approaches to drug policy was mobilized by a distrust of the capacity of people who use drugs, and of practitioners who work with people who use drugs, to provide reliable accounts of their own lives
Summary
Drug policy is constituted by policy formation and implementation across several sectors, including health, justice, human services, housing, and education. People with lived experience of homelessness, out-of-home care, and prison are invited to participate in policy and advocacy forums, as are representatives of Indigenous communities and LGBTQI communities (PIAC, 2019; State of Victoria, 2019) This recognition of the value of lived experience is far from routine in all policy arenas, it is untenable for new policies to be implemented without at least a gesture toward consultation, collaboration, and, increasingly, “co-design” (Australian Government, 2019b). These developments in policy sit alongside long-standing efforts in the social sciences and humanities to capture first-person stories of lived experience. Research methods in these disciplines are mobilized to do analytic justice to both experience itself and the strategies that people use to narrate it
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