Critical Drug Studies Research Articles

Putting tendencies and trajectories to work: useful tools for engaging with accounts of change and recovery?

Dominant understandings of recovery emphasise personal responsibility for initiating and sustaining changes in people's subjectivities and relationships to alcohol and other drugs. However, this potentially obscures the complexities and temporalities of change processes and the range of socio-material elements involved. Addressing this gap, critical drug studies scholars have productively employed the concepts of tendencies and trajectories to analyse how past events of drug consumption flow into current and future consumption events. Critiquing notions of personal responsibility within recovery processes, we apply the concepts of tendencies and trajectories to help explain recovery's emergence and continuities. Doing so helps decentre the individual as the agent responsible for improved capacity by broadening the perspective of developing health and wellbeing. In this paper, we provide a qualitative analysis of interviews with fourteen people with lived recovery experiences within an urban-rural setting in Melbourne, Australia. This analysis illustrates how recovery tendencies and trajectories are cultivated through repeated actions, habits, and practices over time. Applying the concept of trajectories to change narratives reveals how accumulated moments precede and follow turning points, supporting shifts in consumption patterns. These moments are not necessarily connected but, when considered collectively, contribute to a recovery trajectory and assemblage of health. In reflecting on the affordances of thinking, researching and doing with recovery tendencies and trajectories, we argue that analysing tendencies and trajectories illuminate opportunities where change lies within an endless combination of human and non-human forces. Applying these concepts to recovery research, practice, and policy engages with temporal and socio-material elements of recovery, offering a more emancipatory approach than is currently provided by common recovery theories and approaches that assume individuals are personally responsible for change.

Cripistemologies of Drug Use Against Transinstitutional Carceral Ableism

Across Canada, thousands of drug users are dying from a toxic illicit drug supply resulting from oppressive drug policies and regulations that reinforce the prohibition and criminalization of drug use and the pathologization and rehabilitation of drug users. Bringing together critical drug studies and critical disability studies, the article contributes cripistemologies of drug use to unpack some of the ways transinstitutional carceral ableism conjoins control strategies of punishment-therapy-abandonment to unite both medical and carceral approaches to disability and drug use that have debilitating and deadly consequences. Against transinstitutional carceral ableism, the article mobilizes cripistemologies of drug use to trouble and reject the disposability of non-rehabilitated drug users central to medical and carceral approaches and instead favour consensual and pleasurable drug use via care practices grounded in interdependence, mutual aid, and solidarity.

“Staying with the Trouble” in Ontopolitical Research on Drugs

Trouble seems to be characteristic of contemporary politics and life. From the environment to the pandemic, crises of political credibility around the world, conflict on social media and the drama of so-called “cancel culture”, avoiding or settling trouble seems more unimaginable than ever. Yet, as the theme of this conference makes clear, trouble is not always negative, especially when posed in verb form. To trouble preconceptions, orthodoxies or alienating norms can be productive, exciting and transformative. This is as much the case in research as in any other area of life. Troubling our founding assumptions, our research questions, our theories and methods is the way we move forward, even if it is not always easy or immediately rewarding. In this keynote presentation I will reflect on my own engagements with forms of scholarly trouble, drawing on the work of Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the trouble (2018) to identify key ways in which we as researchers may “embrace trouble” in useful and productive ways. Thinking through some central propositions articulated by Haraway in her engagement with other scholars, such as the importance of storytelling, the value of grieving, and the uses of response-ability, I will offer a range of examples drawn from my own work in critical drug studies and ontopolitical research to highlight the promises and pitfalls of trouble. In doing so, I aim to acknowledge the opportunities I have enjoyed over the years to be part of the innovative and courageous field of critical drug studies, of which the Contemporary Drug Problems conference is also an important part.

An object-oriented analysis of social apps, syringes and ARTs within gay Taiwanese men’s chemsex practices

Critical drug studies explore the discursive and material dimensions of sexualised drug use to overcome individualised and often pathologising notions such as risk, safety, responsibility and pleasure. This article uses an object-oriented approach—following the use and flow of social apps, syringes and antiretroviral therapy (ART)—to analyse gay and bisexual Taiwanese men’s drug practices. Interview data from fourteen men are used to articulate how objects were brought into gay and bisexual men’s chemsex repertoire in ways that shaped individuals’ safe-sex communication, intimacy maintenance and stigma negotiation. An object-oriented approach scrutinises risk, pleasure and identities in assemblages of the human and nonhuman, and can help identify new opportunities for implementing health promotion interventions and policies.

Transnationalizing Critical Drug Studies

This essay explores transnational STS as an analytic capable of recognizing the heterogeneities, pluralities, and relationalities of drugs—legal and illegal, products of agriculture or laboratory—as emblematic material-semiotic actors that move between global North, West, South, and East and into and out of bodies. Critical drug studies flourishes as a transdisciplinary knowledge project at the nexus of anthropology, history, sociology, political science, and other knowledge projects. This article situates critical drug studies in relation to the interdisciplinary knowledge project that is transnational STS and to postcolonial, postpositivist, and decolonial STS. The paper responds to the prompt offered by the organizers of a stream of papers in 2020—on “Transnational STS” for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): “What becomes visible when nation-state as the only analytic breaks down? What is the role of the nation-state with regard to education, research activities and the regulation of technologies in the contemporary period?” This article deals with the bifurcated regulation of drugs as technologies made legal or illegal by a global colonial, imperial, and nation-state-based regime that has made global drug policy since the early twentieth century. We are witnessing the reconfiguration of this regulatory system within and between nations—making a transnational analytic frame necessary for recognizing the relations facilitated by global drug policy.

Figuring Things Out: Contemplating Drug Addiction and Disclosure In and Out of the Field

From 2017 to 2019, I conducted fieldwork on the opioid crisis in upstate New York. As part of my research, I interviewed people who use/d opioids. Interviewees discussed their beginning use, escalating use, and, for many, eventual sobriety. Throughout research, I reflected on my own drug consumption and attempts at moderation and abstinence—mostly regarding my heavy use of alcohol. I tracked my reflections in a field diary, writing over 200 entries. Yet, like many ethnographers, I extracted the notes out of my final research write-up. In part, my lack of disclosure was perhaps due to my being in what James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente refer to as the contemplation stage of change: I was unsure how to identify myself as a person who uses/struggles with drugs and alcohol, and I was not ready to commit to long-term sobriety. Whether I disclosed or not, such contemplation did affect my fieldwork: it shaped my motivation to pursue drug research and advocacy; my relationships and interactions with participants; and ways I navigated harm reduction and sober support spaces. After over 2 years of being out of the field (and now in a state of long-term sobriety), I revisit my field diary through autoethnographic exploration. In doing so, I place contemplation within the growing conversation on reflexivity and disclosure in critical drug studies.

Instrumentalising therapeutic and enhancement drugs as pharmacological technologies with politicogenic drug effects

This paper continues to develop ‘drugs as instruments’ framework by reviewing Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical drug studies and anthropology of pharmaceuticals literature that frames drugs as pharmacological technologies. By discussing especially human enhancement drugs (HEDs) this approach is situated in the new materialist turn in critical drug studies. All drugs, medical and nonmedical, are framed as pharmacological technologies and discussed as nonhuman actors. When discussing drugs as technologies the paper will focus generally on their ‘social effects’ which include extra-pharmacological variables. These extra-pharmacological variables include what the author refers to as politicogenic drug effects, meaning effects that derive from contemporary drug policing.

The Spaces Between Fault/Lines: Collaborative Politics of Addiction in Japan

In the last decade, the Japanese welfare system has dramatically expanded health-care services and introduced new therapeutic programs for people diagnosed with addiction problems. Staff and members of volunteer-led non-profit rehabilitation centers (known as DARCs) together with medical professionals, developed pilot clinical therapies and critical studies of current clinical models. By encouraging encounters between professionals and DARC volunteers, these programs serve as a basis for new social and economic welfare policies. They incorporate critical assessments of causality and responsibility in the context of social marginalization and the lack of medical care. Scholars of Japanese welfare and a wider scholarship of governmentality and drug policies have analyzed deinvestment in marginalized populations by focusing on medicalization and criminalization. However, the Japanese therapeutic expansion produced alternative experiential, moral, and medical understandings of drug use, as it enabled grassroots participation through new forms of citizenship, peer studies, and alliances across medical, penal, and welfare fields. This article therefore focuses on how grassroots activists engage with medical professionals and welfare officials through self-studies and research about these collectives. Drawing on the anthropology of addiction literature and critical drug studies, and 6 months of anthropological fieldwork in Japan, I interrogate the emerging collaborative politics of addiction in Japan, focusing on alliances between various actors and institutions, the organization of care in a time of economic abandonment of marginalized social classes, and the making of grassroots solidarity. Finally, I reflect on the politics of fault and practices of space-making that characterize these pragmatic alliances. I consider these alliances as interventions into the hegemonic understandings of fault and responsibility in the context of social assistance and addiction-specific welfare policies.

Your diagnosis will not protect you (and neither will academia): Reckoning with education and Dis-Ease.

This article is an autoethnographic exploration of institutionalized responses to uncontrolled substance use informed by medical paradigms. Theoretically, it is situated within a lineage of work in critical drug and Mad studies that challenge assumptions about choice, including - and especially - by interrogating the extent to which choice is an apt conceptual tool for making sense of "addiction." Throughout, I focus on two discrete but analogous events, both of which entailed binging on substances, entering altered states, and being rejected from academic spaces through a lens of biomedicine. My objective in doing so is two-fold: First, I hope to incite what I feel is a long overdue conversation between Mad and critical drug studies in service of theoretical cross-pollination. Second, I wish to outline how codifying people as Mad and addicted can amount to a "cutting out" (Smith, 1978) of relevant extraneous factors that motivate one's deviant actions, including within education institutions whose members research these same identities. I conclude by discussing the implications of this "cutting out" for my and possibly others' academic trajectories.

Aging with drug use: Theorizing intersectionally with material gerontology and critical drug studies

Rethinking old age and what aging means within the context and materiality of drug use, this paper asks, ‘how does drug use matter in old age?’ and follows a series of conceptual arguments to link aging studies and critical drug studies with material gerontology in an intersectional analysis. To do this, four research areas are reviewed to conceptualize habitual drug use in old age. First, aging is explored through its biological, subjective, and socio-material representations. Secondly, the merits of material gerontological thinking are discussed and developed in connection to marginalization and related intersectionality representing the third and fourth areas of research, respectively. Conceptual results suggest a model of ‘embodied-drugged-aging,’ an integrated conceptual approach which neither categorizes nor abstracts aging with drug use from its social and material contexts.

Digital chemsex publics: Algorithmic and user configurations of fear and desire on Pornhub

In recent years, chemsex has emerged as both a subcultural vernacular and an orientation device for gay health promotion. Chemsex loosely describes gay men using certain drugs to extend and modulate group sex practice. In line with hegemonic responses to gay sexuality in general, most research has been grounded in problematisation, with discourse mostly returning to the question of containment. Drawing on porn, platform and critical drug studies, this article offers a corrective approach by defining a networked, cultural study of chemsex that is attuned to how chemsex erotics operate in many different (digital) intimate publics. Assembling algorithmic search suggestions, 41 videos and 450 comments, the article finds that the videos and comments found through the search function are vastly different than those found through user-generated playlists. Two competing publics form around the fear/desire-response to drug use: a cautious erotic of disinhibition and a counterpublic erotic of transgression.

Sociology and the problem of description

Howard Becker’s practice of description has been debated, critiqued and reclaimed in a range of fields including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, Science & Technology Studies, critical drug studies and more recently Heather Love’s (2015) appraisal of deviance studies. Much of this debate concerns the uses of social research methods and their political effects. Taking up these issues with the construction of social scientific knowledge in Becker’s work, this article returns to the methodological problem of description in Becker’s research on drug use. Focusing on the legacy of Becker’s empirical studies of deviance and the critiques of his research methods, it addresses the problem of description in the research process. In reviewing the methodological relevance of Becker’s problem of description as a tool for thinking sociologically, the paper evaluates the contribution of descriptive methods for contemporary sociology and knowledge production. In so doing, it demonstrates how description is transformative of objects, problems and disciplinary practices.

Rethinking enhancement substance use: A critical discourse studies approach

BackgroundWe draw on both interdisciplinary enhancement substance use research and critical drug studies scholarship to reconceptualise enhancement substance use. Our critical discourse approach illuminates how a variety of substances are positioned as tools for self-improvement. In reconceptualising enhancement substance use, we ask what different substances can be positioned as providing enhancement? How are they positioned as tools for achieving enhancement or self-improvement goals? What discursive repertoires are employed to achieve these aims? MethodsForty interviews were conducted with people who use substances, such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, cocaine, alcohol, nootropics and non-prescription pharmaceuticals, including Adderall and modafinil. To explore the meanings of and motivations for substance consumption, we apply the sociocognitive approach (SCA) pioneered by Teun van Dijk (2014; 2015) and examine language through the triangulation of cognition, discourse and society. We analyse how different substances are positioned as tools for achieving enhancement or self-improvement goals. ResultsWe identify three distinct discursive repertoires that frame substance use as enhancement: the discourse of transformation, the discourse of healing and the discourse of productivity. When accounting for enhancement substance use, our participants employ a number of discursive strategies, including ideological polarisation or ‘othering’, analogies, examples, maxims, metaphors and figurative speech. We also find evidence of interdiscursivity with most participants drawing on more than one discourse when speaking about how substances are positioned as providing enhancement. ConclusionWe conclude that the concept of enhancement has wider applicability than current understandings allow. We argue that if we reframe all substance use as providing enhancement or achieving a self-improvement goal, we have the potential to destigmatise substance use and eliminate the over-simplistic binaries that surround it.

Assembling and diversifying social contexts of recovery

Recovery from drug use is receiving increased attention in critical drug studies. Researchers point out the importance of scrutinizing the term and its meanings anew in order to better understand drug use treatment policies and their effects on the individuals they target. Informed by relational ontological thinking, this article analyses a series of empirical accounts of recovery experiences, and offers a critical assessment of the social contexts of recovery. Qualitative data collected in Azerbaijan and Germany provide distinctive reports of the differentiated experiences of youth as they make and re-make sense of their recovery within specific recovery contexts. Discussions reveal how recovery advances in relations between human and nonhuman actors including spaces, bodies, affects, and practices. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that recovery may be framed as an emergent and dynamic context that becomes with and from drug use.

Problematizing the DSM-5 criteria for opioid use disorder: A qualitative analysis

BackgroundThis paper includes the voices of people who are members of a peer-led drug user group (SNAP) in Canada who are receiving heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) outside of a clinical trial. Drawing from critical drug studies, we problematize the criteria for severe opioid use disorder (OUD) from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, by exploring SNAP members' experiences in relation to heroin-assisted treatment, and examining how SNAP participants' narratives challenge conventional notions of what constitutes severe opioid use disorder. MethodDrawing on critical analysis and research guidelines developed by drug user unions and organizations, and critical methodological frameworks on ethical community-based-and-responsive research for social justice, in this paper we focus on semi-structured interviews conducted with 36 SNAP members at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users site in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada. We included opened ended questions about experiences prior to receiving HAT, experiences while receiving HAT, experiences of drug use and cessation, and future hopes. ResultsAlthough SNAP participants were diagnosed as suffering from OUD, the DSM-5 criteria for OUD fails to encompass their diverse experiences of opioid use. Nor does the DSM diagnosis capture the complexities of their lived experience. The DSM OUD constructs an idea of addiction and the addicted person based on a list of symptoms thought to be associated with extended use of opioids. The problem with this is that many of these "symptoms" of drug use are, in the case of SNAP participants, tied to contextual issues of living in the DTES, experiencing structural vulnerability, and being the target of punitive drug policies and laws. ConclusionTo label someone as having a severe disorder shifts the focus from political and social issues, including the lived experiences of people who use heroin. The DSM-5 de-contextualizes drug use. How addiction and heroin are constituted has political implications that will determine what types of services and programs will be set up. Treating a disorder, or a person with a disorder, requires a much different approach than understanding heroin use as a habit. SNAP, and their allies, are rupturing conventional ideas about heroin and taken for granted assumptions about people who use heroin.

On the legacy of normalization.

In 1998 Howard Parker, Judith Aldridge & Fiona Measham published Illegal Leisure, a ground-breaking study of profound changes in British youth cultures in the 1990s, and the place of drugs and drug use in these upheavals. This work introduced the 'normalization thesis' to the social sciences, offering a novel vocabulary for re-imagining the normative character of young people's attitudes towards and experiences of illicit drug use. Arriving at the dawn of the new century, the book offered a thoroughgoing re-thinking of the character of youth cultures at a time of great social, cultural, economic and technological disruption. In so doing, the book deftly anticipated many of the most interesting currents of critical drug studies that followed.

Making problems: The inventive potential of the arts for alcohol and other drug research.

The arts and arts-based methods are rare in critical studies of alcohol and other drugs. This article explores the potential role of the arts for allowing alcohol and other drug problems to develop in more collaborative (with participants, broadly conceived) and thus more generative ways. Following turns in the field toward the performativity of alcohol and other drug realities, this article instead asks: what happens if we take the 'experimentality of social life' (Marres, Guggenheim & Wilkie, 2018) as our starting point for research rather than our object? That is to say, how can we work with our already inventive alcohol and other drug worlds to know and intervene with them in closer, more intimate ways? Through ethnographic engagement with a community theatre group for people who identify has having experiences of dependency or addiction, the article looks at how they 'set up' and 'stage' the problem they seek to research and enact through embodied, sensorial and relational modes of knowing that are created speculatively together and with the audience and environment. As we now accept that our methods in critical drug studies are entwined with the realities they make, this article intends to awaken our methodological imagination and attentiveness to the arts as the discipline that has always made things to know things, in order to enable problems to not only be known in new ways but to emerge in new ways.

Drug dog affects: Accounting for the broad social, emotional and health impacts of general drug detection dog operations in Australia

BackgroundDrug detection dogs are increasingly being deployed by policing agencies in Australia and elsewhere to home in on people carrying illicit drugs in a broad range of social contexts including at music festivals, on public transport and in a range of everyday urban spaces. Significant concerns have been raised about their limited deterrence and detection efficacy and tendency to increase drug-related health harms including overdose. Yet the complex ways in which these effects play out, and the broader impacts they have on social and emotional wellbeing, are not yet well documented. This study builds on a growing body of poststructural critical drug studies research to explore the complex social, emotional and health impacts of drug dog use in these broad social contexts. MethodsSemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 people who had been searched by drug detection dogs at or near music festivals and events, licensed venues and public transport spaces in Australia. Participants were asked about their experiences of being searched, how it impacted upon them in the short and long term, and how it shaped their drug use behaviours, sense of self and social relations, including relations with police. ResultsThis study supports previous findings that these drug dog operations do not tend to deter people from consuming illicit substances, but instead encourage a range of adaptations that increase the likelihood of health harms including overdose. The rationalities underpinning responses to drug dogs, and the impacts of those responses, are shown to be deeply spatial, temporal, social and embodied. More specifically, drug dog deployment is shown to have significant short and long term impacts on social and emotional wellbeing and can produce deep embodied trauma. ConclusionThese findings suggest that the use of drug dogs in these broad social contexts is based on untenable assumptions about the rationalities of deterrence, is producing substantial harm without evidence of benefit, and should be urgently reconsidered.

Data Desire in the Anthropocene

Data Desire in the Anthropocene

About the “Gender and Critical Drug Studies” Special Issue (Vol 31)

Next article No AccessAbout the “Gender and Critical Drug Studies” Special Issue (Vol 31)PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs Volume 312017 A journal of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/SHAD31019999 Views: 17Total views on this site © 2017 by The Alcohol and Drugs History Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.