Stephen Parkin's new book, Habitus and Drug Using Environments, furnishes a unique perspective on injecting drug use in the UK. He is concerned with such spaces as ‘public toilets, parking lots, derelict buildings, secluded stairwells, rooftops and doorways’, which are almost always, he contends, ‘hidden in open view’ (p. 1). Now a research fellow in the School of Health and Human Sciences at Huddersfield University, Parkin has contributed to public policy and the field of sociology as a member of the academy and a private consultant for over a decade. In this monograph he blends Bourdieusian theory with extensive qualitative research on injecting drug use to produce a work that challenges and adds to the conception of ‘health-place nexus’ (p. 1) The result is a dense and penetrating book that not only helps to re-conceptualise the drug user as an actor, but also problematises the interaction of drugs, drug-using environments and legal frameworks. In the opening pages of Habitus and Drug Using Environments, Parkin admits that his book will not make ‘audacious claims’ about either the ‘harms or hazards’ involved in injecting drugs. That topic has been well-researched. Instead, he argues that the ‘various environments that house public injecting drug use serve to amplify this array of established harm and hazard’ (p. 6). To this end, Parkin offers an impressive amount of data to support his claim. He conducted over 70 interviews with drug users and close to 170 with front-line health workers in four separate locations in the south of England, including Barking and Dagenham, Plymouth and Southend-on-Sea. At the same time, Parkin fully immersed himself in the milieu that he describes, thereby amassing ethnographic observations, visual assessments of over 400 separate sites and 1000 photographs. In total, it is a remarkably vast dataset from which he draws conclusions. From the outset Parkin underlines the importance of Pierre Bourdieu, noting that Habitus and Drug Using Environment ‘prioritises an engagement with [his] theories’ (p. 32). Bourdieu, who died in 2002, developed a robust and influential body of sociological work, especially on the structure–agency debate, along with writings on the inter-relationship of capital, field, and practice. Here, it serves as the core theoretical foundation for Parkin. In particular, Bourdieu's view of capital, using a social, cultural, economic, and symbolic model, is outlined and employed to help understand drug using behaviour. Moreover, in Parkin's view, five distinct and significant “structuring structures” (p. 113) ought to be recognised in the interpretation of injecting street drug users. They are, in alphabetical order: corporeality, environment, injecting spaces, materials and time. These concepts, which Parkin pulls out of the literature, give shape to his overall framework of analysis. Somewhat troublingly, the focus on Bourdieu's theory, the description of the methodological approach, and the explication of research findings, while undoubtedly crucial, detracts from the drug user perspective. Indeed, it is not until halfway through chapter 5, an overview of the field, that an actual drug-user is heard from, meaning the reader is not exposed to first-person accounts of drug use and environments in the four locations throughout England until 100 pages into the book. This seemed to be a missed opportunity to grant these subjects agency as well as humanise them. As the book reaches its conclusion, it offers an unexpectedly gloomy indictment of UK drug policy in an era of austerity. Parkin uses Bourdieu's ‘left and right hand of the state’ metaphor to illustrate how harm reduction has been reprioritised and restructured. He writes that the UK drug strategy has, in recent times, been imbued with a moralistic and abstemious tone. This has meant, in turn, that harm reduction approaches to drug use have declined, whereas recovery efforts have increased. While the left hand, which offers support and services, has dwindled, the right hand, representing capitalism and profit, has grown more dominant. The vulnerable (that is, drug users) could possibly become ‘more vulnerable, the marginalised more marginalised as a consequence of the velvet glove of the left being smothered by the grip of an iron fist on the right’ (p. 253). To be sure, it is a solemn close to the book and one that reminds the reader of the implications of this work.
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Nov 1, 2022
Alison Ritter 
Open Access