Drugs and Culture

Current approaches to drugs tend to be determined by medical and criminal visions that emerged over a century ago; the concepts of addiction, on the one hand, and drug control on the other, having imposed themselves as the unquestionable central notions surrounding drug issues and discourses. Pathologization and criminalization are the dominant perspectives on psychoactive drugs, and it is difficult to describe drug consumption in any terms other than those of medicine, or to conceive of regulation except in terms of control and eradication. Drugs and Culture presents other voices and understandings of drug issues, highlighting the socio-cultural features of drug use and regulation in modern societies. It examines the cultural dimensions of drugs and their regulation, with special attention to questions of how consumption of specific psychoactive substances becomes associated with particular social groups; the social dynamics involved in our coming to think of these phenomena as we do; and the factors that determine the political and policy responses to drug use. Adopting approaches from anthropology, sociology, history, political science and geopolitics to challenge the prevailing pathologization and criminalization of drug use, this book provides international and comparative perspectives on drug research, based on the latest research in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Hong Kong.

Geoffrey Hunt is Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis, USA Maitena Milhet is a researcher at the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) Henri Bergeron is Research Fellow and Scientific Coordinator of the Chair in Health Studies at Sciences Po, Paris and Research Fellow (Permanent post - First Class) at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

Drugs and Culture; I: Knowledge: Science, Medicine, and Discourses on Drugs; 1: Social Fear, Drug-Related Beliefs, and Drug Policy; 2: Blinding Ourselves With Science: The Chronic Infections of Our Thinking on Psychoactive Substances; 3: Epidemiology as a Model: Processing Data through a Black Box?; 4: Opiate Addiction: A Revival of Medical Involvement; 5: This is Not Medicalization; 6: Drugs: A Sociological Blind Spot? A Look at the French Experience 1; II: Consumption: Cultures of Drug Use; 7: Drug Consumption: A Social Ritual? The Examples of Tobacco and Cocaine; 8: Dance Drug Scenes: A Global Perspective 1; 9: Contemporary Use of Natural Hallucinogens: From Techno Subcultures to Mainstream Values; 10: Ecstasy, Gender, and Accountability in a Rave Culture 1; 11: Drug Use in Europe: Specific National Characteristics or Shared Models?; III: Policy or Politics? The Cultural Dynamics of Public Responses; 12: Modernity and Anti-Modernity: Drug Policy and Political Culture in the United States and Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; 13: Assessing Global Drug Problems, Policies, and Reform Proposals; 14: Homelessness, Addiction, and Politically Structured Suffering in the US War on Drugs 1; 15: Knowledge and Policies to Reduce Drug Supply in France: Some Misunderstandings; 16: The Culture of Drug Policy