Drugs and Culture
Knowledge, Consumption and Policy
Edited by Geoffrey Hunt, Maitena Milhet and Henri Bergeron
Ashgate
Farnharm, Surrey, 2011
ISBN: 9781409405436
ISBN: 9781409405443
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. Pathologisation and criminalisation 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 pathologisation and criminalisation of drug use, this book provides international and comparative perspectives on drug research in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
Contents
List of Figures and
Tables
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Drugs
and Culture
Maitena Milhet, Molly Moloney,
Henri Bergeron, and Geoffrey Hunt
Part I. Knowledge: science, medicine, and discourses on drugs
1. Social Fear, Drug-Related Beliefs, and Drug Policy
Ross Coomber
2. Blinding Ourselves With Science: The Chronic
Infections of Our Thinking on Psychoactive Substances
Tom Decorte
3. Epidemiology as a Model: Processing
Data through a Black Box?
Patrick Peretti-Ratel
4. Opiate Addiction: A Revival of Medical Involvement
Peter Conrad and Thomas Mackie
5. This is Not Medicalization
Didier Fassin
6. Drugs: A Sociological Blind Spot?
A Look at the French Experience
Michel Kokoreff
Part II. Consumption: cultures of drug use
7. Drug Consumption: A Social Ritual? The
Examples of Tobacco and Cocaine
Randall Collins
8. Dance Drug Scenes: A Global Perspective
Geoffrey Hunt, Karen Joe-Laidler Molly Moloney, Agnes van der Poel, and Dike van de Mheen
9. Contemporary Use of Natural Hallucinogens:
From Techno Subcultures to Mainstream Values
Maitena Milhet and Catherine Reynaud-Maurupt
10. Ecstasy, Gender, and Accountability in a
Rave Culture
Molly Maloney and Geoffrey Hunt
11. Drug Use in
Europe: Specific National Characteristics
or Shared Models?
Frank Zobel and Wolfgang Gštz
Part 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
David T Courtwright and Timothy A.
Hickman
13. Assessing Global Drug Problems, Policies, and Reform Proposals
Peter Reuter
14. Homelessness, Addiction, and Politically
Structured Suffering in the US War on Drugs
Philippe Bourgois
15. Knowledge and Policies to Reduce Drug Supply in France: Some Misunderstandings (full text here)
Nacer Lalam and Laurent Laniel
16. The Culture of
Drug Policy
Henri Bergeron
Index
