The Drug Effect Health, Crime and Society

The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society offers new perspectives on critical debates in the field of alcohol and other drug use. Drawing together work by respected scholars in Australia, the US, the UK and Canada, it explores social and cultural meanings of drug use and analyses law enforcement and public health frameworks and objectives related to drug policy and service provision. In doing so, it addresses key questions of drug use and addiction through interdisciplinary, predominantly sociological and criminological, perspectives, mapping and building on recent conceptual and empirical advances in the field. These include questions of materiality and agency, the social constitution of disease and neo-liberal subjectivity and responsibility. This book provides a fresh scholarly perspective on drug use and addiction by collecting top quality original work, written by a mix of international leaders in the field and emerging scholars working at the cutting edge of research.

Introduction: the drug effect: constructing drugs and addiction Suzanne Fraser and David Moore; Part I. Drug Use as Social and Cultural Practice: 1. The social life of smokes: processes of exchange in a heroin marketplace Robyn Dwyer; 2. Party animals: the significance of drug practices in the materialisation of urban gay identity Kane Race; 3. Pleasure and pain: representations of illegal drug consumption and trafficking in music, film, and video Susan Boyd; 4. The ontological politics of knowledge production: qualitative research in the multidisciplinary drug field David Moore; Part II. Drugs, Health and the Medicalisation of Addiction: 5. Beyond the 'potsherd': the role of injecting drug use-related stigma in shaping hepatitis C Suzanne Fraser; 6. Drugs that work: pharmaceuticals and performance self-management Helen Keane; 7. From 'magic bullets' to medical maintenance: the changing meanings of medical approaches to drug use in US drug policy Nancy D. Campbell; 8. Pharmacotherapy as social policy, or, the public and private worlds of welfare capitalism kylie valentine; Part III. Drugs, Crime and the Law: 9. Court-ordered treatment, neo-liberalism and homo economicus Toby Seddon; 10. Cannabis in cultural and legal limbo: criminalisation, legalisation and the mixed blessing of medicalisation in the U.S. Craig Reinarman; 11. Drugs, crime and the law in Australia Ian Warren; 12. Re-conceptualising harm reduction in prisons Karen Duke; 13. Possessed: the unconscious law of drugs Desmond Manderson.

Suzanne Fraser is based in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of three books on health, the body and society including Making Disease, Making Citizens: The Politics of Hepatitis C.
David Moore is based at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, where he leads the Ethnographic Research Program. He has written extensively on the social and cultural contexts of alcohol and illicit drug use and is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Habits: Rethinking Addiction.