The Place and Time of Drugs

Critical discussions of the problem of context are surprisingly rare in drug policy debates. Despite wide acceptance of the importance of social contexts in shaping illicit drug use and related risks and harms, few accounts exist of the nature and organisation of these contexts, their defining features and constituent properties. This oversight confounds efforts to identify the specific means by which contexts actually shape illicit drug use and the experience of drug related harms. This article addresses this omission in setting out a theory of drug use contexts grounded in the analysis of space, embodiment and practice. After reviewing recent theoretical accounts of space, embodiment and practice, the article outlines a set of methodological principles for the identification and analysis of local drug use contexts. I also consider how this analysis might inform the design of new, context specific, drug prevention and harm reduction initiatives.

This paper addresses some of the major implications of actor-network theory (ANT) for research on the consumption of alcohol and other drugs (AOD). It focuses on the significance of ANT’s rejection of the subject-object distinction for recent debates in human and cultural geography regarding the role of social contexts in mediating AOD consumption. In exploring this theme, I apply insights derived from ANT to the analysis of qualitative data recently collected in studies of AOD use in Melbourne, Australia and Vancouver, Canada. These studies indicate that AOD consumption is a relational achievement involving diverse objects, spaces, actors and affects. The paper goes on to argue that social contexts may themselves be understood as discrete assemblages of such objects, spaces and actants. This suggests a novel basis for investigating the role of social contexts in mediating AOD consumption in particular settings. The paper closes with an assessment of the implications of these arguments for the ongoing design of novel, place-based, approaches to the study of AOD use within human and cultural geography. I emphasise the need for greater recognition of the agentic force of spaces and objects, such that research designs more sensitive to the dynamics of context might be elaborated.

Dilkes-Frayne, E. (2014). Tracing the “event” of drug use: “Context” and the coproduction of a night out on MDMA. Contemporary Drug Problems, 41(3), 445-479. In this article I propose that current research addressing the mediating role of “context” in youth illicit drug use can be complemented by examining drug use “events”. Events analyses capture the temporality, dynamism and multiplicity often lacking in research into contexts of use. Drawing on Actor Network Theory, I conceptualize the drug use event as a process of successive mediations, whereby shifting relations bring about transformations and actions including drug use. The methodological aspects of “tracing” drug use events are discussed, before an account of an event in which a young man takes MDMA at a music festival in Melbourne, Australia. Building on this account, I illustrate the value of this approach for rethinking how we conceive of contextual influences on drug use, and suggest how analysing events could assist the project of harm reduction. http://cdx.sagepub.com/content/41/3/445.abstract

Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2015

AIMS - This article describes life in an open illicit drug milieu in a Norwegian city. This site, called “the Bench”, is a stigmatised place, and if one sits there, one is marked with the stigma of the place. Our aim is to gain insights into what stigmatised people gain from frequently visiting and staying in a public place that in itself is stigmatised. METHOD - One of the authors spent a year of participant observation, studying what went on at the Bench. He managed to build rapport in a gradual process of inclusion. The theoretical perspective rests on classic ethnography, symbolic interactionism and sociology on labelling and purity and dirt. RESULTS - “The Bench” is not only a local drug market, but also a social meeting place in which one can feel dignity, and where a certain humanisation process takes place through the rituals of everyday life. On “the Bench” it is possible to tell stories of decay, failures and shortcomings in life, stories that in other social arenas would ...

Working Papers Series in Sociology, 2017

The article first aimed at identifying important theories and research which have been suggested to explain why people use substances. Over the years the research field has become immense and scattered, to some extent divided and specialized, which restrains the potential of knowing what matters most. A second aim was therefore to show how these various aspects could be incorporated into a common theoretical framework. Three central theoretical traits were identified in the literature, suggesting that substance use is affected by laws and policies in society, norms and behaviours of others and people’s individual characteristics. This fits well with the Situational Action Theory suggesting that individual and environmental factors matter, but that the interaction between them is most important, and further clarifies the patterns and links between different explanations. This is helpful when determining the real causes of substance use and might further assist in selecting between various policy approaches.

Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 2019

A key question in drugs research is why people use psychoactive substances. Diverse motives such as boredom, habit, and pain relief have served as explanations, but little is known about how adult cannabis users motivate their use in prohibitionist policy contexts, like Sweden. The aim is to explore what motives a sample of adult Swedish cannabis users refer to when they give meaning to their use. We ask: what aspects of cannabis use (e.g. drug effects, individual characteristics and social contexts) are emphasized in their accounts, and how are such aspects combined to describe motives and justify use? In this study, motives are perceived as culturally situated action, and our analysis is based on online text messages (n ¼ 238) and interviews (n ¼ 12). Participants emphasized either the characteristics of the use situation (motives such as party, relaxation and social function) or of him-/herself as an individual (motives such as mindfulness, identity marker and somatic function). They often mentioned medical and recreational motives in the same account, and carefully presented themselves as rational individuals. The motives reflect that the drugs discourse is increasingly medicalized, that responsibility is highly esteemed in contemporary societies, and that cannabis use is still stigmatized in Sweden.

Problem drug use, including abuse and addiction, are public health concerns that have wide-ranging social consequences. Among the many social factors identified as relevant for illicit drug use and abuse, community context remains relatively understudied by comparison with individual, family, and peer risk factors. Yet, the etiology of drug abuse points to characteristics of individuals that tend to cluster within disadvantaged neighborhood contexts (e.g., poverty, single-parent families, and early childhood behavioral problems). In this chapter, we propose a new conceptualization of sociogeographic context for analyzing the potentially complex relationships between contextual risk factors and drug use, abuse, and addiction. Our conceptualization goes beyond the conventional notion of local context as comprised of static neighborhood conditions to encompass dynamic patterns of movement of local residents and non-residents across time and space that affect individual behaviors in significant ways. We suggest that some types of individual and community spatio-temporal use patterns may contribute to problematic drug behaviors because they generate higher levels of social isolation.

Drugs and Alcohol Today, 2021

This paper explores multiple problematisation processes through a former needle exchange programme run by Kék Pont (a nongovernmental organisation) in the 8th district of Budapest. By presenting a collage of ethnographic stories, we attempt to preserve tacit knowledges associated with the programme and thereby keep its office alive as a ‘drug place’, the operation of which was made impossible in 2014. Drawing on the insights of Foucauldian governmentality studies and Actor-Network Theory, this paper focuses on drug use as a problem in its spatial-material settings. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, our contribution traces multiple problematisation processes and related infrastructures. From the needle exchange programme’s perspective, drug use is not a singular problem but the effect of multiple problematisation processes. Although those processes are often in conflict with each other, the question is not which one is right, but how social workers manage to hold them together. It is a fragile achievement that requires years of training and ongoing negotiation with local actors. By eliminating Kék Pont’s 8th district office, the Hungarian Government did not only hinder harm reduction in the area; it had also rendered tacit knowledges associated with the needle exchange programme as a ‘drug place’ inaccessible. Our paper is a melancholy intervention – an attempt to preserve tacit knowledges that had accumulated at the needle exchange programme. Our retelling of ethnographic stories about this ‘drug place’ is our way of ensuring that other drug policies remain imaginable.