Abstract
The fourth biennial Contemporary Drug Problems (CDP) Conference was held in Helsinki, Finland, from August 23 to 25, 2017. Hosted by CDP, the National Institute for Health and Welfare (Helsinki, Finland), the National Drug Research Institute (Curtin University, Australia), the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research (Aarhus University, Denmark), the Centre for Population Health (Burnet Institute, Australia), and the Department of Science and Technology Studies (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), the conference brought together international critical drugs scholars working across a range of disciplines and methods.
This year’s conference continued to build upon themes explored in previous meetings including notions of emergence, relationality, contingency, and problematization. The theme of “making alcohol and other drug realities” further opened up questions of ontology by encouraging critical engagement with, and the development of, scholarly work that sees drugs and their effects as constituted in various forms of practice. The conference theme challenged delegates to critically explore and debate the issues posed when we approach science, policy, treatment, law, and other practices as constituting the realities they seek to address. In doing so, the conference theme explicitly sought to grapple with the implications of the conceptual shift proposed within the “ontological turn” for the alcohol and other drugs field. Responding to this conference theme, presenters considered the realities constituted and stabilized (or obscured) in and by treatment services, drug education, harm reduction services, drug markets, policy processes, criminal justice processes, measurement tools, models of addiction, and research methods (to name just a few). Across the 3-day program, 132 delegates from 21 countries, with disciplinary backgrounds ranging from sociology to public health, epidemiology, law, policy, criminology, cultural studies, anthropology, and science and technology studies, presented both qualitative and quantitative research examining issues of contemporary relevance to the alcohol and other drugs field. These included drug consumption rooms, “alcohol-fueled violence,” cannabis policy, “new psychoactive substances,” school-based prevention programs, pleasure, tobacco plain packaging, “chemsex,” take-home naloxone, and neuroscientific accounts of addiction. These topics were approached using a diverse range of theoretical frameworks including but not limited to feminist science studies, actor network theory, problematization, social constructionism, and phenomenology. Across many of the sessions was a shared engagement with the ways in which research methods enact their object of study, how knowledges are privileged or silenced, and the multiplicity of realities performed through practices and across spatiotemporal sites.
Setting the scene for the discussions to come, Emeritus Professor Carol Bacchi (University of Adelaide) delivered the opening keynote address, entitled “Deploying a poststructural analytic strategy: Political implications.” Bacchi noted that the “What’s the problem represented to be?” approach (Bacchi, 2009; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) has been taken up by critical drugs scholars in recent years, encouraging the field to ask new questions and analyze policy issues in novel ways. She outlined her approach, emphasizing its central argument: that proposed solutions produce and give shape to the “problems” they purport to address. Drawing on Foucault’s work on problematization and the constitutive effects of practices, Bacchi argued that by scrutinizing the politics involved in the “coming to be” of objects and subjects (i.e., the politics involved in the making of “the real”), we may open up spaces in which to contest them. Bacchi concluded by enjoining delegates to reflect on the political projects associated with the use of the word problem.
The second keynote address was presented by Dr. Adam Winstock (founder and director of the Global Drug Survey [GDS] and a consultant addiction psychiatrist) and Dr. Monica Barratt (University of New South Wales). The presentation, entitled “The Global Drug Survey: Participatory Methods and the Making of Safer Drug Realities,” was divided into two parts. First, in a prerecorded video, Winstock described the development and global reach of the GDS. He outlined GDS’s aim to make drug use safer, regardless of the legal status of drugs, by sharing information with individuals, communities, and health and policy organizations. This is achieved through GDS’s annual survey (now conducted in more than 10 languages across 20 countries) as well as through the development of apps and self-assessment tools. Monica Barratt then outlined the history of the GDS and, drawing on John Law’s article Seeing Like a Survey (2009) , sought to illuminate the ways in which the GDS is performative and generative. By tracing one finding from the survey, Barratt explored the realities produced through its methods.
Dr. Cameron Duff (RMIT University) delivered the final keynote address. In a presentation entitled “Making Drug Realities: From Analysis to Praxis After the Ontological Turn,” Duff traced the genealogy of the ontological turn and set out some future directions for critical drugs scholars working with these theoretical resources. Highlighting the work of Vitellone, Malins, Moore, Fraser, Keane, Race, Demant, Dilkes-Frayne, and others, he argued that over the last two decades, this community of scholars has produced a body of work that has helped illuminate the multiple forces acting within the events of drug consumption and their constitutive roles in the emergence of subjects, harms, and effects. Highlighting and celebrating the key achievements of critical drugs studies, Duff asked delegates to imagine where this work might be leading. In Duff’s view, what this field shares is a commitment to caring practice—caring about things and bringing attention to things which have hitherto not been cared about. By invoking care as an ethical orientation, he challenged delegates to consider what calls them into an event as they encounter it. Such work, he argued, requires a better (or perhaps, as Kane Race argued in another conference presentation, a radical) empiricism.
Although we in the alcohol and other drug field encounter institutional arrangements that often seem impervious to change (prisons, laws, and treatment systems), Duff argued that we nonetheless need to interrogate and challenge them. This theme resonated across the three keynote presentations and indeed the conference as a whole. If drug realities are made through practices, then the challenge is to consider how we might interfere “to make a difference, to engage in an ontological politics, and to help shape new realities” (Law & Urry, 2004, p. 404). There is much to anticipate and build on for the next CDP conference in 2019.