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. Acknowledging the changing national and international drug policy terrain, The Drug Effect covers a diverse array of drug types and populations. The book is organised into three sections – drug use as social and cultural practice; health and the medicalisation of addiction; and drugs, crime and the law – which reflect standard divisions in organising research and teaching on drug use. The intention in this volume, however, is to ‘trouble’ these divisions and the assumptions behind them, offering individual pieces and an overarching critical analysis that can be used both as a research resource and as a teaching tool