formulating policies with which to deal with heroin use as a social problem. ... Dora and South's Left Realist account of heroin use and their formulation.
Crime, Law and Social Change 15: 19-36, 1991. 9 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Heroin policy and deficit models
The limits of Left Realism
S T E P H E N K. M U G F O R D 1 and PAT O ' M A L L E Y 2. 1Department of Sociology, Australian National University, Canberra; 2National Centre for SocioLegal Studies, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia (* requests for offprints)
Abstract. This paper criticallyassesses Left Realist approaches to understanding heroin use and to
formulating policies with which to deal with heroin use as a social problem. It criticises the epistemological foundation of Left Realism, querying especially its prioritizing of inner city residents' experiences. Dora and South's Left Realist accountof heroin use and their formulation of an appropriate policy are then argued to have fundamental weaknesses as a result of their Left Realist assumptions. The paper then attempts to indicate some alternative paradigms for interpreting drug use, developingespecially a focus on theorizingdemand, and suggestsalternative policy directions which emerge from this.
Introduction
"Left Realism" is said to be capable of replacing a more theoretical but allegedly more unrealistic, romantic and impractical position held by Left criminologists in earlier years. A m o n g its central virtues are held to be that it speaks more directly to the real concerns of the working class and thus provides a m o r e sensible and practical basis upon which to pursue a progressive political agenda for criminological issues. Moreover, its adherents claim to address policy issues more closely than their critical forebears, attempting to present reforms which are attainable in the short and medium term, rather than in the mythological time of revolutionary reconstruction. The central criticism made by its opponents, predictably, is that it represents a sellout to conservative criminal justice policy, giving a progressive gloss to the justification of punitive sanctioning, police repression and even institutionalised racism. Often, the critique of Left Realism has been accurate and biting, but in a very large measure it has been responded to by its opponents at a rather general level) The central aim of this paper is to bring such critical examination down to the level of specific policy formation which Left Realism takes as its home ground. After preliminary examination of important methodological issues the paper will examine the response of Left Realist advocates to demands for the formation of a progressive drug policy. The topic poses an odd
20 problem, because despite its prominence in popular concern, few of those who strongly advocate the Left Realist position have tackled the issue of drug use. The two principal exceptions to this are Nicholas Dorn and Nigel South, who have written extensively on drug issues. 2 Broadly speaking, Dorn and South's position is to argue in characteristic Left Realist fashion that legalization options traditionally posed by the 'romantic' critical criminologies of the past two decades are out of step with the times. That is, they do not form an option that any major political party would currently advocate, and are not supported by many who have first-hand experience of drug problems (users, their friends and relatives, street workers and so on).3 Our selection of the work of Dorn and South to represent Left Realism in this domain is also based on a high regard for the work, which clearly is neither superficial nor poorly informed. Nonetheless, we see them as falling into certain pitfalls in policy formation and selection, pitfalls that are themselves characteristic of the Left Realist position rather than idiosyncratic to these authors.
The foundations of Left Realist knowledge
The most fundamental tenet of a realist criminology is to be faithful to the phenomenon which it is studying. That is to be true to the actual shape of the phenomenon and forces which have brought it into being and which will transform it over time. 4 At first sight this account of Left Realist epistemology represents itself as a rather crass empiricism espousing presuppositionless knowledge, a view supported by the confidence with which the rest of criminology is dismissed as "a babble of paradigms united around a shared inability to get to grips with the phenomenon of crime" .5 The Left Realists argue that they have managed to escape this cacophony and be "faithful to the phenomenon" - a claim made long before by interactionist criminologists in exactly the same terms - by giving theoretical and analytical priority to the experiences and perceptions of those defined as victims of crime. 6 For interactionists this involves participant observation among the criminalised underdogs of society. For Left Realists it involves questionnaire and related victimology research which taps working class accounts of crime, police and criminal justice. For interactionists, the close identification with the subjective perceptions of underdogs created critical problems, for it began to appear that the underdogs defined reality and the sociologists merely recorded the given truths. Moreover, critiques of "bottom-up" history and theory created difficulties for interactionists, for the underdogs often lacked strategic knowledges- resulting in a sociological focus on the actions of low-level "zookeepers" of deviance. It
21 can be argued, the "realism" of the Left Realists tends to recreate the same problems, for at first sight all that has changed is that the touchstone of Left Realism has become the experience of the victims of crime rather than that of the deviants themselves. The Left Realist position therefore has to distance itself from the kind of "faithfulness to p h e n o m e n a " which characterised the interactionists. This is achieved by critical analysis of the experience of the populace: Realism is not empiricism in that it does not believe public stereotypes of crime or fears of crime or images of offenders or of policing are a c c u r a t e . . . To take crime seriously is not to reflect the public images of crime. But it is to say that there is a rational core to public concerns and images. That is, popular conceptions of crime and policing are, in the main, constructed out of the material experiences of people, rather than fantasies impressed upon them by the mass media or agencies of the state. 7 How then do the Left Realists work on the experiences, preceptions and stereotypes of these people in order to reveal the rational core which their experience encapsulates? The answer is by constructing an holistic account. Other criminologies, it is urged, focus on fragments of the p h e n o m e n o n of crime, "taking one empirical verity like a single reflection from a multi-faceted mirror and claiming it represents the whole."8 Left Realism, however, "places together these fragments in the shape of crime in their social context over time to capture the real forces behind the one-dimensional time-frozen images of conventional accounts.'9 Clearly the central problem now is what are these "verities" and how are they established? And how exactly are we to piece these fractured images together? The only clue appears to be a list of categories into which they are to be placed. These categories are: "the wider origins", the "immediate origins", the "actual act", the "immediate origin of social reaction", "the wider origin of social reaction" the " o u t c o m e of social reaction on deviants' further reaction" and the persistence and change of action in terms of all of these. But this shopping list leaves us no wiser as to how we identify of the " r e a l " wider origins, the " r e a l " immediate origins and so on, for the material experience of the inner city populace is agreed to be no direct guide to these matters. Moreover, even were we to accept the status of "empirical verities" assembled together under these headings, how do we carry out the reassembly in order to achieve other than a mere list of factors? To pursue Young's own metaphor, we must have a theory about the structure of the multi-faceted mirror in order to make any coherent sense whatsoever of the multiplicity of "reflections" of reality which appear therein. This is not what is provided, perhaps because to spell it out would undermine their realist credentials and reveal them as rather
-
22 like "Left Idealists" - just another set of theoretical interpeters championing an underdog. This leads directly to the second feature of Left Realism - its discovery that crime is a real problem for the inner city working class. As is generally known, this discovery has relied heavily on questionnaire research which revealed substantial agreement within working class inner city areas that crime does present major problems for working people. Further, it showed that while highly critical of police for their brutality, corruption, inefficiency and bias, there was a demand for effective policing which dealt with the problems of crime which beset working people. It is at this point which we must confront the question of what it is that makes Left Realism "Left". The answer at first glance is that the Left represents the powerless and relatively deprived, for the Left Realists make it clear that the task for "Left Realists" is to formulate policies and interventions which reflect the concerns of inner city working people as interpreted by Left Realists using the above methods. Arguably, the advocacy of inner city crime victims, and an ill-concealed contempt shown for "suburban souls" constitutes a narrow platform for a socialist strategy dealing with crime. Moreover, such victim-oriented advocacy creates major risks to important and hard-won legal rights, as crime prevention strategies seek to become more "effective". For example, a major core of Left Realist proposals suggests that much can be achieved by democratising control over police. Without disagreeing for a moment, nevertheless there are no indications that the solutions to the problems of policing rapes, muggings, burglaries and the like will be solved by this strategy. Demands for increased police powers against "legitimate targets" (those defined as preying on the inner city working class) are likely to be given added fuel by such developments. A localized police - no matter how democratically controlled - may be more repressive for unpopular minorities than any state bureaucracy. Changes in policing methods, sanctions and the courts are also called for. But who makes these decisions and how, and supposing that faith in the masses is repayed by local sectarianism, racism, homophobia or patriarchy? Presumably someone "on behalf" of the constituency must decide what is "Left", using certain methods to "unpack" the political verities wrapped in the demands of the constituency, in much the same way that they unpack the empirical truth from the experiences of the constituency. To be fair, this seems little different to traditional practices of the Left, but it throws us back onto the difficult questions of what makes an analytical account "real" or a policy "Left", and these grave problems do not go away by ritual invocation of the experiences of inner city residents. At best, we would argue, Left Realism performs the important service of restoring to critical criminology neglected issues concerning the victims of
23 crime. At worst, it uses these concerns in tandem with invocation of naive realism to give its paradigm a privileged criminological status. The outstanding questions smothered by this privileging are simple: What are the theoretical categories with which to transform common sense into a defensible account and into progressive policies? W e submit that the cursory examination provided above indicates that at a general level, Left Realism provides no useful answers to these questions, and that the danger therefore is that common sense will not be so transformed - leading at the policy level to the confirmation of the commonsensical status quo: the status quo of existing, ineffective policies for dealing with the human problems generated by crime and criminalization.
Dorn and South on heroin and heroin policy
T h r o u g h o u t their contributions to A Land Fit For Heroin Dorn and South address or assume two principal and interacting themes concerning heroin and heroin policy: the deficit model of drug use, and the policy of harm and use reduction. In both of these themes, we argue, the concerns and assumptions of Left Realism work to produce characteristic flaws and lacunae.
Deficit drug use and Left Realist method D o r n and South's position involves the adoption of a 'deficit' model of drug use, that is, that heroin use is evidence of a 'social deficit' in the situation in which users find themselves. Thus, for example, they argue that In most countries, including the U K . . . there are severe pockets of deprivation in which p o o r housing and industrial collapse coexist. In such contexts young people have little prospects [sic] of employment, every prospect of lifelong poverty, and no alternatives - except perhaps to hustle in the irregular economy, which does not fit the cultural orientations of everyone. If heroin becomes available in such a r e a s . . , it is likely to be spread by the hustlers and irregulars to the wider set of young people sharing the experience of economic and social depression. This is the most socially destructive pattern of heroin use, potentially drawing in people of a retreatist frame of mind who have few foci of economic and social involvement or pleasure other than the drug. 1~ D o r n and South, along with many other deficit theorists see heroin use as compensation for hard times, portraying these users as victims of the unemployment who resort to drug use as a compensation for the deficit. However,
24 the argument as presented involves a direct leap from correlation to causation via commonsense experiential assumptions and evidence. Clearly, unemployment does create an environment in which one kind of psychotropic drug use flourishes. But such a deficit model must be considered against the fact that the fastest growth in drug use arose in the affluent 60s and 70s and that the bulk of use, even with heroin, is non-problematic, non-dependent u s e . 11 Moreover much of the development of "the drug industry" is unintelligible in terms of a social deficit model. It was the privileged in search of pleasure, not the underprivileged in search of escape who provided the impetus for the development of large-scale cocaine trade.lZ Being unemployed is associated with certain kinds of psychotropic drug use in the present period, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for such use. We think that the failure to remember this, and the problems that flow from it, are a direct result of the concern to elevate the 'knowledge' of 'members' to a pre-eminent status. This theme emerges frequently in A Land Fitfor Heroin, for example under the caption"Grassroots strategies: learning from experience", it is argued that the experiences and perspectives of practitioners- professionals, community activists, parents of users and so o n - provide a touchstone for interpreting and evaluating policy ideas...13 We are here firmly in the grip of Left Realist epistemology- but as others have pointed out, TM this generation of youth workers, parents and professionals grew up with the Sixties' definitions of drugs as retreatist media offering relief from a grinding reality, and may be predisposed to interpret events in the light of their own socially acquired assumptions and explanations. What Dorn and South do in starting from the appearance of things at the grassroots level is to remain trapped in such common sense definitions of the modal heroin user as retreatist and dependent. This fault arises directly from a failure to address as a theoretical issue the status of members' knowledge. Rather, than accepting this knowledge as providing accounts of the real, we would argue that the accounts that individuals give of their drug use are 'vocabularies of motive'. 15These are formed out of a variety of available cultural definitions, explanations and meanings, including the influence of official accounts. Matza's work of nearly a quarter of a century ago showed the dangers of accepting at face value delinquents' explanations of their actions, showing them to be built selectively upon official discourses of judicial justification and critique. 16The experience of users, and of their kin, friends, victims, neighbours and so on cannot therefore be used in any unmediated fashion to form a generalised social policy concerning drugs and drug use.
25 Harm and use minimization The second feature of the account given by Dorn and South is a concentration upon the policy of harm and use minimization, one which we agree is the most practical and humane general policy goal. The pressing question, however, is which particular policies should be implemented to achieve the strategy? Dorn and South seek to develop a distinctively "Left" policy, the first element of which predictably draws on "grassroots experience" of professional workers, parents of users, and practitioners. Where this policy touches on the issues of "social and personal harm" minimization, the central thrust is based on the deficit/retreatist model of drug users, and the countervailing strategies proposed involve efforts to "rebuild the framework of the family", community support, and so on. 17We have no objection to these policies as such. But we regard as dangerous any policies based upon the assumption of retreatist/ deficit drug use if they are assumed to be other than limited range interventions addressing one particular type of user, and thus are assumed to be the foundation for an overall policy affecting and applying to heroin users in general. The second major element of Dorn and South's policy is directed at use reduction. This involves a set of policies principally addressing the process of national and local drug distribution. Whereas they see most existing policies focusing on supply or demand, Dorn and South suggest that we need to attend to the distributive system which exists "between" these processes. This system is integrated with the "irregular economy", of theft, prostitution, fencing stolen goods etc.18 In their view, this irregular economy acts as a conduit for the distribution of illicit drugs. It expands during recessions, or in depressed areas, as licit economic opportunities contract and thus works to increase the availability of drugs under such conditions. 19 This may be a useful model for understanding patterns of drug distribution, and thus directs our attention toward what may be important processes. 2~Out of this model however, comes a general policy directive with which we find considerable difficulty, namely, to reduce drug abuse by restricting the size and scope of the irregular economy or, failing this, to displace or isolate drug distribution within the irregular economy. A key to this process, Dorn and South suggest is the "deregulation" of certain illicit activities, such as loansharking, which are central to the irregular economy. It is argued that, for example, by lifting regulation on loans and credit, loansharking would no longer be outside the law. This would reduce the number of transactions taking place outside the law, which in turn would leave fewer activities in the irregular market (including drug distribution). The latter would then be "socio-economically isolated and, hence, reduced" and in consequence, they suggest that
26 we should put "deregulation (of non-drug parts of the irregular economy) on the agenda as a policy option.., aimed at reduction of the drug problem.'21 However, we would apply Dorn and South's own overarching criterion of political feasibility, and ask how likely it is that such a policy would be considered by any government. We would submit that a policy of decriminalization of heroin or other drugs, which Dorn and South dismiss as beyond any realistic agenda, is infinitely more feasible than a policy of reversal or slowing down of economic and consequent demographic and social changes, and of some kind of management of those changes so that 'regular' jobs and opportunities are made available. 22 Moreover, we would suggest that legalization of some sectors of the irregular market is not especially likely to disarticulate them from the illicit drug trade. If respectable corporations can be involved in all manner of legal and illegal profitmaking enterprises, and if their endeavours in the illegal sector are often facilitated by their licit status, then why should this not also be true for "legalized" enterprises currently in the irregular economy? Far better than deregulating, and leaving the weakest members of society to look after themselves, a policy which sits ill with Left thinking generally, we would suggest that a more programmatic policy of legalization and regulation is at least as feasible an alternative. A further key problem for Dorn and South is that by accepting the taken for granted "members" accounts of deficit theorising, demand remains virtually unexplored, and the remaining but probably erroneous assumption is that if supply (or rather "distribution") can be drastically cut, then demand will simply wither. Were we to assume to the contrary, i.e. that demand is resilient and that historical precedent suggests that it will not simply disappear when the means of satisfying it become scarce, then a sensible strategy might be to regulate production and distribution rather than merely to attempt to disrupt distribution. State regulation of quality and supply is one of the positive consequences of legalization of any commodity. Dorn and South however do not seriously address this possible strategy for dealing with heroin, for the simple reason that it is identified as a "nonfeasible" policy which they identify with the radical Right and its naive "freedom of choice" concepts. In this respect Dorn and South's case is seriously misleading. Identifying legalization exclusively with the ideas of Right libertarians is paramount to arguing that "freedom" and "choice" are concepts exclusive to the Right. Yet we would argue that concepts take their meanings from the place they occupy in theoretical discourses. Freedom in critical theories has meanings and implications which are far from identical with those espoused by Hayek, Friedman and their ilk. Legalization need not have the implications of radically (and of
27 course mythically) "deregulated" and " f r e e " markets. Legalization permits state ownership of production, regulation of supply and of distribution. In the " r e a l " world of robust capitalism, the state appears as one of more feasible power centres which may be at least partially coopted by the Left to improve conditions affecting many working people. In short, pressure to generate reformist state measures has been and remains one of the repertory of defensible strategies of the Left. A policy based on alternative conceptions of why people use illicit drugs - alternative that is to the deficit model of D o r n and South - may look very different to that which they espouse. It may open up freedoms and choices which are restricted at the moment. But it is by no means therefore either " R i g h t " or unrealistic. But our argument has run ahead of itself, for advocacy of this alternative Left policy, of legalization/regulation, rests on the prior theorization of demand, omission of which we argue to be D o r n and South's key shortcoming.
Theorizing demand Broadly speaking, four theoretical models have been generated in the understanding of illicit drug use: 'pathology', profit', 'the state' and 'pleasure'. In any theorization of drug use, what tends to happen is that some combination of the first three of these discourses is used to provide an explanation of how illicit drugs are produced, traded and consumed. Dorn and South in their account draw upon only two of these: pathology and profit. As we hope to show, the eschewal of the state and pleasure paradigms is symptomatic of their Left Realist stance, and leaves unexplored a very specific and important set of questions bearing upon policy formation. The first p a r a d i g m - 'pathology' - focuses upon the question "what kinds of people use drugs, and under what conditions?". The answer, the form of which is implicit in the question, concentrates upon deficits or pathologies, either individual or social. As noted, Dorn and South incorporate a strong element of social pathological theorising in which the individual drug user is the hapless victim of an unfair, deficient or exploitative world. T h e pathology paradigm has several principal flaws relevant to our concerns. First it tends to assume that illicit drugs are proscribed because they are more dangerous than licit drugs, and that users of illicit drugs thus form a category of drug users distinguished by the nature of the drugs used rather than because of the social definitions attached to these drugs. Second, it assumes defects in users, and selects for study those users most likely to exhibit any 'defect' (i.e. those who have ended up in prison or undergoing treatment). It thus relies upon a theoretical schema that overlooks the possibility that any 'defect' that does exist in users, such as low self esteem or poor coping skills, is
28 possibly the 'cause' of being visible for study. Put another way, it fails to recognise that the majority of users of illicit drugs may manage their drug use without experiencing debilitating problems. The parallel would be with theorising alcohol usage in general on the basis of what is known about institutionalised alcoholics. 23The political implication is that a general policy for dealing with drug use should not be constructed on the basis of a specific user-group. It would appear neither appropriate nor likely to be effective. Thus while no-one would deny the reality of problems suffered by alcoholics, and few would argue against harm and use reduction policies being implemented for these people, few would suggest a general prohibition which would affect the enjoyment of alcohol by users not experiencing problems. Moreover, from our perspective at the end of the twentieth century, does it appear in retrospect that in Prohibition periods an effective strategy for dealing with alcohol abuse was to attempt to break up the irregular economy upon which its distribution was based? We think not. Among other things, we would argue, the experience of Prohibition eras has revealed that both the broad base of demand for alcohol, and demand resilience, rendered such "deficit" based policies ineffective and counterproductive. We argue that the same follows for heroin use. Overgeneralization from the deficit model is the fundamental political and theoretical error which underlies prohibitionist strategies, even the enlightened versions of the type advocated by Dorn and South. The second paradigm clearly espoused in Dorn and South's account centres upon profit. Here the central question is "how are we to understand and explain the persistence of the drug trade, especially the illicit drug trade?". The question, "why do people use drugs?" is answered by implication only, this being "because others sell the drugs to them and convince them that they want them." In this view the most significant truth about drugs is that they are profitable commodities, and what we need to do in order to explain the use of drugs is to trace out the connections of profit that lie behind drug-trafficking.24 Despite its powerful account of the origin and persistence of the drug trade, this paradigm really does not speak to the question of why people use drugs. Demand has to exist, and adequate theoretical and empirical understanding of it must be integrated into any theory of drug consumption. The profit paradigm goes a considerable way towards giving us an adequate model of supply, but says little about demand. As a result, it also provides only a partial account of what are the likely effects of state interventions and prohibitions. Dorn and South's acceptance of prohibitionism, and under-recognition of the potential of state regulation in the field of drug use, may thus both be seen as effects of their focus on the profit model. The third paradigm of "the State", largely ignored by Dorn and South, asks questions about the illicit status of some drugs rather than others. Explicit in this paradigm is the idea that drug choice is a subcultural matter, while the fact
29 that some drugs are legal, and others not, reflects not the wise separation by state officials of the harmful from the harmless, but rather the historically contingent separation of drugs to reflect the interests or power of some groups over others. D o r n and South avoid this model, perhaps because of its 'Left Idealist' associations. But the effect is an implicit acceptance in their work of the a s s e r t i o n - undermined by the state p a r a d i g m - that specific drugs are illicit because they are harmful, or because they are more harmful than licit drugs. The fourth paradigm, and that least used by D o r n and South, is that of 'pleasure'. It is hard to point to any major work that uses the paradigm as a major resource, for it is more an implicit or taken for granted line of reasoning although elements of it do appear in most studies that use ethnographic data concerning drug use. 25 The core of this paradigm is a simple assumption that people use drugs "because they enjoy them". Such a view is clearly expressed in countercultural versions of drug discourses, and may seem self evident. Further reflection, however, shows that this argument rests on the simplistic and unexplicated assumption that pleasure is a necessary and sufficient condition for drug use. T h e r e is no doubt that if one asks the majority of cocaine users, heroin consumers and so forth why they use the drug of their choice, they will tell you that it is pleasurable so to do, and they may go further to map out the specific pleasurable sensations or effects. But this alone is not a sufficient condition of our accepting 'pleasure' as an explanation, for such a step would place us in much the same position as that of the Left Realists, of accepting members' accounts more or less as literal representations of reality. R a t h e r we would suggest the need to go further and ask why 'pleasure' appears as a warrantable motive, and why the effects of drugs are culturally understood as pleasurable rather than aversive. 26 Moreover, simply to accept this model leads to an easy vision of hedonists who are either incapable of weighing pleasures against costs (i.e. the costs of drug abuse), or of people so deprived of pleasure by social or psychological deficits that they are 'driven' to drug use. Both accounts lead to a naive acceptance of the deficit model, because both models assume the need for a special account of consumption activities where the commodity concerned is an illicit drug. We would argue, to the contrary, that demand for illicit drugs as such needs no special explanation. Rather it is theorizable as a normal aspect of a commodified society in which strong sensations are defined as pleasurable and pleasure is defined as the sine qua non of leisure activity. First let us begin with the observation that in modern society there is a radical separation between time in work and time 'at play', and that this also coincides closely with a separation between 'productive' time and 'consumption' time. Wage earners work in order to generate the means of purchasing commodities during the nonwork times. Indeed, in the classical statements of bourgeois culture, such as Benthamite utilitarianism, the wage was under-
30 stood clearly as a reward for labour because of its capacity subsequently to
purchase pleasure. Leisure time as a time for pleasure, became identifiable as a specific, significant and legitimate period of time, as a rightful and necessary component of modern life. 27 Conversely, of course, the emergence of the wage form generated a capacity even a necessity - to consume commodities, while the logic of generalised commodity production in its turn stimulated "the commodification of everything" as more and more opportunities for profit were explored. Understandably, these processes together led to the explosion of pleasurable commodities on offer, and to the cultural stress on the pleasurable character of commodities. (Without which the advertising industry and its products would be unintelligible). But what is the form of these pleasures? Love and a clear conscience are undoubted pleasures, but they are not easily bought and sold. The commodification of pleasure involves a certain aesthetic, one which is especially associated with purchasable stimulants of sensations, and preferably of sensations which will be in need of restimulation on a regular basis. 28This 'need' of course, is only loosely related to anything establishable as biologically essential, although the reciprocity between the social construction of the body and its biological reorganization is clear enough. 29Rather it is related to the 'need' of capital to find constantly renewable opportunities for the sale of commodities. Competition for the sale of pleasurable commodities, in turn, generates not only an enormous variety of 'pleasures', but also competition between pleasures. Very prominent among the means of promoting specific pleasurable commodities is, of course, the intensity of the sensation involved. Strong sensations and extraordinary experiences are the subject of escalating spirals of the commodity aesthetic, in which the reward intrinsic to the consumption of the commodity is precisely its powerful impact upon the senses. To draw us away from thinking about drugs as 'different' to other such commodities, consider the following passage on tourism: -
Potential tourist sights/sites have to offer pleasurable experiences which are out of the ordinary. People must experience, and in particular anticipate the experience, of particularly intense pleasures, pleasures which are on a different scale, or which involve different senses, from those customarily encountered. However, these sensations do not follow 'naturally' they have to be produced by an array of tourists service providers... Pleasures and their anticipation thus involve highly complex processes of production and consumption in which bodily sensations are worked on and worked at in contexts designed to demarcate the extraordinary. 3~
31 In summary then, strong sensations are seen to be a set of legitimate rewards/ pleasures and effects intimately bound up with commodity consumption. The nexus between leisure, pleasure as strong sensations, and commodity consumption is crucial to our understanding of the demand for drugs as normalin a commodified society. We may now begin to understand both why 'pleasure' might appear among the category of 'warrantable motives' which may be provided for actions in modern society, and why the form of pleasure might be one in which the sensational effects of drug use are perfectly intelligible as pleasures. Indeed, we would go further and argue that the (socially mediated) effects of drugs such as heroin and cocaine conform precisely to the aesthetics of entertainment commodities. In this sense, demand for drugs needs no explanation additional to that of demand for a very large category of core commodities. It may at this point be argued that the difference between 'licit' and 'illicit' strong-sensation commodities is being ignored, for the damage caused by drug abuse is so great that an additional explanation is after all required in order to account for such consumption. Indeed, a strong strand of such additional explanation is precisely that offered in the deficit theorizations which are based on the assumption that some additional account must be given for why safe, licit stimuli are not enough, or not available to certain categories of people. Our response to this point is two-fold. The first element is to reiterate that the distinction between licit and illicit stimuli cannot be sustained on the basis of harm alone. This, as we have argued, is a central point established by the 'state' perspective. The second response is related but distinct. It is that that the generalised process of commodification creates all manner of 'problems' from lung cancer as an effect of smoking tobacco, the road toll as an effect of privatised transportation commodities, and up to and including the crises of global resource depletion and environmental destruction created by the consumer societies. It is not simply that some licit commodities are hazardous to their consumers. Many of them are, and moreover they present risks collectively as well as individually, and are socially identified in this way, as an unavoidable aspect of a lifestyle intrinsic to modern culture, n In other words, harmfulness is not only a feature of commodity consumption regardless of 'licitness', but moreover is recognised culturally as a 'normal' risk of commodity consumption as an activity and as a form of social organization. People accept such harms, even catastrophic harms, as more or less unavoidable consequences of commodified living; we may try to mitigate the effects but most often the efforts made are not strenuous and usually stop well short of total prohibition. 32 It is difficult therefore to argue that we necessarily need to resort to some
32
special explanation of drug users as consumers, just because the commodity which they consume is potentially harmful. They consume not because they are socially or psychologically deprived or deficient, but because they are members of a society in which commodity consumption is generally understood to be both normal and risk-bearing. While, there are pressures to stop people consuming illicit drugs, there is any number of core-cultural, countervailing pressures stimulating the desire for the type of effect they produce, establishing the legitimacy of their form as pleasure, and thus providing the vocabulary of motives for their use. The policy implications of this model of demand are reasonably clear. First, it suggests that it will be very difficult to define one set of pleasurable commodities such as heroin or cocaine as distinctly 'bad' and thus deter users and potential users. Their nature and effects ('good' and 'bad') are contiguous with those of all manner of closely related commodities. Second, stimulation of demand for licit commodities producing strong sensations will stimulate precisely the social appetites which render drug use attractive. Third, if such processes are generalised throughout a commodified culture, then locating a specific social deficit as the site of stimulus to drug use, and building a general policy upon this, is d o o m e d to failure - whatever the policy selected. Fourth, disrupting supply or distribution may deflect some users onto alternative pleasurable commodities, although the history of prohibitionism does not suggest that this is likely on any scale. But in any case we must seriously ask whether 'heroin abuse' as a social problem is worse than "alcohol abuse" is worse than 'car abuse' and so on. Each is a major social problem, and all are related directly to the fact that demand for strong sensations is a generalised problem in a commodity culture. Now we may not readily be able to tackle the problem at this level of generality, that is, by reducing the cultural stress on such commodities. But we may be able to recognise that regulatory strategies (the use of seat belts, improved car design, ingredient and manufacturing standards for wines and spirits) have generally proven more effective (or less countereffective) than prohibitory strategies for the minimization of harms flowing from the pleasurable commodities.
Conclusion
We have suggested that there are four potential discourses that purport to say something about the use of illicit drugs - the pathology, profit, pleasure and state paradigms. Of these four, there is some tendency, we think, for the pathology and profit paradigms to cluster t o g e t h e r - as in the work of Dorn and South - and for the pleasure and state paradigms to cluster together. This is
33 because the first two focus upon the way that flaws in the 'nature of things' whether personal (low self esteem, etc.) or social (exploited producer countries, exploitive traffickers, exploited users) have negative impacts upon the vulnerable user. The second pair, however, focus more upon the way that people make choices and the way that power (e.g. class power) is used to try to prevent those choices and control those people. Each of the four paradigms, and to a certain extent, each of the pairs, will take us in different directions when we come to analyse drug use and seek policies for 'the drug problem'. Let us begin with the first 'pair', the pair of Dorn and South's usage. The pathology approach leads either to prohibitionism in order to protect those suffering from a deficit, or to harm reduction. Dorn and South will live with the first and promote the second. The profit position leads to a 'diversionary' model, where the proximate goal is to take profit from the criminal pushers and if possible to put them out of business. Dorn and South support this approach. This pair of positions thus leads them towards a particular policy, namely a policy of harm minimization via prohibitionism and disruption of supply, and treatment for users. It is 'realist' in that it conforms to the prejudices of many, especially at the grassroots level. But what it appears to deliver either are policies essentially little different to the policies already politically favoured and allegedly put into effect (prohibition), or policies which are not notably "feasible" (economic change). If we look at the other pair of paradigms we see something quite different. The State position leads to questions about the rights of citizens/subjects and about the arbitrary nature of prohibitions and restrictions. Policy based upon this kind of argument, traditional within the sociology of crime and deviance, pushes for 'diversity' and decriminalization. Such policy arises not necessarily out of a failure to recognise the potentially harmful effects of illicit drugs, but rather out of the paradigmatic refusal to accept the legitimacy of the harmbased distinction between licit and illicit drugs upon which prohibition is based. Prohibition in this view is no more appropriate for heroin than for alcohol. This parallel in turn brings forward the second paradigmatic objection to prohibition, concerning recognition of the resilience of demand and the resistances generated by prohibition - so central to the early versions of the state paradigm in interactionist sociologies of deviance. Dorn and South skate over the issues of law and power and do not seem to see that they might raise issues about resistance. Nor do they ask who makes the law, who it might or might not have benefited and so on. Such questions are not asked probably because the state paradigm forms a key part of the Left Idealist problematic which is anathema to Left Realists. What we ask in response is whether a sensible policy can be formulated which, for fundamentally ideological reasons, leaves out a key element in the explanation of drug use? While we would agree that there was an overemphasis on the state paradigm among certain
34 approaches branded 'Left Idealist', this does not render the importance of the state paradigm null and void. It remains a key c o m p o n e n t of any policy forming exercise which hopes to deal with m o r e than one dimension of this complex problem. Finally, by examining 'pleasure' we m a y begin to develop an explanation about demand. W e have suggested that it m a y be productive to think of d e m a n d for drugs as a normal (in the D u r k h e i m i a n sense) part of a m o d e r n society, based as it is on the commodification of pleasures and the pleasure of commodities. To conceive of drug use as normal, as another form of c o m m o d ity consumption, suggests that we attend seriously to the ideas that d e m a n d is unlikely to be stamped out legislatively, that it will not disappear by indirect manipulation of the existing distribution networks. In place of prohibitionism or 'free m a r k e t e e r i n g ' it appears that in a commodified world a progressive and realistic policy would be to require that the drug commodities, the ownership and conditions of their production, sale, distribution etc., be subject to state regulation rather than a b a n d o n e d to the highest licit or illicit bidder. This model also undermines law and order prohibitionist conceptions of some drugs as acceptable and others as purely negative quantities leading to or arising out of pathology. H a r m minimization strategies need not assume an all or nothing, absolutist conception of drugs. Alcohol use and abuse is dealt with by a complex array of h a r m minimization strategies which stop short of assuming that alcohol is a purely negative drug resorted to pathologically. O t h e r drugs, including heroin, we argue, should be dealt with realistically in this fashion, by policies which are at least as 'feasible' as those viewed by Left Realism and perhaps are m o r e likely to be effective.
Notes 1. J. Sim, J.P. Scraton and P. Gordon, "Introduction: Crime, the State and Critical Analysis," in P. Scraton (ed.), Law, Order and the Authoritarian State (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987). 2. J. Auld, N. Dorn and N. South, "Irregular Work, Irregular Pleasures: Heroin in the 1980s," in R. Matthews and J. Young (eds.), Confronting Crime (London: Sage, 1986); N. Dorn, and N. South, "Criminology and the Economics of Drug Distribution in Britain: Options for Control," The Journal of Drug Issues, 1986 (16:4), 523-535; N. Dorn, and N. South, "Reconciling Policy and Practice," in N. Dorn and N. South (eds.), A Land Fit for Heroin (London: MacMillan, 1987). 3. N. Dorn and N. South, 1987, op.cit., 162. 4. J. Young, "The Tasks Facing a Realist Criminology," Contemporary Crises, Law, Crime and Social Policy, 1987 (11:4), 337. 5. J. Young, 1987, op.cit., 337. 6. B. Glaser and A. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970).
35 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
12.
13. 14.
15.
16. 17. 18. 19.
20.
21. 22. 23.
24. 25. 26. 27.
28.
J. Young, 1987, op.cit., 338. J. Young, 1987, op.cit., 337. J. Young, 1987, op.cit., 337. N. Dorn and N. South, 1987, op. cit., 7. On the growth in the 1960s see e.g., P. Bean, The Social Control of Drugs (London: Martin Robertson, 1974). On the non-dependent use issue, see C. Faupel and C. Klockars "DrugCrime Connections. Elaborations from the Life Histories of Hard-Core Heroin Addicts," Social Problems 1987 (34: 1), 54-68; H. Parker, "The New Heroin Users: Prevalence and Characteristics in Wirral, Merseyside," British Journal of Addition, 1984 (82: 2), 147-157; R. Hartnoll, "Estimating the Prevalence of Opioid Dependency," The Lancet 1985 (January 26), 203-205. Dorn and South do note the existence of middle class drug use (see e.g. 1987, op.cit., 8-9), and occasionally make gestures in the direction of dealing with problems for middle class users (1987, op.cit., 149). But the lack of analytical attention paid to this group is revealed by the use of denigrating labels such as 'yuppie', of the exemplification of these people in the form of heroin-using children of cabinet ministers and others of "high office", and of implications that these people after all have easy access to private treatment (1987, op.cit., 8-9). Such polarisations effectively lead us to abandon theoretically and for policy purposes large sectors of the stable, employed, blue collar and white collar working class. N. Dorn and N. South, 1987, op.cit., 151. L. O'Bryan, "The Cost of Lacoste - Drugs, Style and Money," in A. Henman, R. Lewis and T. Malyon (eds.), Big Deal. The Politics of the Illicit Drugs Business (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 57. C. Wright Mills, "Situated actions and vocabularies of motive," in G. Stone and A. Farberman, (eds.), Social Psychology Through Symbolic lnteractionism (Waltham Mass: Ginn Blaisdell, 1970). D. Matza, Delinquency and Drift (New York: John Wiley, 1965). N. Dorn and N. South, 1987, op.cit., 159-160. N. Dorn and N. South, 1986, op.cit., 526; 1987, op.cit., 160-1. The model is consistent with their general affiliation with deficit theory, being itself a deficit theory of deviance akin to Mertonian "innovative behaviour": i.e. people resort to illicit means of generating income when there is a deficit in the availability of licit means. However we would argue that the concept of drug distribution in our view does not escape the demand/supply models which Dorn and South criticise, but simply directs attention to the local and national supply system as opposed to the international supply system. N. Dorn and N. South, 1986, op.cit., 532. J. Auld, N. Dorn and N. South, 1986, op.cit., 531. S. Mugford and P. Cohen, "Pathology, Pleasure, Profit and the State: Toward an Integrated Theory of Drug Use," Paper presented to the 1988 Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology, University of Sydney, August 22, 1988. A. Block and W. Chambliss, Organizing Crime (New York: Elsevier, 1981). See for example G. Pearson "Social Deprivation, Unemployment and Patterns of Heroin Use," in N. Dorn and N. South (eds.), A Land Fit for Heroin (London: MacMillan, 1987). Cf. G. Pearson, The New Heroin Users (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 26.22. John Urry, "Cultural Change and Contemporary Holyday-making," Theory, Culture and Society 1988 (5: 1), 36, draws on a considerable tradition in arguing that leisure activity "presupposes regulated and organized work", that leisure is "the opposite of work", and that this creation of separate temporal spheres of work and leisure is a develop almost uniquely modern. W. Haug, The Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986).
36 29. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), and R. Keat, "The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis," Radical Philosophy, 1986 (42: 1), 24-32. 30. J. Urry, 1988, op. cit., 45. 31. M. Featherstone, "Lifestyle and Consumer Culture," Theory, Culture and Society, 1988 (4: 1), 55-70. 32. Indeed, this may be understood perhaps as a specific form of what Berman sees as the quintessence of modernity: To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. M. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, (London: Verso, 1983), 15.
