Tobias Berger and Alejandro Esguerra (eds.): World Politics in Translation, 2018

This chapter tries to stay faithful to the spirit of ANT and engage with politics empirically. More precisely, based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Lisbon in 2015, it shows how three key works – indicating three key episodes in the development of ANT – can be put to use in the realm of drug policy. The structure of the chapter is as follows: Drawing on Michel Callon’s classical study of scallop-farming, the first empirical story demonstrates the usefulness of the sociology of translation when it is applied to the problematisation of drug use in Europe. Then, centred on Bruno Latour’s introductory text, Reassembling the Social, the second empirical story shows how ANT refigures drug use as a social problem. Following Annemarie Mol’s work on care, the third empirical story highlights different ways of engaging with drug use, only some of which operate in terms of problem-solving. The final part of the chapter discusses the three processes together and argues for a shift in ANT-inspired thinking about politics – a shift from a concern with bad translation to good treason.

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.

American International Journal of Contemporary Research

This paper aims to present a general perspective on the relationship between drugs and society, and, at the same time, to develop an analysis of the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal, as well as of the regulated cannabis market in Uruguay. So, methodologically, it is based on both a review of the literature about that subject and an investigation of the primary sources of the Portuguese and Uruguayan drug policy. Among the results found out, it can be highlighting the following sample: 1) the prohibitionist policy on drugs is one of the cases that most reveals ambivalence when it is considered the production of social rules; 2) the so-called drug problem is not and never has been a police problem, except in the sense that the police are themselves the problem-it is, rather, a problem of lack of knowledge and wrong policy approach; 3) the prohibitionist drug policies have failed; 4) Portugal is an example of a well-implemented drug decriminalization policy; 5) the philosophy of Uruguayan drug policy assumes that human rights obligations take precedence over drug control efforts. Conclusively, it is advocated, for example, the implementation of policies that regulate illicit drugs, from production through to distribution.

2017

If surveillance is understood as a complex multi-dimensional process, then collaboration between health, social and law enforcement sectors can be viewed as a part of the surveillance culture of particular societies and urban settings. Policies towards illicit drugs usually build on a two-track approach—public health and public order—with different objectives that have to be negotiated daily by street level workers in the light of their differing beliefs on drug use. This paper brings examples of collaboration and non-collaboration among workers from social, health and law enforcement agencies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Porto Alegre, Brazil in their daily interactions with drug users, to analyze the types of surveillance arising from these negotiations. The study utilizes results from 80 in-depth interviews with street level workers and 800 hours of participant observation carried out from February 2010 until March 2011, equally divided between the two cities. Different cultures of surveillance produce diverse state-citizen approaches in terms of coercion, care, and rights. In Amsterdam, close collaboration and information exchange among workers produce a 'chain' surveillance culture: an intensive screening allows drug users to have more access to care, yet, at the same time this can produce excessive control over users' lives. In Porto Alegre, by contrast, insufficient collaboration produces a surveillance culture of 'holes': less systematic screening and lack of information sharing allows users to slip out of care, and of workers' surveillance sight. Historically, though coming from apparently opposite extremes in terms of drug surveillance (respectively permissive and controlling), both Amsterdam and Porto Alegre in practice show surveillance cultures which combine care and order. Combinations, however, vary according to different assemblages between actors concerned with transforming drug users' lives.

The discoursive construction of women in public campaigns against drugs: looking into its ideological work Pinto-Coelho, M. Zara Simões "The discoursive construction of women in public campaigns against drugs: looking into its ideological workAbstract: This paper analyse the way women are talked about in portuguese public campaigns against drugs, using a critical discourse approach, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996), van Dijk (2001. When women are chosen as topics of discourse, they are constructed as two types of mothers: as mothers in the problematic family that gives raise to addiction, and as addict mothers. My aim is to show the role of various linguistic resources and of its interplay with semiotic ones in the construction of these two social figures. I argue that parental discourse in prevention campaigns functions to reinforce gender diference by maintaining a sexist ideology, one that serves to obscure public responsibility for the conditions under which women are likely to be pregnant and perform mother-work, and that places undue burdens on women. At the same time, this kind of ideological work also functions to reinforce the otherness of drug users and, through that, to justify policy decisions.

2008

Drogen und Verhalten im Umgang damit sind stets auch Gegenstand von gesellschaftlichen Konstruktionsprozessen und moralischer Wertungen. Das Anliegen des vorliegenden Artikels ist es, die Rolle von Drogen in Diskursen uber Einwanderer/innen sowie die sozialen Auswirkungen dieser Rolle zu untersuchen. Hierzu wurden 22 narrative Interviews mit Spanier/innen aus vier verschiedenen Stadteilen in unterschiedlichen Stadten der autonomen Region Valencia (Spanien) gefuhrt und, einem soziologischen Diskursmodel folgend, analysiert. Im Ergebnis konnten deutliche Unterschiede zwischen dem Bild der Heroinabhangigen aus dem eigenen Stadtteil und dem Alkohol missbrauchender lateinamerikanischer Migrant/innen festgestellt werden. Wahrend Erstere mit Empathie und Mitleid als Opfer gesellschaftlicher Probleme und von Drogen beschrieben wurden, wurden die Migrant/innen im Diskurs als Eindringlinge benannt, die das Zusammenleben im Stadtteil bedrohen. Diese Unterschiede konnen mit nicht-diskursiven Pr...

Health Sociology Review, 2016

Drawing on Foucault's conceptualisation of power, this paper examines public health as a distinctly modern regime of governance. An account of the historical regulation of drug use is traced in order to examine socio-historical shifts and lines of continuity in contemporary technologies of harm reduction. Using qualitative interview data, we examined practices of power in the context of contemporary drug use, including self-governance using techniques of monitoring, self-management and selftracking. Participants' accounts revealed that they were encouraged to self-govern their drug use through a variety of reformist technologies that are embedded in harm-reduction programs. It is argued that participants' subjectivity is formed at the intersection of authoritative governance and self-governance, through ethical practices of the self which have emerged from disciplinary health practices, and incorporate the body as the site of power. We illustrate this by drawing a distinction between hygienist and sanitationist practices of public health. These governmental practices, which are embedded in public health programs, encourage people who use drugs to transform themselves into moral citizens, aligning their ethical practices with governing interests.