Prescribing heroin for addiction: Some untapped potentials and unanswered questions

Wakeman, Stephen

doi:10.1177/1748895815575617

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…These facilities forbid sharing of any kind and as all consumption is undertaken and monitored in individual booths, there is no opportunity for any sort of social interaction. As such, the findings presented above raise important issues around the potential desirability and longterm efficacy of heroin-assisted treatment programmes (see Wakeman 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’

Wakeman

2015

Crit Crim

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This article presents the findings of an ethnographic exploration of heroin use in a disadvantaged area of the United Kingdom. Drawing on developments in continental philosophy as well as debates around the nature of social exclusion in the late-modern west, the core claim made here is that the cultural systems of exchange and mutual support which have come to underpin heroin use in this locale-that, taken together, form a 'moral economy of heroin'-need to be understood as an exercise in reconstituting a meaningful social realm by, and specifically for, this highly marginalised group. The implications of this claim are discussed as they pertain to the fields of drug policy, addiction treatment, and critical criminological understandings of disenfranchised groups.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’

Wakeman

2015

Crit Crim

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“…Clearly, such solutions are far from simple. Wakeman (2015) has identified that providing services for drug users without a nuanced understanding of their cultures and lifestyles will not necessarily result in engagement. In relation to public use, a number of participants explained their street use was due to family members refusing to allow them to use at home ("my granddad doesn't want me smoking at all.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cannabis Use in an English Community

Taylor

Wilson

Barrett

et al. 2018

Contemporary Drug Problems

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Cannabis occupies an ambiguous social, cultural, economic, and legal position, meaning that the way communities construct, interact with, and interpret drug markets is a complicated and uncertain process. This article seeks to explain these ambiguities by investigating the place of cannabis use in a UK borough, drawing on qualitative empirical data collated from a sample (N ¼ 68) of practitioners, local residents, cannabis users, and their families. In doing so, the article employs the concept of liminality (whereby individuals and spaces occupy a position at both ends of a threshold) to explore how community behaviors and norms relate to issues of space, harm, and drug policy. The article contextualizes the position of cannabis use within the fieldwork site, exploring a series of competing contradictions that divided participants between the rhetoric and reality of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition suggests cannabis use to be dangerous, which prompted concern. However, the lived reality of prohibition for residents sat in stark juxtaposition: The drug was used commonly and publicly, was effectively decriminalized, and its use (reluctantly) accommodated. This malaise placed residents within what is described here as the liminality of drug prohibition, in which notions of the licit and illicit became blurred and whereby the illegality of cannabis augmented anxieties yet simultaneously proved a barrier to addressing them. In conclusion, the current study provides further evidence of prohibitionist drug policy proliferating rather than mitigating drug-related harms.

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“…There is a need therefore to avoid adding to the already imposing structures which silence our alternative voices and to emphasise in our work that sociocultural understandings of drug use should always be understood within the context of the damaging principles of prohibitionist drug policy and the reductionist discourse. The work of both the Beckley Foundation and Drug Science in the UK should encourage critical scholars as they demonstrate that funding for research sitting outside of normative parameters can be attained -there remains, however, a need to advance the body of evidence collated by such groups to develop a richer sociocultural understanding of substance use and how this relates to drug policy (see for example Wakeman, 2015).…”

Section: Moving Beyond the Othermentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving beyond the other

Taylor¹

2016

Tijdschrift Over Cultuur &Amp; Criminaliteit

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SummaryThis paper uses the UK as a vehicle through which to argue that a dominant reductionist drugs discourse exists which simplifies understandings of drug use and drug users leading to socio-cultural misrepresentations of harm, risk and dangerousness. It contends that at the centre of this discourse lies the process of othering -the identification of specific substances and substance users as a threat to UK society. Interestingly, within the wider context of global drug policy reform this othering process appears to be expanding to target a wider variety of factors and actors -those policies, research findings and individuals which contest normative notions, resulting in the marginalisation of 'alternative voices' which question the entrenched assumptions associated with drug prohibition. The paper concludes that there is a need for collective action by critical scholars to move beyond the other, calling for academics to be innovative in their research agendas, creative in their dissemination of knowledge and resolute despite the threat of being othered themselves.

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Prescribing heroin for addiction: Some untapped potentials and unanswered questions

Cited by 9 publications

References 42 publications

The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’

The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’

Cannabis Use in an English Community

Moving beyond the other

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