ABSTRACT
The project that I have been pursuing in this book has proved to be even more complex and stranger than I ever envisaged. I have found myself in some unfamiliar corners of scholarship that at times appeared to be a long distance away from the world of drugs – from behavioural economics to histories of insurance to accounts of global governance. This has made the process of writing the book quite a taxing (and lengthy!) one but it has also led me to think more about the nature of the drug question as a ‘problem space’. What does it tell us that we need to look in such a diverse set of literatures and from such a range of perspectives? It is tempting to describe it as an ‘interdisciplinary’ field of study. Up to a
point, that is certainly true, but I have certain reservations about the idea of interdisciplinarity which has in any case become something of an academic cliché. As I noted in Chapter 6, Braithwaite (2000) has described the new regulatory scholarship that he has spearheaded as sweeping across the disciplines and leading to a paradigmatic shift in the social sciences. We might see the regulation perspective then as interdisciplinarity writ large. A similar
view might be taken about the governmentality analytic. But as Braithwaite has gone on to argue, ‘paradigmatic change is not about razing the work and the methodological rigour of disciplines; it is about reconfiguring the invaluable endeavours pursued within them so they can feed into more fertile modes of theory-driven organization’ (Braithwaite, 2005b: 347). In other words, we need the discipline of the disciplines to ensure the highest levels of conceptual and methodological rigour but, in investigating any given problem, we should scan across them for the best intellectual tools and resources for the job. This resonates with Ian Hacking’s (2004) argument that his own work is most accurately characterized in terms of collaborating disciplines rather than interdisciplinarity. For him, the endeavour should not be to break down disciplinary boundaries but rather to respect the distinctive contributions each can make and to draw on those where relevant to particular problems or projects. This leads me to a couple of related reflections. First, pursued in the types
of ways suggested by Hacking and Braithwaite, the study of the drug question can potentially make an important contribution to the reconfiguring of the social sciences in the early twenty-first century. In this sense, to consider it as a very specialist and narrow field of study is to miss a rather large trick! Second, and related to this point, attempts to set up a sub-discipline of ‘addiction studies’ may therefore not be very helpful in the long run. The intellectual project needs to be broader in its vision. These two points, if correct, present us with a formidable challenge – we need to couple mastery of the specialist detail with an understanding of the bigger picture. One way to read this book is as a modest contribution to this rather daunting project. I hope that others will go on to build on this in the future. I am not sure that the drugs question is necessarily unique or even par-
ticularly distinctive in this respect. To take the example of crime, another issue that I know a little about, in my view the most insightful and interesting work in this field in recent years demonstrates exactly this kind of breadth of vision and imagination. The late Richard Ericson’s last book Crime in an Insecure World (Ericson, 2007) or Ian Loader and Neil Walker’s (2007) Civilizing Security are outstanding examples of work which is ‘criminological’, in the sense that it has a strong focus on crime, but which melds together social theory, political science and socio-legal scholarship. Perhaps then Braithwaite is right and the investigation of most contemporary social issues is likely to require us to sweep across the disciplines. This is a big question for today’s social scientists. In the next section, I will briefly trace the overall arc of the book’s central
narrative. I will then return to my core theme, the relationship between drugs and freedom, revisit its main contours and characteristics and reflect on its significance. Following on from this, I return to the short dictionary of misunderstood words that I began in Chapter 2, as a way of pulling together some important insights and themes from previous chapters. In conclusion,
I attempt to make sense of my project as a whole and consider how it might contribute to the future development of different and more constructive ways of imagining and governing what we currently call the ‘drug problem’.
