ABSTRACT
Chapter 15, the final contribution to this collection, shifts the focus from the cultural practices associated with drug consumption at the micro-level, back to the relationship between political practices and illicit drug use. In this, it returns to and develops themes explored in the Chapters 2 and 7 of the volume, namely the response of the government to evidence of widespread recreational drug use, but in doing so it extends the discussion to consider whether or not we can detect evidence of normalisation in the very development of government policy. In other words, is it the case that government policy, despite the alternations and tensions between harm reduction and enforcement strategies, has in effect moved to a position of accommodation? This is the point at which the dimensions of popular cultural practices and symbolic representation touch policy development within the state. As Richard Huggins suggests, if it is possible to detect a move towards a position of accommodation to recreational drug use in the policy development process, this is likely to be prompted by much more than a simple reading of the quantitative evidence provided by surveys of use and exposure to ‘offer situations’. It is likely to reflect a recognition of the process of cultural accommodation discussed first by Parker, Aldridge and Measham (1998) in their original formulation of the ‘normalisation thesis’. In other words, governments and civil servants, as much as journalists and cultural commentators, must acknowledge the extent to which ‘sensible’ drug use is culturally embedded within popular cultures.
