ABSTRACT
The previous chapter looked at the process of policy making. It suggested that the copious evidence of the link between inequality and drug-related harms is unlikely to fit the ideological use of evidence that characterizes this process. This chapter will take a look at some of the products of this process. Instead of participant observation of the daily lives of policy makers, it will use discourse analysis of the products of their labours. More specifically, it will follow the recommendations of John Thompson (1990) on the use of ‘argumentative analysis’. Thompson rejects accounts of government action which reduce the state to the role of a mere instrument of a ruling class. He argues that this view ignores the way in which the state responds to the demands and interests of other social groups. He proposes instead an approach to analyze the contest for power and for control of meaning that underlies the policies that governments create. He recommends that we:
break up the discursive corpus into sets of claims or assertions organized around certain topics or themes, and then . . . map out the relations between these claims and topics in terms of certain logical, or quasi-logical operators (implication, contradiction, presupposition, exclusion, etc.).
