ABSTRACT

All the evidence on drugs, crime and public health that this book will give has already been presented. It has shown that man-made inequality is indispensable to the understanding of contemporary patterns of drug use, drug control and related harms. Chapter two showed that illicit drug use is not an activity that is confined to poor and marginalized groups. Indeed, it seems that rates of illicit drug use are actually higher among the relatively privileged. But the health and criminal harms of problematic drug use are most likely to be experienced by people who are economically, socially and racially excluded, through a process that I described in Chapter 3 as subterranean structuration. In Chapter 4, I showed that, when making policy on illicit substances, members of powerful groups mine the mountains of evidence that have been produced. They do so selectively, in order to find nuggets of evidence to use in stories that mark their tellers out as worthy of recognition, promotion or election. Political tactics contribute to this distorted use of knowledge, but a deeper influence is the use of drug policy as a symbolic discourse which ideologically sustains inequalities in the distribution of power, resources and respect. As many authors have concluded, prohibitionist policy is not a rational response to the existing pains and pleasures of drug use. Neither, as O’Malley and Mugford (1991) argued, is it a result of a conspiracy by a unified, omniscient state in the interests of a homogeneous ruling class. Prohibition, in its many varieties, results from shifting patterns of argument and discourse involving various groups within and around the state.