Drugs: a sociological blind spot? A look at the French experience

Both popular and scientific understandings of illicit drugs - their effects, their consequences, their users - have been shaped by a number of sometimes obscured assumptions, beliefs, or myths. These myths can make us blind to the reality of the lived experiences of drug users and are often instrumentalized within public and political discourses and responses, a connection that Kokoreff traces in this chatper in his analysis of the rise and fall of French sociological thinking on drug use and drug sales. He traces this history from the 1960s and 1970s when sociological approaches were fairly moribund, to the 1990s when the sociological research really took off and even had some currency in policy circles, to the current moment when the research is again lagging and is given little attention in policy arenas, which are again becoming more repressive, and less friendly to sociological approaches. For example, in the 1980s he shows how sociological thought was dominated by the major paradigms of Marxism and Structuralism which showed little or no intellectual interest in the drug phenomenon. From these perspectives, drug use was viewed as either an "epistemologically ambivalent object" or at best epiphenomenon related to social forms of social marginality and deviance... at worst... a 'polluting object' that could potentially transfer its characteristics... to the person studying it." In examining these developments within social science research itself, Kokoreff emphasizes again the extent to which general societal views about the drug phenomenon permeate even those disciplines whose task it is to examine it. [From the book's introduction]