The WOMAN Center was a women’s drug treatment program focused on heroin that existed in Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood between 1971 and 1985. During this period, successful advocacy by the Modern Alcoholism Movement was establishing the “disease model” as the norm in the expanding alcoholism treatment realm; therapeutic communities and methadone maintenance vied for similar prominence in the world of drug treatment. The WOMAN Center approached drug dependence quite differently. Its founders’ allegiance to ideas about grassroots organizing led them to see drug use and related problems as predictable responses to community chaos and blight. Their treatment program hinged on linking individual and community empowerment, achieved through drug cessation but also through consciousness-raising and leadership training. This theory was difficult to operationalize and the WOMAN Center’s tenure was short-lived. This article argues that it is nevertheless an important moment in the theorization of women’s alcohol and other drug problems: WOMAN’s intersectional analysis of gender, which drew special attention to the ways that capitalism and racism affect women’s decisions to use drugs, is a road not taken for women’s treatment. Attention to such a politicized vision of recovery is important as the U.S. grapples with the present wave of narcotics use in rural and rust-belt communities.

This article explores autoethnography as one way of doing feminist research in the drugs field. By telling my story during my 40 years experience as a feminist researcher in the drugs field, I aim to help those practicing critical drug scholarship to become familiar with this methodology as a viable way of employing a gender analysis, an employment that is the focus of this special issue. This paper is divided into five related discussions. First, I explain what feminist autoethnography is. Second, I look at how doing feminist “drugs” autoethnography helps to develop empathy. Third, I describe the methods and use of data employed in this paper. Fourth, I tell my story chronologically from 1972 to the present time. Lastly, as with many autoethnographies, my analysis of my “story as data” is left to last and I discuss the political implications of my experiences, while “feeling about” empathy as resonance with the other.

Drugs and crime research and theory in the United States originated after President Nixon declared the first War on Drugs in 1971. This research agenda promised to reveal the scope, dynamics, and impact of the drugs–crime relationship, thus promising solutions for the country’s drug problems. The initial focus was on drug trade violence and, as a result, produced scholarship mostly on men’s involvement in drug distribution, purchasing, and related crimes. It paid little attention to women’s involvement and failed to consider how gender might shape the drugs–crime relationship. By the early 1980s, however, studies began to appear on women’s experiences and addressed the role of gender in U.S. street-based illegal markets for crack cocaine and heroin. These studies revealed women’s relative powerlessness or supporting roles to domineering males in illegal, street-based drug markets. Today, drugs of concern in the U.S. originate and are sold and purchased through both legal and illegal channels that often work in tandem. This interplay requires us to rethink the drugs–crime relationship. Our article seeks to provoke new thinking and research on how 21st-century drug trends might reshape the gendered nature of drug selling across both legal and illegal markets and the gray area in between. In specific terms, we review the nature of women’s involvement in newer drug markets and consider how their involvement differs from that of men and how theory and research might move forward in addressing these changes. Our conclusions, and those reached by others in this issue, speak to the centrality of gender scholarship in research and policy on drugs and crime currently and into the future.

Editor’s NoteThis issue of Contemporary Drug Problems features the first article in a new series entitled ‘Contemporary Issues’. Articles commissioned for this series will be authored by emerging o...

This article examines how a Swedish program for social emotional learning establishes a relationship between the subject and emotions and the political implications of this relationship. This includes an examination of how emotions fit with notions of “evidence-based policy” in the field of drug policy. The key questions are: (1) How are emotions constituted in programs of social emotional training (SET)? (2) How is the subject and its relationship to emotions and social norms constituted in this program? (3) What are the political implications of the relationship between the subject and emotions? The article shows that the SET program seeks to instill in the subject the ability to identify and control emotions in order to become an emotionally mature subject. The program establishes a neurodisciplinary regime where the subject is to “rewire” its synaptic links through repetition, decoupling emotions from their cultural context. Emotions are thus reified as internal entities arising from the central nervous system. The SET program constructs a social bond that demands adherence to specific social norms governing democratic participation. The subject is expected to control its emotions and engage in cooperation, negotiation, and conflict resolution within a model of democratic communication. Refusal or inability to adhere to the norms implicit in this model of communication risks relegating the subject to the sphere of the irrational, thereby disqualifying certain practices and responses from the sphere of the political. This is what happens to drug users, as drug use is constructed as an expression of irrationality. The SET program also pacifies individuals politically by turning issues such as drug use, unemployment, and education into matters of acquiring skills rather than political action.

With the recent legalization of gay marriage in France, the couple has become the most valued social unit in the gay community. The emergence of the “chemsex” and “slamming” subculture—which involves injecting drugs during sexual encounters—on the fringes of the gay online dating scene has thus aroused new fears and anxieties. While slamming is often portrayed as a risky, extreme, and deviant practice divorced from the sentimental norms of stable relationships, this article aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how practices of injecting drug use—and significantly, attendant practices of managing risks and harms—are entangled with the search for love and willingness to build lasting emotional bonds among young gay men. Drawing on ethnographic immersion on two gay dating sites and 25 life story interviews with gay men who inject drugs in Paris and Lyon, I argue that the link between romantic relationships and injecting drug use is anything but straightforward. The suffering and loneliness that follow romantic breakups can trigger uncontrolled drug use while feelings of “love fusion” between “slammers” can encourage further risk-taking. But romantic relationships can also provide crucial symbolic and material support to place limits on drug use in ways that reduce harm.

Drawing primarily on interviews conducted in London with people who inject drugs, this article looks at participants’ accounts of encountering “triggers,” variously described as material things, spaces, people, situations, and memories. This article argues that instead of understanding triggers or “cue-induced cravings” in terms of a separation between objects and subjects, the former triggering the latter, they suggest a relational “becoming” that, if taken seriously, can influence a more open approach to drug use and reducing drug-related harm. Triggers are a key area of interest for neurological models of addiction, particularly in light of neuroimaging technologies that claim to visualize the phenomenon, but in sociological studies of alcohol and other drugs, they are seldom explored. This can be linked to a historical interest in the decision-making individual. However, in rethinking triggers in terms of “the event”, and the body as something we do, neither subject/object nor body/world pre-exist each other. Therefore, triggers, as emphasized by the participants in this study, become a way of shining light on some of the complex relationships people have with drugs that go beyond rationality and reason, without reducing such practices to irrationality or loss of self-control.

Life course theory has been used to explain why people stop committing crime and/or deviant behavior. Life course theory scholars have demonstrated important life events, such as marriage, gaining employment, or joining the military, have led to reduced recidivism; however, drug courts might also legitimately be considered a turning point for an offender. This study utilized semi-structured interviews with former drug court participants ( n = 29) in an attempt to expand life course theory and demonstrate how drug courts should be considered a facilitator of “turning points” for previous criminal offenders. During the interviews, participants discussed how drug court helped them attain many important skills/ideas: self-esteem, improved relationships with family and children, a general educational development certificate, a driver’s license, and/or gainful employment. A gendered analysis demonstrates women found drug court to be more useful at facilitating turning points than their male peers. Additionally, recidivism rates for the participants were lower than similarly situated offenders at the state level. While further research is needed, this study begins to advance the expansion of life course theory.

Contemporary Drug Problems (CDP) recently held its third biennial conference from September 16-18, 2015, in Lisbon, Portugal. Hosted by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the 2015 conference built on the success of the previous two conferences held in Prato, Italy, in 2011 and Aarhus, Denmark, in 2013. 2011 conference sought to explore the ways in which and problems are constituted socially and politically. 2013 conference continued and expanded these discussions to analyze how the complexity of the multiple constitution of drugs may be attended to in research, policy, and practice. 2015 conference theme, Encountering alcohol and other further contributed to the project of encouraging critical thinking and novel approaches to alcohol and other drug research established in the previous two conferences. This most recent CDP conference provided a forum to ask important questions of increasingly influential approaches to alcohol and other drug (AOD) research that emphasize relationality, contingency, and emergence, and their potential importance for grappling with some of the complex issues arising in contemporary AOD research (some of which were also explored at the 2011 and 2013 conferences). key themes of the conference included:* the co-constitution of people, drugs, and places;* the importance of closely scrutinizing common assumptions about the power of pharmacology and the agency of consumers; and* the implications of understanding drugs and their consumption as phenomena that emerge in complex assemblages made up of a range of forces.The conference was opened by CDP editor David Moore and EMCDDA Scientific Director Paul Griffiths. Following the welcome to delegates and acknowledgment of the conference partners (in addition to EMCDDA, the National Drug Research Institute, the Burnet Institute, Aarhus University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Professor Moore introduced the first of three fascinating keynote presentations.The first keynote address was delivered by Professor Alison Ritter (Drug Policy Modelling Program, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales) and was entitled The dynamics of drug policy: Relational, emergent and contingent. Professor Ritter examined the relational and socially constructed process of policy development. Drawing together contemporary concepts of performativity with established approaches to policy development analysis, Professor Ritter argued policy is never fixed but instead made in practice. Importantly, she also argued that, although challenging, this insight provides an opportunity for developing novel approaches to address AOD issues.Dr. Emmanuel Kuntsche (Addiction Switzerland) delivered the next keynote address at the close of the second day of the conference with his keynote presentation entitled Understanding the weekend drinking of young adults from an ?events' perspective: possibilities and limitations of using per-sonal cell phones. …

In Denmark, outpatient substitution treatment has traditionally been associated with a great deal of ambivalence and control. Until the late 1990s, a condition for entering substitution treatment was that the user ceased using illicit drugs. Failure to comply would in many cases mean expulsion from treatment. However, since the late 1990s/early 2000s, a more liberal substitution treatment policy has developed, which recognizes continued attachments to illicit drugs and drug scenes for many drug users. With this shift in treatment rationality, treatment encounters between social workers and drug users can be analyzed as experiments enacting new relations between legal and illegal drugs, bodies, and environments. Drawing analytical inspiration from material semiotics and actor-network theory, this article focuses on how “outside” relations are articulated and become visible “inside” outpatient treatment encounters. Against this backdrop, we analyze the trial and error involved in stabilization as a set of ongoing processes relating to configurations of heterogeneous material networks. The article presents by way of a case study a detailed analysis of these entanglements, drawing on data from two qualitative studies of outpatient substitution treatment in Denmark.