Liviu Alexandrescu | Manchester Metropolitan University (original) (raw)

Research Papers by Liviu Alexandrescu

Contemporary Drug Problems, 2024

Recent efforts to rethink drug-related stigma have been increasingly considering the power dimens... more Recent efforts to rethink drug-related stigma have been increasingly considering the power dimension of the concept, to show how stigma formations flow top-down from governments, as well as other political or corporate stakeholders, towards the powerless and marginalised. Stigma attaches itself to the individual and collective identities of the substance-using subject. But it equally alters the multiple lives of the substance. In the US opioid crisis of recent decades, big pharma companies could be seen lobbying the medical profession and harnessing their power to destigmatise opioid painkillers, as part of wider marketing and sales strategies. This has been subsequently linked with rising opioid-related fatalities and spiralling harms among some of the most vulnerable groups. This theoretical paper locates the object-stigma of drugs between the cultural confines of 'limbic capitalism' (the drive to seek pleasure and meaning through consumption) and 'palliative capitalism' (the drive to pathologise and medicate ills attributed to the individual, but not the system). It argues that stigma should be viewed as a dynamic force which, under the guise of consumer culture and the veil of scientific rationality, can be manipulated by business elites to shift meanings around pain, pleasure, and addiction, in ways that are potentially conducive to social harms.

Normalisation re-visited: Drugs in Europe in the 21st century, 2023

In recent years, top government and opposition politicians in the United Kingdom have increasingl... more In recent years, top government and opposition politicians in the United Kingdom have increasingly admitted to personal experiences of using criminalised drugs. Acknowledging the symbolic discrepancies between how such transgressions are framed as trivial stories, and the moral injunction they carry for less powerful others to submit to drug prohibitions, this chapter provides a discussion of narrative scripts used to convey encounters with controlled substances. Observing these as past encounters (part of formative journeys), ambiguous encounters (that blur the agencies of subject and substance) and displaced encounters (in settings far from home), this chapter argues that accounts of breaking drug laws indicate a contradiction. This entails a gap between a normalisation of 'drug talk', on one side, and a further normalisation of current prohibitive drug control regimes, on the other, that also inhibits possibilities of reimagining existing but unjust arrangements.

Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 2022

This paper proposes a stigma-vulnerability nexus as a critical incursion into understandings of a... more This paper proposes a stigma-vulnerability nexus as a critical incursion into understandings of and responses to drug-related social problems. Considering stigma and vulnerability as sites of ostensibly empathetic interventions that aim to mitigate the impact of illicit substances, it proposes that the two concepts are best deployed when located within the political economy of drug harms. Doing so foregrounds the material inequalities resulting from existing socioeconomic arrangements and highlights the limitations of them being politically mobilised in purely cultural-interactional ways, which can serve to overlook structural conditions and justify harmful political choices. As a theoretical perspective, the stigma-vulnerability nexus is therefore concerned with the macro-structural factors that shape both concepts and how they intersect. To demonstrate its value as an analytic tool, it is first applied to the framing of 'County Lines' dealing, where senior gang members are stigmatised, but the wider drivers of vulnerability among the young people they exploit are overlooked. Secondly, the nexus is applied to the case of new psychoactive substances. Here, the perceived vulnerability of young people is used to justify responses that ultimately lead to amplified harms being displaced onto structurally disadvantaged populations such as the homeless and prison inmates, compounding their economic vulnerability and class stigma.

Crime Media Culture, 2021

Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to o... more Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to order, civilise and make life secure are expressed. In The Purge film franchise, crime becomes legal in America for a night each year, when violence and destructive impulses are freely discharged and actively encouraged by the US government. This article proposes a critical discussion of some of the criminological themes in the films, reading the institutionalised carnage of Purge night as a metaphor for the systemic violence of the market and further on for liberal governance as a philosophy of war, scarred by the horror of hidden monsters. It then argues that dystopian aesthetics can obscure the failures and antagonisms of the social order in the present, as well as punctuate anti-utopian fears of the future.

Crime Media Culture, 2019

Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids ('spice'-ty... more Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids ('spice'-type drugs) have moved into unregulated street markets and have become popular among homeless populations in the United Kingdom. Images of so-called 'spice zombies', rough sleepers in public spaces experiencing severe substance-induced fits, have been used by local and national media to suggest the growing scale of the problem. This article proposes that such depictions should be read through a cultural analysis rooted in the political economy of austerity policies, where the twofold stigma of substance and welfare dependencies directs guilt at the poor, concealing the systemic cruelty of benefits reforms. Through the circulation of such tropes and the ridiculing of a superfluous abject underclass that embodies them, media and political discourses of the 'broken society' highlight an evident need for welfare reduction and more generally for the austerity project.

This paper observes and compares discursive framings of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in part... more This paper observes and compares discursive framings of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in parts of the mainstream media in Romania and the United Kingdom. It assembles a corpus of about 800 news items and looks into samples of reporting from 2009 to 2017. In Romania, NPS or more generally ‘ethnobotanicals’ were first associated with gullible youths experimenting with what appeared to be synthetic cannabinoids only for public attention to briefly move on to stimulant powders displacing heroin among injecting users, later on. In the UK, the synthetic cathinone mephedrone was presented by tabloids as a ‘menace’ to teenagers and other young users, only for synthetic cannabinoids to eventually be linked with rough sleepers and other vulnerable groups. Through this, qualitative distinctions are shown in the portraying of a middle-class notion of naïve but ‘clean’ youth, valuable in itself, and the portraying of abject underclass users, mostly as a threatening and contagious presence. Beyond alarmism and exaggeration, drug news reporting thus also appears rooted in class politics and structural inequalities where NPS meet with the lived conditions and spoiled identities of disadvantaged groups.

Background Between 2008 and 2013, powder-stimulants sold by ‘head shops’ as novel psychoactive su... more Background
Between 2008 and 2013, powder-stimulants sold by ‘head shops’ as novel psychoactive substances (NPS) or ‘legal highs’ have displaced heroin among groups of injecting substance users in Bucharest, Romania. Rising HIV-infection rates and other medical or social harms have been reported to follow this trend.

Methods
The study builds on two sets of original (N = 30) and existing (N = 20) interview data and on observations collected mainly at the site of a methadone substitution treatment facility.

Results
By disentangling the space–time continuum of the methadone queue, this paper argues that injecting drug users’ (IDUs) passage from opiates to amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) can be understood as ‘spillages’ of space and time. IDUs thus ‘spill’ out of the disciplinary flows of methadone treatment in two ways. The first is that of space and materiality. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), ATS/NPS appear embedded in reconfigured practices and rituals of injecting use. Such spillages see the pleasure-seeking self being fluidised in forming connections with, or spilling into, nonhuman actants such as substances, settings or objects. The second dimension of spilling is that of time. In this sense, heroin use is a ‘cryogenic strategy’ of inhabiting history and facing the transition to the market society that Romanian opiate injectors spill out of, not able to appropriate choice and legitimate consumption. The phenomenological qualities of stimulants that seem to accelerate lived time and generalise desire thus present them with an opportunity to alleviate a form of what a post-communist moral imaginary of transition frames as debilitating nostalgia.

Conclusion
ATS/NPS are revealed as fluid entities that do not only shape risk conditions but also alter shared meanings and contextual configurations of bodies, substances and disciplinary regimes in unpredictable ways.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate a group of Romanian injecting substance use... more Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate a group of Romanian injecting substance users “migrating” from heroin to novel psychoactive substances (NPS) as a counterpublic seeking to escape the stigma of drug abjection.

Design/methodology/approach
– The findings are drawn from interview and observational data collected mainly at drug services sites in Bucharest, Romania.

Findings
– The stimulant powders sold by head shops appealed to experienced drug users because they seemed to emulate a consumerist ethos and cultivate a healthy, rational agent that popular discourses of addiction deem incompatible with drug careers. NPS and head shops were thus initially understood as a possibility of escaping “junk identities”. However, they ultimately sealed injectors as abject bodies that obstructed the collaborative goals of rehabilitation and health restoration. A sense of symbolic distance shaped by notions of moral and bodily hygiene separated heroin and NPS users, as the latter increasingly came to be seen and see themselves as flawed consumers of health and freedom.

Practical implications
– NPS retail spaces could present valuable opportunities to insert harm-reduction resources and harness counterpublic health strategies.

Social implications
– Dominant definitions of substance use as unavoidable paths into self-destruction push users towards unknown compounds they can attach more fluid meanings to. This suggests that prohibitionist language still obscures rational dialogue about existing and emerging drugs.

Originality/value
– The paper traces ATS/NPS in an Eastern European context offering an alternative vantage point to harm-focused perspectives.

This article examines how mephedrone, the most popular legal high sold freely in the United Kingd... more This article examines how mephedrone, the most popular legal high sold freely in the United Kingdom until its classification as a high-risk drug, in April 2010, was constructed by the British popular media as a moral epidemic that threatened the very symbolic heart of the nation – its youth. News of teenagers committing suicide after taking the drug or dying of overdose had been presented in the pages of tabloid dailies for months when the government decided to ban the substance despite the lack of solid scientific data on the medical and social risks it posed. Drawing on Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies, this article demonstrates how in its attempt to influence national policy the media largely responded to the new drug problem with panic discourses that perpetuated the old ‘war on drugs’ ideology, choosing to frame mephedrone as an agent of death and moral downfall even when its destructive influence was questionable. In this perspective, a blueprint made of multiple layers of historical drug scares and repressive drug policies shaped the metaphors and narratives used by the media to codify a sense of threat and by the audiences to interpret the symptoms of a social pathology.

Chapters by Liviu Alexandrescu

This chapter offers a short history of ‘drugs’ as a policy object and a governance tool that reve... more This chapter offers a short history of ‘drugs’ as a policy object and a governance tool that reveals some of the contradictions behind the emergence of modern capitalism in the liberal age. It situates the freedom-addiction binary at the foundation of moralising prohibition discourses and the ideal of the ‘drug-free world’. It emphasises the preservation of the choice-making liberal self as the main function of the medico-legal institutional assemblages designed to monitor and control the non-therapeutic consumption and distribution of psychoactive agents. It further seeks to follow this paradigm in the scientific field by knocking at the door of a ‘science of intoxication’ that predominantly understands and explains habits of substance use as deviant paths of flawed minds and bodies. This is weighed against sociological and ethnographic accounts that challenge pathological definitions of addiction by placing drugs at the core of culturally meaningful lifestyles and power relations. Finally, this first chapter looks at harm-reduction, the main reform movement that challenges the ‘war on drugs’ by invoking ideals of pragmatic public health provision. If prohibition discourses are thus critiqued for restricting human freedom, contrary to the ideals they were meant to serve, harm-reduction is also critiqued for its risk management ethos that positions ‘problematic users’ as crippled rational subjects.

NB: This extract from my doctoral thesis can be used and referenced as an introductory literature review to the field of critical drug studies.

Media Contributions and Public Engagement by Liviu Alexandrescu

Interview with the drug policy reform blog #mybrainmychoice.

Fighting prejudice against people who use drugs should lead to a larger interrogation of society ... more Fighting prejudice against people who use drugs should lead to a larger interrogation of society and inequality – not only a change of vocabulary.

Recent media reports pointing to the toxic effects of 'Spice' on users and communities have calle... more Recent media reports pointing to the toxic effects of 'Spice' on users and communities have called for immediate action from local and government authorities to mitigate the damages and sanitise public space. But years of state-enforced austerity reveal so-called 'drug epidemics' as just the symptom of deeper, structural economic problems and inequalities. Not least, also of a general condescending attitude towards the poor and less fortunate.

Short piece for the 'ESRC new drugs seminar series' blog exploring the link between the phenomeno... more Short piece for the 'ESRC new drugs seminar series' blog exploring the link between the phenomenological qualities of stimulant substance use ('speed time') and larger historical flows of time and political transition.

It is often said that society must be defended from drug users. But who defends drug users from s... more It is often said that society must be defended from drug users. But who defends drug users from society?
Article written for DrugReporter, a media platform supporting the European Drug Policy Initiative (EDPI).
http://drogriporter.hu/en/edpi

The urban legends that ‘legal highs’ have inspired, speak of the traumas and hardships faced by i... more The urban legends that ‘legal highs’ have inspired, speak of the traumas and hardships faced by injecting drug users.
Article written for DrugReporter, a media platform supporting the European Drug Policy Initiative (EDPI).
http://drogriporter.hu/en/edpi

Conference Papers and Presentations by Liviu Alexandrescu

Presentation delivered at the 2017 conference of the European Society for Social Drug Research, S... more Presentation delivered at the 2017 conference of the European Society for Social Drug Research, September 23-25, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Presentation of a small sample of my work on how transitioning from heroin to novel psychoactive ... more Presentation of a small sample of my work on how transitioning from heroin to novel psychoactive substance (NPS) use can be understood, in some cultural contexts, as a kind of identity 'normalisation' strategy for heavily stigmatised groups of experienced injecting drug users.

Presentation delivered at the University of Kent for the first event in the 'ESRC new drugs semin... more Presentation delivered at the University of Kent for the first event in the 'ESRC new drugs seminar series' - 'New Drugs: New Policy Landscapes', December 2014.

Events by Liviu Alexandrescu

Restrictive UK drug laws have not made people who use drugs safer and have not significantly inhi... more Restrictive UK drug laws have not made people who use drugs safer and have not significantly inhibited the use of new psychoactive substances (NPS, formerly known as ‘legal highs’) and other more traditional illicit drugs, according to experts.

Contemporary Drug Problems, 2024

Recent efforts to rethink drug-related stigma have been increasingly considering the power dimens... more Recent efforts to rethink drug-related stigma have been increasingly considering the power dimension of the concept, to show how stigma formations flow top-down from governments, as well as other political or corporate stakeholders, towards the powerless and marginalised. Stigma attaches itself to the individual and collective identities of the substance-using subject. But it equally alters the multiple lives of the substance. In the US opioid crisis of recent decades, big pharma companies could be seen lobbying the medical profession and harnessing their power to destigmatise opioid painkillers, as part of wider marketing and sales strategies. This has been subsequently linked with rising opioid-related fatalities and spiralling harms among some of the most vulnerable groups. This theoretical paper locates the object-stigma of drugs between the cultural confines of 'limbic capitalism' (the drive to seek pleasure and meaning through consumption) and 'palliative capitalism' (the drive to pathologise and medicate ills attributed to the individual, but not the system). It argues that stigma should be viewed as a dynamic force which, under the guise of consumer culture and the veil of scientific rationality, can be manipulated by business elites to shift meanings around pain, pleasure, and addiction, in ways that are potentially conducive to social harms.

Normalisation re-visited: Drugs in Europe in the 21st century, 2023

In recent years, top government and opposition politicians in the United Kingdom have increasingl... more In recent years, top government and opposition politicians in the United Kingdom have increasingly admitted to personal experiences of using criminalised drugs. Acknowledging the symbolic discrepancies between how such transgressions are framed as trivial stories, and the moral injunction they carry for less powerful others to submit to drug prohibitions, this chapter provides a discussion of narrative scripts used to convey encounters with controlled substances. Observing these as past encounters (part of formative journeys), ambiguous encounters (that blur the agencies of subject and substance) and displaced encounters (in settings far from home), this chapter argues that accounts of breaking drug laws indicate a contradiction. This entails a gap between a normalisation of 'drug talk', on one side, and a further normalisation of current prohibitive drug control regimes, on the other, that also inhibits possibilities of reimagining existing but unjust arrangements.

Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 2022

This paper proposes a stigma-vulnerability nexus as a critical incursion into understandings of a... more This paper proposes a stigma-vulnerability nexus as a critical incursion into understandings of and responses to drug-related social problems. Considering stigma and vulnerability as sites of ostensibly empathetic interventions that aim to mitigate the impact of illicit substances, it proposes that the two concepts are best deployed when located within the political economy of drug harms. Doing so foregrounds the material inequalities resulting from existing socioeconomic arrangements and highlights the limitations of them being politically mobilised in purely cultural-interactional ways, which can serve to overlook structural conditions and justify harmful political choices. As a theoretical perspective, the stigma-vulnerability nexus is therefore concerned with the macro-structural factors that shape both concepts and how they intersect. To demonstrate its value as an analytic tool, it is first applied to the framing of 'County Lines' dealing, where senior gang members are stigmatised, but the wider drivers of vulnerability among the young people they exploit are overlooked. Secondly, the nexus is applied to the case of new psychoactive substances. Here, the perceived vulnerability of young people is used to justify responses that ultimately lead to amplified harms being displaced onto structurally disadvantaged populations such as the homeless and prison inmates, compounding their economic vulnerability and class stigma.

Crime Media Culture, 2021

Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to o... more Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to order, civilise and make life secure are expressed. In The Purge film franchise, crime becomes legal in America for a night each year, when violence and destructive impulses are freely discharged and actively encouraged by the US government. This article proposes a critical discussion of some of the criminological themes in the films, reading the institutionalised carnage of Purge night as a metaphor for the systemic violence of the market and further on for liberal governance as a philosophy of war, scarred by the horror of hidden monsters. It then argues that dystopian aesthetics can obscure the failures and antagonisms of the social order in the present, as well as punctuate anti-utopian fears of the future.

Crime Media Culture, 2019

Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids ('spice'-ty... more Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids ('spice'-type drugs) have moved into unregulated street markets and have become popular among homeless populations in the United Kingdom. Images of so-called 'spice zombies', rough sleepers in public spaces experiencing severe substance-induced fits, have been used by local and national media to suggest the growing scale of the problem. This article proposes that such depictions should be read through a cultural analysis rooted in the political economy of austerity policies, where the twofold stigma of substance and welfare dependencies directs guilt at the poor, concealing the systemic cruelty of benefits reforms. Through the circulation of such tropes and the ridiculing of a superfluous abject underclass that embodies them, media and political discourses of the 'broken society' highlight an evident need for welfare reduction and more generally for the austerity project.

This paper observes and compares discursive framings of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in part... more This paper observes and compares discursive framings of new psychoactive substances (NPS) in parts of the mainstream media in Romania and the United Kingdom. It assembles a corpus of about 800 news items and looks into samples of reporting from 2009 to 2017. In Romania, NPS or more generally ‘ethnobotanicals’ were first associated with gullible youths experimenting with what appeared to be synthetic cannabinoids only for public attention to briefly move on to stimulant powders displacing heroin among injecting users, later on. In the UK, the synthetic cathinone mephedrone was presented by tabloids as a ‘menace’ to teenagers and other young users, only for synthetic cannabinoids to eventually be linked with rough sleepers and other vulnerable groups. Through this, qualitative distinctions are shown in the portraying of a middle-class notion of naïve but ‘clean’ youth, valuable in itself, and the portraying of abject underclass users, mostly as a threatening and contagious presence. Beyond alarmism and exaggeration, drug news reporting thus also appears rooted in class politics and structural inequalities where NPS meet with the lived conditions and spoiled identities of disadvantaged groups.

Background Between 2008 and 2013, powder-stimulants sold by ‘head shops’ as novel psychoactive su... more Background
Between 2008 and 2013, powder-stimulants sold by ‘head shops’ as novel psychoactive substances (NPS) or ‘legal highs’ have displaced heroin among groups of injecting substance users in Bucharest, Romania. Rising HIV-infection rates and other medical or social harms have been reported to follow this trend.

Methods
The study builds on two sets of original (N = 30) and existing (N = 20) interview data and on observations collected mainly at the site of a methadone substitution treatment facility.

Results
By disentangling the space–time continuum of the methadone queue, this paper argues that injecting drug users’ (IDUs) passage from opiates to amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) can be understood as ‘spillages’ of space and time. IDUs thus ‘spill’ out of the disciplinary flows of methadone treatment in two ways. The first is that of space and materiality. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), ATS/NPS appear embedded in reconfigured practices and rituals of injecting use. Such spillages see the pleasure-seeking self being fluidised in forming connections with, or spilling into, nonhuman actants such as substances, settings or objects. The second dimension of spilling is that of time. In this sense, heroin use is a ‘cryogenic strategy’ of inhabiting history and facing the transition to the market society that Romanian opiate injectors spill out of, not able to appropriate choice and legitimate consumption. The phenomenological qualities of stimulants that seem to accelerate lived time and generalise desire thus present them with an opportunity to alleviate a form of what a post-communist moral imaginary of transition frames as debilitating nostalgia.

Conclusion
ATS/NPS are revealed as fluid entities that do not only shape risk conditions but also alter shared meanings and contextual configurations of bodies, substances and disciplinary regimes in unpredictable ways.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate a group of Romanian injecting substance use... more Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate a group of Romanian injecting substance users “migrating” from heroin to novel psychoactive substances (NPS) as a counterpublic seeking to escape the stigma of drug abjection.

Design/methodology/approach
– The findings are drawn from interview and observational data collected mainly at drug services sites in Bucharest, Romania.

Findings
– The stimulant powders sold by head shops appealed to experienced drug users because they seemed to emulate a consumerist ethos and cultivate a healthy, rational agent that popular discourses of addiction deem incompatible with drug careers. NPS and head shops were thus initially understood as a possibility of escaping “junk identities”. However, they ultimately sealed injectors as abject bodies that obstructed the collaborative goals of rehabilitation and health restoration. A sense of symbolic distance shaped by notions of moral and bodily hygiene separated heroin and NPS users, as the latter increasingly came to be seen and see themselves as flawed consumers of health and freedom.

Practical implications
– NPS retail spaces could present valuable opportunities to insert harm-reduction resources and harness counterpublic health strategies.

Social implications
– Dominant definitions of substance use as unavoidable paths into self-destruction push users towards unknown compounds they can attach more fluid meanings to. This suggests that prohibitionist language still obscures rational dialogue about existing and emerging drugs.

Originality/value
– The paper traces ATS/NPS in an Eastern European context offering an alternative vantage point to harm-focused perspectives.

This article examines how mephedrone, the most popular legal high sold freely in the United Kingd... more This article examines how mephedrone, the most popular legal high sold freely in the United Kingdom until its classification as a high-risk drug, in April 2010, was constructed by the British popular media as a moral epidemic that threatened the very symbolic heart of the nation – its youth. News of teenagers committing suicide after taking the drug or dying of overdose had been presented in the pages of tabloid dailies for months when the government decided to ban the substance despite the lack of solid scientific data on the medical and social risks it posed. Drawing on Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse studies, this article demonstrates how in its attempt to influence national policy the media largely responded to the new drug problem with panic discourses that perpetuated the old ‘war on drugs’ ideology, choosing to frame mephedrone as an agent of death and moral downfall even when its destructive influence was questionable. In this perspective, a blueprint made of multiple layers of historical drug scares and repressive drug policies shaped the metaphors and narratives used by the media to codify a sense of threat and by the audiences to interpret the symptoms of a social pathology.

This chapter offers a short history of ‘drugs’ as a policy object and a governance tool that reve... more This chapter offers a short history of ‘drugs’ as a policy object and a governance tool that reveals some of the contradictions behind the emergence of modern capitalism in the liberal age. It situates the freedom-addiction binary at the foundation of moralising prohibition discourses and the ideal of the ‘drug-free world’. It emphasises the preservation of the choice-making liberal self as the main function of the medico-legal institutional assemblages designed to monitor and control the non-therapeutic consumption and distribution of psychoactive agents. It further seeks to follow this paradigm in the scientific field by knocking at the door of a ‘science of intoxication’ that predominantly understands and explains habits of substance use as deviant paths of flawed minds and bodies. This is weighed against sociological and ethnographic accounts that challenge pathological definitions of addiction by placing drugs at the core of culturally meaningful lifestyles and power relations. Finally, this first chapter looks at harm-reduction, the main reform movement that challenges the ‘war on drugs’ by invoking ideals of pragmatic public health provision. If prohibition discourses are thus critiqued for restricting human freedom, contrary to the ideals they were meant to serve, harm-reduction is also critiqued for its risk management ethos that positions ‘problematic users’ as crippled rational subjects.

NB: This extract from my doctoral thesis can be used and referenced as an introductory literature review to the field of critical drug studies.

Presentation delivered at the 2017 conference of the European Society for Social Drug Research, S... more Presentation delivered at the 2017 conference of the European Society for Social Drug Research, September 23-25, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Presentation of a small sample of my work on how transitioning from heroin to novel psychoactive ... more Presentation of a small sample of my work on how transitioning from heroin to novel psychoactive substance (NPS) use can be understood, in some cultural contexts, as a kind of identity 'normalisation' strategy for heavily stigmatised groups of experienced injecting drug users.

Presentation delivered at the University of Kent for the first event in the 'ESRC new drugs semin... more Presentation delivered at the University of Kent for the first event in the 'ESRC new drugs seminar series' - 'New Drugs: New Policy Landscapes', December 2014.

Restrictive UK drug laws have not made people who use drugs safer and have not significantly inhi... more Restrictive UK drug laws have not made people who use drugs safer and have not significantly inhibited the use of new psychoactive substances (NPS, formerly known as ‘legal highs’) and other more traditional illicit drugs, according to experts.

On the 22nd of May, Oxford Brookes Criminology is hosting its first research seminar, marking the... more On the 22nd of May, Oxford Brookes Criminology is hosting its first research seminar, marking the end of an academic year that also saw the launch of the university's BA/BSc degree in Criminology. Titled 'Drugscapes: Two years after the ban', this one-day event seeks to debate and understand how recent prohibition-geared legislation pushed by the Home Office has impacted on recreational drug markets, trends in use and regulation strategies in the United Kingdom.

The introduction of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 was meant to provide a ‘blanket ban’ on ... more The introduction of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 was meant to provide a ‘blanket ban’ on new psychoactive substances (NPS) or (formerly) ‘legal highs’ in the United Kingdom. This one-day seminar seeks to capture research inputs and practitioner experiences that can provide insights into trends and dynamics of supply and use, public framings and policy debates around traditional and emerging recreational drug markets, in the aftermath of this legislative change.