Social construction and the evidence-based drug policy endeavour (original) (raw)
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Evidence based practice has been the mantra for several years and may be held up as the gold standard for professional practice, as the method for driving policy: ‘Evidence based policy’. However, much of the focus in the topic has been on the methodologies, and discussions, around the various merits or otherwise of methodological approaches, say between quantitative and qualitative research, or the strengths and weaknesses of RCTs. There is also a need to take a wider perspective on evidence and understand that the use of evidence, no matter what research method underpins it, has a social and often political dimension to it. Evidence based policy is ‘socially constructed’. Social and political issues also affect what gets researched, how it gets published and perhaps what topics are off limits. To illustrate this process, an examination of the laws around the use of substances, be they caffeine, alcohol or ecstasy, indicates that public policy often has a tangential relationship to evidence. An argument is that the evidence should drive our policies; however it may well be the case that the policy comes first (drug prohibition) and then there is a search for the evidence to back that policy – ‘policy based evidence’. Other issues that may well fall into this category: climate change, fracking, economic austerity or even nursing staffing levels. The argument presented here is that ‘evidence based’ policy is socially constructed and may actually have little to do with evidence! Drugs policy will be used to illustrate the dynamic and oft contested nature of evidence and its use.
2012 marked the 100th anniversary of the first international treaty on tackling international drug flows. Since the International Opium Convention in 1912 and the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 (and its amendment in 1971) were agreed, development, implementation and assessment of counter-narcotic (CN) activities aimed at reducing the harm caused by illicit drug industries received considerable attention from practitioners and researchers. Studies reveal that, due to the complexity and breadth of the impact of both the illicit drug industry and CN interventions on societies, drug control interventions may result in an array of consequences that are not intended yet may significantly impact societies overall or particular societal groups (Strang et al 2012; Reuter 2009). This paper is concerned with understanding the socio-psychological drivers of the unintended consequences (UCs) of CN interventions aimed at motivating attitudinal and/or behavioural change to prevent ...
Social Policy and Drug Addiction: A Critical Study of Policy Development
Addiction, 1984
The drug addict or ‘problem drug taker’ is the focus of a number of overlapping systems of regulation from moral to medical and penal. It is consequently difficult to analyse the development of policy in this area without lapsing into oversimplifications which imply either a process of medicalization or the unity of a totalitarian system of social control. It is argued here that we cannot adequately understand the development of policy in the field of drug addiction by reference to the medicalization of social problems and that a more fruitful course is opened up by analyzing developments of ‘rational knowledge’ which underpin policy shifts. In the light of this argument the apparent shifts in policy in the 1960s following the Second Brain Report are re-evaluated.