Drugs, Leisure, Consumption and Harm (original) (raw)

Lifestyle Drugs and Late Capitalism: A Topography of Harm

Forthcoming chapter for the edited collection Deviant Leisure: Contemporary Perspectives on Leisure and Harm. Full reference: Hall, A. (forthcoming) ‘Lifestyle Drugs and Late Capitalism: A Topography of Harm, in Smith, O. & Raymen, T. (eds.) Deviant Leisure: Contemporary Perspectives on Leisure and Harm. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Deviant Leisure: A Critical Criminological Perspective for the 21st Century

Critical Criminology, 2019

This article argues that the time has arrived for leisure and consumerism to become key objects of study for a 21st century critical criminology. As global capitalism struggles to sustain itself it is creating myriad crises in areas such as employment, personal debt, mental health issues and climate change. Using a zemiological lens, we argue that it is on the field of commodified leisure and consumerism that criminologists can see these meta-crises of liberal capitalism unfold. Therefore, this article positions the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective as a new and distinct form of 21st century critical criminology that departs from traditional criminological approaches to leisure rooted in the sociology of deviance in favour of critical criminology’s recent zemiological turn to social harm. In doing so, this article outlines how the deviant leisure perspective’s emergence at the intersection of zemiology, green criminology and ultra-realist criminological theory enables it to address some of the realities of our times, and begin to explain the normalised harms that emanate from the relationship between commodified leisure and consumer capitalism.

Drug Addiction and Capitalism: Too Close to the Body

Body & Society, 2008

In the Road Runner cartoon, a classic moment is the following scene: at some point in his constant chase after the ever-elusive Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, by accident, runs over a cliff. Wile E. Coyote does not immediately fall down into the canyon below, however, as one would expect, but instead continues running unsuspectingly into thin air. Only when he senses something wrong and looks down to realize that there is no solid ground to support him does gravity start to function and he falls into the abyss below. Being addicted to drugs is to be in a state similar to that of the coyote in the air, having realized the lack of supporting ground. It is a radical way of fulfilling the imperative of enjoyment constantly thrown at us by the contemporary ideology of consumption. The problem of drug addiction is that the extreme enjoyment achieved through use of the drug at the same time also reveals an ambiguity in the ideology of consumption and a fundamental paradox of the capitalist economy of desire. Compared to the ordinary capitalist subject, the addict’s problem is not that he has lost the solid ground under his feet.1 His problem is, rather, the realization that there never was any such solid ground in the first place. While the ordinary capitalist subject stays unaware, hanging in the air, the drug addict’s realization sends him falling directly into the abyss.

The Deviant Leisure Perspective: A Theoretical Introduction

This chapter outlines the intellectual origins and theoretical foundations of the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective in criminology. It first problematises and challenges some of the central tenets of leisure as it has been approached by liberal social scientists; before going on to draw upon ultra-realist criminology theory to invite new perspectives and leisure and harm in contemporary consumer capitalism.

Drugs and addiction in the liberal age: The history, science and governance of the lost self

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.

Terror, Leisure and Consumption: Spaces for Harm in a Post-Crash Era

2018

Leisure has many competing definitions as its practices and composition have evolved over time. Conventional renderings of leisure place it as '"residual time" left over outside of working hours' (Tucker, 1993, p. 16). However, as working hours have changed, definitions of leisure are in flux. The rise of a 'leisure industry' interfacing with contemporary notions of 'lifestyle' intersects popular culture, consumption and capital, to commodify time and space, interest and enthusiasm. During industrialism leisure was fought for as a space for self-determination, first encoded as personal time to pursue intimate or local interests and then later, to enable workers to enter into the consumer landscape of the middle class by indulging in public and semi-private pastimes that increasingly engaged cultures of exchange. The commodification of leisure has stimulated conspicuous consumption in the pursuit of pleasure and sensation, as shopping, purchase and exchange whether in tourism, serious leisure pursuits, listening to music or any other of the expanding myriad of

Consumption and its discontents: addiction, identity and the problems of freedom

The British Journal of Sociology, 2004

The focus of this paper is on the notion of 'addictive consumption', conceived as a set of discourses that are embedded within wider socio-historical processes of governance and control. It examines the discursive convergences and conflicts between practices of consumption and notions of addiction, which it notes are consistently represented in terms of the oppositional categories of self-control vs. compulsion and freedom vs. determinism. These interrelations are explored with reference to the development of notions of addiction, and their relation to shifting configurations of identity, subjectivity and governance.

DEVIANT LEISURE: A CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Through reorienting our understanding of 'deviance' from a contravention of norms and values to encompassing engagement in behavior and actions that contravene a moral 'duty to the other', the new 'deviant leisure' perspective outlined here, describes activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm. Using the ideological primacy of consumer capitalism as a point of departure, we explore the potential for harm that lies beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure. Such an explanation requires a reading that brings into focus the subjective, socially corrosive, environmental and embedded harms that arise as a result of the commodification of leisure. In this way, this article aims to act as a conceptual foundation for diverse yet coherent research into deviant leisure.