Abstract
The fifth biennial Contemporary Drug Problems (CDP) conference was held in Prato, Italy, from September 4 to 6, 2019 at the Monash University Prato Centre. The conference was hosted by the Law Faculty at Monash University, the National Drug Research Institute (Curtin University), the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (La Trobe University), the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research (Aarhus University), the Behaviours and Health Risks Program (Burnet Institute), and the Department of Science and Technology Studies (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
The conference brought together approximately 100 delegates from 15 countries. Peer Organization Participation Awards supported two peer delegates (from the Kirketon Road Centre in Sydney and Students for Sensible Drug Policy Australia) to attend and present at the conference. These awards are offered by the CDP conference committee to acknowledge the significant contribution made by peer organizations to drug research, policy, and advocacy.
The Monash University Prato Centre—a teaching and research center housed in the Palazzo Vaj, an 18th-century palace located in the heart of Prato’s historical center—provided a beautiful space in which to consider and discuss the wide variety of responses to the conference theme, “Rethinking ‘change’: New theories, new topics, new questions, new methods.” This provocation prompted delegates to (re)think drugs and their meanings in relation to change and to formulate new approaches to thinking about drug consumption and drug “effects.” Delegates presented exciting and inventive analyses covering a range of settings, practices, and substances—cannabis, alcohol, ayahuasca, psychedelics, naloxone, performance and image-enhancing drugs, psychostimulants, and opioids. Some key themes across the papers were how to reconceptualize drugs research to challenge dominant approaches to studying drugs, which constitute consumption as necessarily a “problem” to be “fixed”; the benefits of reorienting drugs research toward noticing instances of care, pleasure, agency, and transformation that emerge from practices and objects in and around drug “events”; developing and applying new theoretical approaches that help to locate and elucidate gender and its effects in drug consumption practices and policies; and finally, what the above changes in approach might imply for the politics and effects of doing drugs research.
Conference attendees were offered three thought-provoking keynote addresses across the three days. The first keynote address was given by Associate Professor Kate Seear from Monash University’s Faculty of Law. Seear’s presentation, titled “On law’s fragility, onto-advocacy and the possibility of change,” was based on material from her recently published book, Law, drugs and the making of addiction: Just habits (Routledge, 2019). In her address, Seear drew on the work of critical legal scholars to analyze the constitutive capacities of the law and legal processes relating to drugs—an area that she argues has been surprisingly neglected. Drawing in particular on John Law’s conception of “practices,” Seear expertly illustrated legal processes through which lawyers, anticipating what judges want to hear, strategically deploy certain ontologies of drugs and addiction in order to produce optimal outcomes for their clients. Judges, meanwhile, can only make rulings based on the facts of the case as they are presented by lawyers, and it is this circularity of relations and practices, argued Seear, that produce and stabilize legal “truths” about drugs and addiction.
The second keynote address was given by Associate Professor Natasha Martin from the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego. Her presentation, titled “Rethinking hepatitis C treatment and prevention: How modelling is informing the change required to achieve elimination among people who inject drugs,” examined the relationship between statistical modeling and the hepatitis C virus (HCV) global elimination campaign. First, Martin demonstrated some of the ways in which approaches to modeling HCV treatment-as-prevention have changed and become more sophisticated and better able to incorporate complexity over time. She then argued that these models—that communicate the efficacy and affordability of this treatment approach to eliminating HCV—helped to generate a shift from reluctance to optimism on the part of governments in providing effective treatment options to a highly stigmatized group.
Closing the conference was the Early Career Researcher keynote address delivered by Dr. Fay Dennis from the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her presentation, titled “Mobilizing stasis: A critical orientation to change,” Dennis reflected eloquently on the conference theme by critiquing the expectation that drug consumers must “change,” linking this modern demand with a masculine, European, and anthropocentric idea of progress. Challenging this expectation, Dennis drew on feminist and science and technology studies scholarship to encourage more reflection on the benefits afforded by states of stasis, and to ask: how can drug treatments slow down and become more response-able? Dennis argued for a reconception of drug consumers as “living well with drugs,” where—drawing on the work of Donna Haraway—being “stuck” might in fact provide a “more livable place” for consumers. All three of the keynotes productively engaged with the conference theme to reflect on the array of changing practices, discourses, and materialities that produce the objects of drugs, drug consumers, addiction, blood-borne viruses, and stigma. Importantly, though, each keynote also emphasized the capacity for these relations to be critically examined, reformulated, and rethought in ways that produce new, more expansive, and beneficial realities for people who consume drugs.