Cultural ecstasies: Drugs,gender and the social imaginary Ilana Mountian

Reviewed by: Eric Oosenbrug, York University, Canada

In Cultural Ecstasies, the fourth book in Ian Parker’s Concepts for Critical Psychology series, Ilana Mountian takes a deconstructionist approach to the review and examination of multiple discourses on drugs, drug users, policy and addiction. Mountian, a practising clinical psychologist and academic, aims to show in her book how these discourses (for example, those from religion, criminality and medicine), combined with key historical events, affect the diverse and often contradictory interpretations of drugs and drug users in circulation today, including gendered, raced and classed meanings.

Cultural Ecstasies utilizes a broad multidisciplinary framework, taking as its starting points major theoretical contributions not only from feminist research, gender and queer studies but also moral philosophy, psychoanalysis and post-colonial studies. To tie together this expansive theoretical framework, Mountian employs the concept of the social imaginary. This idea is developed from the works of Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis: ‘Imaginary, in a broad sense, refers to images, fantasies, illusions and so forth that are seen as relevant to the constitution of subjectivity’ (p. 11). By bringing together gender perspectives with post-colonial studies and historical cases, Mountian provides both a theoretical background for critical psychologists concerned with power inequalities, and an argument in favour of deconstruction as a means to challenge the naturalizing and dominating categories in drug discourse.

Throughout the book, examples from the history of drugs, drug treatment and drug policies are analyzed as social texts in order to reveal and critique key discursive foundations. Drawing from diverse contexts, such as the use of opium in 19th century England and tranquilizers in domestic settings in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, Mountian demonstrates how mainstream discourses around drugs are individualistic, reductionist and contradictory. These discourses are also frequently polarized, oscillating between ‘good’ or ‘bad’, while often being informed and produced by recurring moral panics.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first three establish the conceptual and historical frameworks in which the conditions of the social imaginary are examined, while the following three are focused on how these have come to shape our present view of addiction, prohibition and treatment. Key to this latter section is an understanding of health in terms of an ethics of living which is structured by moralized dichotomies (for example, free will/dependence, victim/enemy). Here, Mountian uses Derrida’s notion of pharmakon to critically analyze medical and religious discourses on drug addiction. The final chapter focuses on how policy is affected by these social constructions, arguing that current drug policy is ultimately flawed, and that prohibitive legislation based on a limited and restrictive imaginary is central to this failure. The illegality of drugs both enhances problematic discourses and perpetuates associated harms through an overly simplistic interpretation which often ignores considerations of gender, class and race.

The ethical and moral aspects in which mainstream discourses on drugs are embedded are deftly unravelled over the course of the text through effective reference to consequent legislative imperatives emerging from the interplay of longstanding discursive binaries, such as good and bad, natural and artificial, and pure and impure. For example, Mountian illustrates how medical discourses often fall prey to the pathologization of individuals since their subjects, to be rendered by the gaze, must be understood as diseased (as opposed to normal), either mentally or physically.

Mountian’s most thorough analysis takes place in Chapter 3 where she examines the historical discourses of drugs, primarily focusing on the United States of America and the United Kingdom as countries which have had a major impact on policies worldwide. Taking a Foucauldian approach, she concentrates on discontinuities and dominant power structures (such as Western biomedicine, religion and their relations). In doing so, Cultural Ecstasies constructs a useful pharmacographic terrain for subsequent analyses of discourses, practices and approaches to drug use, contemporary imaginaries of the drug user and the ways these discourses intersect with and make visible notions of gender, race and class. In particular, understanding the role of language and the contested meanings of terms like ‘drug’, ‘addiction’ and ‘addict’ are key elements of the analysis. This chapter, and the next on discourses of addiction, offers a generative critique similar to that provided by the works of Berridge and Edwards (1998) on the medicalization process and Courtwright’s (2005) ‘good/bad’ drug policy dichotomy.

Mountian avoids an emphasis on any specific drug, although some drugs are, of course, discussed more than others. Rather, she juxtaposes different approaches to ‘drugs’ as discursively stipulated in order to show how cultural, social and political contexts have contributed to dominant drug discourse today. For example, alcohol is shown to have a variety of usages and meanings depending on its cultural significance as recreational drug, medicine, food or sacred substance.

Although previous works, such as A History of Drugs by Toby Seddon (2010), have examined the political–criminal–medical discourses around drugs during the late 19th and 20th centuries, Mountian goes further in carefully constructing a broad account of the processes by which both the religious-medical and politico-criminal each subjectify the individual in their own ways while playing off each other. Mountian’s book calls attention to key aspects in the fields of drugs that are often excluded from our social imaginaries of drugs and drug policies, such as gender and intersections with sexuality, class, race and age. In doing so, she also makes a powerful argument for the importance of taking into account the different complex and dynamic imaginaries specific to the female drug user. For example, she effectively demonstrates how totalizing discourses contribute additional stigmatization, which can produce different forms of drug taking (such as isolated domestic drug use), operate as social sanction, preventing women (and men) from seeking help, and support drug policies that fail to recognize women as social actors rather than passive subjects of power.

Overall, Cultural Ecstasies is a useful and insightful contribution to our understanding of drugs in modern society that adds significantly to the critical psychological perspective, especially in its aim to bring together a myriad of different disciplinary approaches. The brevity of the book combined with its heavily theoretical orientation make its utilization of an impressive assortment of scholars, from Foucault and Derrida to Žižek and Frosh, both a strength and a possible liability. In some respects, it might have been more effective to explore fewer theoretical constructs in a more rigorous and thoroughgoing manner. There is sometimes a danger that the reader will be left with a dizzying number of complicated, and at times thinly explicated, terms and ideas. However, having said this, it is important to highlight that this book is intended to chart novel disciplinary connections and provide alternative conceptual and methodological perspectives, and therefore, it is perhaps particularly suitable to scholars already somewhat familiar with these subjects. However, Cultural Ecstasies also has the potential to provide students from a wide array of academic backgrounds with an innovative view of how dominant discourses shape and affect potentially harmful policy outcomes. Readers specifically interested in gender studies will find this short yet comprehensive book a great resource for broadening their knowledge and awareness of the multiple meanings and proliferation of drugs discourse in our culture.