Abstract
Toby Seddon has written a genealogy of the drug problem which emerged in its modern form roughly two centuries ago, along with liberal capitalism. As liberal ideology evolved, so did drug policy. In the age of laissez-faire, policy was minimally restrictive. In the age of welfare liberalism, roughly from the end of the 19th century until the 1970s, policy became more restrictive and more paternalistic. In the current neo-liberal epoch, regulators have increasingly relied on ‘strategies of responsibilization in which citizens are governed through their own choices’ (p. 12, emphasis in original). If you end up in gaol or hospital, it is your fault for indulging in risky behaviour.
Seddon considers three British laws, the 1868 Pharmacy Act, the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, and the 2005 Drugs Act, as milestones in drug-policy development. Each reflected prevailing notions of addiction, will, freedom, and the proper role of government. Like the law itself, addiction was a social construct arising from the matrix of liberal capitalism and its concern for individual freedom, whose conception also evolved over time – in part because of the threat posed by drugs and addiction. To trace these historical linkages is to understand that there is nothing fixed or inevitable about the current regulatory regime. Following Michel Foucault, Seddon declares his
‘radical and critical purpose … is to demonstrate that rather than being merely a subterranean matter of deviance or pathology, the issues of drugs and addiction have for two centuries underpinned one of the most cherished values of modern society, the idea of freedom.’ (p. 11)
While Seddon’s case histories are British, his title, evocation of Foucault, and habit of bold generalization show that he is after bigger game: the world-historical origins of the ‘drug problem’ and the international turn toward selective prohibition. Yet the scare quotes he places around ‘drug problem’, might just as well appear around the word ‘the’. Drug problems, plural, worsened in many societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not just in modernizing capitalist nations preoccupied with individual freedom. Chinese worries about opium (‘foreign mud’) reflected concerns about western exploitation, as well as the spread of addiction. Vietnamese nationalists attacked French profiteering from alcohol and opium on anti-imperialist grounds. For the Meiji government, abstention from narcotics was a mark of Japanese racial superiority and a requisite for a strong and prosperous state. For evangelists and missionaries of various faiths, abstention and suppression were about health in this world and salvation in the next. Seddon’s secular and western European scheme of shifting conceptions of individual freedom and governance is a plausible frame for Britain’s drug laws, but it does not necessarily fit the historical experience of other, contemporaneous societies.
Nor does it explain notable variations in drug policies among western nations. In the early 20th century Britain, France, and the United States all developed policies of ‘penal-welfarism’, which Seddon highlights in his fourth chapter. With David Garland, Seddon argues that the turn toward welfare liberalism included a determination to regulate and reform the defective behaviors (including addictive behaviors) of those who failed to live as socially responsible citizens. Why, then, did the British allow conspicuously more latitude for physicians to maintain addicts than in France and the United States? It is possible to answer this question, but only by reference to specific historical circumstances, actors, and interests and how they differed from country to country. Complete historical explanations describe agency and contingency as well as underlying economic and ideological patterns.
Seddon thinks otherwise. He prefers the impersonal to the personal, the general to the particular, the secondary to the primary, the erudite to the plainspoken, the digressive to the straightforward. He barely bothers to describe the legislative and administrative histories of the policies that form the historical core of his book. With asides like ‘readers looking for more detail are directed there’ (p. 82), he shrugs off the narrative chore – and, for that matter, the expectation that he will follow his historicizing indictment with specific reform suggestions. As radical books go, this one plays to the social theorists in the balconies, above the groundling heads of historians, criminologists, and activists. One finishes with a sense of irritation, but also of promise. A scholar of impressive intellectual range, Seddon has many insightful things to say about the development of liberal thought, political economy, globalization, and drugs as consumer objects. He will say them more effectively when he decides to kill his darlings