Contemporary Drug Problems Conference

Contemporary Drug Problems Conference

When: August 17-20, 2027

 

‘Half-lives, Afterlives, Hope and Repair’

Université du Québec à Montréal (University of Quebec in Montreal), Canada

According to experts, the ‘half-life’ of a drug refers to the time it takes for the concentration of a substance to be halved within the body. Understanding the half-life of a drug is important, including for harm reduction and overdose prevention efforts. Inherent in the half-life concept is the idea that drug effects linger, but typically, reduce or resolve.

As people who use drugs remind us, prohibition’s effects are far more enduring. Punitive approaches to drug use, supply and manufacture generate and exacerbate harms that linger long after individual encounters with substances, law enforcement agencies or other bodies conclude. This ongoingness is especially vivid in Canada, where a persistent toxic drug supply crisis has shaped a rapid rise in overdose deaths. The implications for affected communities, including peer workers and advocates, families and friends, is profound. The harms of prohibition are also inseparable from other events and challenges, some of which are themselves enduring. We are thinking here about the important links between prohibition and imperialism, racism and coloniality, sexism, ableism and capitalism, as well as the specific forms of violence unfolding within the contemporary historical moment. This includes a rise in authoritarian and fascist logics globally, a steady growth in regressive political formations, rapidly increasing global inequality, as well as climate crises, mass extinctions and endless war. To the extent that these challenges endure and recur, they function to sustain prohibition’s long afterlife.

Together, these complex temporalities and geopolitical formations raise urgent questions. Can we imagine a future beyond or after the ‘war on drugs’? How might we surface other possibilities, given the enduring nature of forces that sustain prohibition? What kinds of drug futures are likely, desired and possible? Given prohibition’s long half-life, what processes of reparation, repair, and reconciliation will be needed? Can repair be achieved?

Just as it is both vital and difficult to imagine futures after prohibition, there is value in the provocation to imagine futures after ‘drugs’, in which we move beyond ‘drugs’, as concept, category, or object of concern. What are the possibilities for dismantling the language, category or concept of ‘drugs’, and what are the consequences of retaining it? What might be the role of drug scholars and other stakeholders in promoting such potential processes of change? How do diverse ‘drug’ concepts, categories and futures mesh with Indigenous and First Nations knowledges?

The connections between futures and histories are also generative for thinking about the world after prohibition, and (perhaps) after drugs. What can we learn from those who have lived through and defeated authoritarian, colonial, fascist and other regressive regimes, to guide us at this critical historical juncture? For those who have witnessed change, what lessons emerge from within the ruins? And how might wreckage foment hope and optimism?

Building on CDP’s previous conferences, which have variously opened up questions on: how drugs are problematised; how the complexity of drug use can be attended to; how drug use might be understood as event, assemblage or phenomenon; how drugs and their effects are constituted in various forms of practice and interactions/intra-actions; how we might rethink change; the need to embrace ‘trouble’ in our work; and the many boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers that structure how we do drugs, the 2027 conference seeks submissions for presentations that consider drug aftermaths and afterlives, hope and repair.

We welcome research from those working in anthropology, cultural studies, law, criminology, social epidemiology, history, human geography, public policy, gender studies, sociology, social work and related disciplines, and encourage the innovative use of methods, concepts and theoretical tools. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

· Alcohol and other drug policy

· Care concepts and practices

· Class and drug use

· Coloniality and race

· Co-production and/or consumer participation in policy, service design/delivery and research

· Diagnosis and assessment

· Digital technologies, such as social media websites, apps and artificial intelligence

· Drug courts or other specialist, ‘restorative’, ‘problem-solving’ justice approaches

· Drug trends

· Education/health promotion in schools and universities

· Experimentation on humans, plants and animals in drug research

· Harm reduction services and measures

· Human and ‘non-human’ actors in drug research, policy, law and practice

· Indigenous knowledges and experiences of drugs, policy and treatment

· Law reform

· Legal practices, processes and case law

· Monitoring/surveillance systems

· Neuroscientific approaches to drug effects and addiction

· Popular culture enactments of drug use

· Power and positionality between/with researchers and people who use drugs

· Prohibition and international drug conventions

· Quantitative measures of alcohol and other drug use and harms

· Qualitative concepts of subjectivity, agency, affect and identity

· Consumer accounts and narratives of drug use, addiction and recovery

· Reflexivity and research identities, including processes of categorisation (‘lived experience’, ‘expertise’)

· Risk discourse

· Sex, gender and drugs

· Treatment models and practices

· Youth and other drug services

Details of the call for papers process will be announced soon, alongside keynote speakers.

 

This year’s conference is being jointly hosted by scholars from the following organisations:

Centre for Law as Protection, Deakin Law School, Deakin University, Australia

Centre for Social Research in Health, University of New South Wales, Australia

Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia

School of Social Work, Université du Québec à Montréal (University of Quebec in Montreal), Canada

Department of Community Health Sciences, Addiction services, Université de Sherbrooke (University of Sherbrooke), Canada

Department of Social Work, Stockholm University, Sweden

Monash University, Australia

The University of Manchester, England

University of Central Florida, USA

The Australian National University, Australia

Manchester Metropolitan University, England

Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Support, Research and Development Center, Kyiv, Ukraine

School of Law, Society and Criminology, Faculty of Law and Justice, University of New South Wales, Australia

Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux (CEMS), France

Behaviours and Health Risks Program, Burnet Institute, Australia

 

We are especially grateful to our Montreal co-hosts Professor Jorge Flores-Aranda, Professor Rossio Motta-Ochoa, and Professor Karine Bertrand, for their hospitality and planning

 

Image sourced from unsplash, photograph by Steven Wright.