Book review: The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society
| Date | 01 July 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895813489635 |
| Author | Lindsey Richardson |
| Published date | 01 July 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
13(3) 354 –360
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895813489635
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Book reviews
Suzanne Fraser and David Moore (eds), The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society,
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2011; 249 pp.: 9780521156059, £39.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Lindsey Richardson, University of British Columbia, Canada
Editors Suzanne Fraser and David Moore have compiled an anthology of chapters touch-
ing on socio-cultural, health and legal dimensions of drug use as diverse as performance-
enhancing pharmaceuticals in the workplace and harm reduction approaches to drug
trafficking. The aims of the book are both broad and ambitious. These include objectives
to reflect on the ‘constructedness’ of addiction and the resulting political implications of
different conceptual approaches to drug use. As a corollary to this reflection, The Drug
Effect hopes to offer alternatives to the theoretical contrast between positivist determin-
ism and constructivist invention. The book also seeks to explore contingencies that shape
and affect experiences of substance use and addiction, and thereby resituate our under-
standing of and responses to drug use based on an awareness that our conceptions of
drugs and addiction are both situated and potentially problematic. While thematically
diffuse, this collection’s contributions to social science scholarship on substance use
include refreshing perspectives on conventional debates that span theoretical, methodo-
logical and substantive areas.
By far the most important theoretical contribution in the book comes in Fraser and
Moore’s introduction. Here they grapple directly with the epistemological tensions
between traditional positivist understandings of substance use and their attendant claims
of objectivity, and constructivist views that seek to understand the experience of drug use
through discursive, practical and political construction. On offer from Fraser and Moore
are materialist perspectives, masterfully inserted to create a space that preserves the indi-
vidual and contextual specificity of discursive points of view, yet remains compatible
with realist causal accounts of the physical effects of drug use. Their phenomenological,
interactive approach to drug use acknowledges the material reality of psychoactive sub-
stances and the importance of ideas, discourses, practices, histories and politics in the
production of understandings of drugs and their effects. Their approach represents an
incisive conciliation between traditionally conflicting approaches.
The Drug Effect also helps to advance important methodological debates in the field.
Dwyer’s chapter critically reflects on how negotiating access to a community of
Vietnamese drug sellers provided insight into the subcultural practices of demand
489635CRJ13310.1177/1748895813489635Criminology & Criminal JusticeEndsBook reviews
2013
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