Bring it on Home: Home Drug Testing and the Relocation of the War on Drugs
| Author | Kevin D. Haggerty,Dawn Moore |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | 10.1177/a018602 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BRING IT ON HOME: HOME
DRUG TESTING AND THE
RELOCATION OF THE WAR ON
DRUGS
DAWN MOORE
University of Toronto, Canada
AND
KEVIN D. HAGGERTY
University of Alberta, Canada
ABSTRACT
While the war on drugs is often claimed to have failed in multifarious ways, anti-drug
strategies in the United States continue. The discourses through which anti-drug
sentiments and policies are forwarded are, however, being reinvented in light of this
failure, favoring an inclusionary and less state-centered disease trope for certain popu-
lations of drug users. In this article we argue that the privileging of the disease trope
within anti-drug rhetoric facilitates the introduction of home drug testing as a means
of ‘state-free’ drug regulation offered to specific populations. The advent of home
drug testing is congruent with neoliberal trends towards mobilizing private entities
like the family to engage in regulatory practices that were previously concerns of the
state. A market for home drug testing has evolved out of rhetoric around private
security, and the commodification of notions of safety. Home drug testing is theo-
rized as a tool of surveillance that offers a very particular scientific gaze trained on
the seemingly indefensible adolescent body. Teens, however, are not defenseless in this
scheme. We document the concomitant rise of resistance technologies and tactics
designed to assist teens and others to ‘beat’ the tests.
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200109) 10:3 Copyright © 2001
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 10(3), 377–395; 018602
04 Moore (bc/d) 2/8/01 10:05 am Page 377
INTRODUCTION
THE AWARD-WINNING movie American Beauty provides a
popular depiction of what we suggest is an extension of anti-drug
initiatives in which drug testing, coterminous with a change in the anti-
drug discourse, is introduced into the homes of white middle-class America.
The story unfolds in a stereotypical, middle-class suburb. In one scene an
attractive, white, teenage boy sells marijuana to his middle-aged neighbor.
The neighbor asks about a container of yellow liquid and the boy responds
that it is urine. His parents, he explains, drug test him.
This article explores this most recent extension of America’s anti-drug
initiatives into a new and relatively untouched space, the realm of middle-
class domesticity. Widely proclaimed failures of the ‘war on drugs’ have
prompted a renewed emphasis on attempts to eradicate the demand for
drugs. In the process, the metaphor of drug use as a ‘disease’ has been revived.
This trope works in the context of a distinctive constellation of actors, insti-
tutions, and interests to advance home drug testing as a potential solution to
one manifestation of America’s drug problem. Parental drug testing of
teenagers advances anti-drug initiatives into the home and into a child’s body
by effectively deputizing parents, making them unique articulations of
private police. We argue that the use of such tests is characteristic of wider
trends in neoliberal approaches to governing crime. Home drug testing is
part of a turn to technology in governmental strategies which suggests that
analysts must pay greater attention to the minutiae of such tools and the
social factors that help to position them as potential solutions to crime prob-
lems. However, the drug testing example indicates that rather than being
embraced exclusively due to their demonstrated abilities to reduce crime
risks, governmental technologies can be adopted for a host of less rational
reasons. In the process, they can also prompt some highly distinctive forms
of resistance.
We draw from various research sources, including approximately 50 web-
sites dealing with drug testing, numerous hard-copy pamphlets and infor-
mational packages pertaining to such tests, and advertisements in specialty
magazines aimed at drug users. Telephone interviews were conducted with
five representatives of companies that market home drug tests. The minutes
of hearings into the regulation of home tests by the US Food and Drug
Administration provided valuable insights into who originally advocated on
behalf of these tests, and the types of problems they thought these technolo-
gies might solve (Food and Drug Administration, 1997).
THE FAILED ‘WAR’ ON DRUGS AND THE REVITALIZATION OF THE
DRUG USE ‘DISEASE’
It has only been over the last century that drug use has been problematized
in Europe and North America. During this time, the discourse surrounding
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