Drug Abuse

Policies unfit for heroin

A critique of Dorn & South

Stephen K. Mugford Department of Sociology Australian National University

Pat O'Malley National Centre for Socio-Legal Studies La Trobe University

In 1987 Dorn and South published 'A Land Fit For Heroin', a landmark book in which a serious attempt was made to understand the use of heroin in a framework much broader than a focus on individual users and their presumed psychopathology. Here and in earlier policy pieces that discuss and advance policies for dealing with heroin users (e.g. Dorn and South, 1986; Auld, Dorn and South, 1986), the authors break away from narrow moralistic perspectives to locate the debate in terms of wider considerations of economy, social structure and the politics of class relations, especially urban based class relations in contemporary Britain.

Despite our support for the general thrust of their work, we shall argue in this paper that weaknesses in their argument mean that the policies they advocate are not appropriate to resolving the heroin problem, nor to the 'drug problem' in general. In simple terms, we conclude that a substantial problem with their work derives from the wider "Left Realist" framework in which it operates. Left Realism, reacting against alleged "idealism" of other critical approaches, identifies itself with serious consideration of the crime problem as perceived by working class people, and with attempts to construct policies which

are plausible additions to existing party political agendas. We argue, however, that in a search for a 'realistic' framework for constructing policy in the spiritual desert of Thatcherism, the authors risk reproducing common sense prejudices and of advocating policies which while electorally popular in part (such as increased prohibitionism) may be counterproductive or ineffective.

Against the position of Dorn and South, and of Left Realism in general, we advocate the necessity to construct policy based upon adequate theorising. In particular, we suggest that the users of drugs (i.e. illicit psychotropic drugs) do not require special theories to understand them, nor is it adequate to rely upon the knowledge of members of relevant communities (users, relatives, police etc.) as a "touchstone of reality" about the drug problem. Rather, it is vital to think of drugs as instances of more general categories and processes such as pleasurable commodities, commodification, the construction of temporality in modern society and so forth. In doing this, we do not argue for a position that systematically denies or denigrates the perspectives of members, but rather one that accords such views the status of a common sense which members use to organise their actions but which we would want to 'locate' in a broader discourse. [Interestingly, this latter position seems to have been adopted by Dorn and South themselves in later work (1989) which treats drug stories not as truths-in-themselves but rather as accounts to be theorised about] . The broader discourse that we advocate would found its case not upon the common sense or prejudices of particular constituencies - a technique which can easily lead to special pleading on the grounds of access to privileged knowledge - but upon a conceptual discourse which is open to scrutiny and debate.

To develop our critique it will first be necessary to give a thumbnail sketch of the Left Realist position and a summary of our criticisms of it.

A sketch of Left Realism

Left Realism is a criminological position espoused by a number of British writers, notably Jock Young, and adopted by some in North America. Against alternative critical approaches which it labels "Left Idealism", Left Realism argues that criminology should be recast to take into account the views and experiences of inner city working class people for whom crime is a real problem which is not merely the construction of media moral panics or Right wing politicians. In criticising alleged tendencies by Left Idealists to reduce crime to an ideological fantasy created by conservatives, to deny authenticity or attention to the victims of crime and to construct criminals as innocent or harmless victims of the capitalist state, Left Realists claim to discover some truth which their intellectual precursors and opponents have suppressed or neglected. In particularly the Left Realists claim to have access to policy making strategies that allow them to produce workable policies which earlier writers have overlooked in a utopian search for grand (and implicitly elitist) solutions.

While we cannot develop the argument here, we assert that Left Realism is seriously flawed both in theory and in practice. It may perform the important service of restoring to critical criminology neglected issues concerning the victims of crime, but it uses these concerns in tandem with an invocation of naive realism to give its vague paradigm a privileged criminological status. The outstanding question smothered by this privileging is simple: What are the theoretical categories with which to transform common sense into a defensible account and into progressive policies? We argue that in general Left Realism provides no

useful answer to this question, and that the danger therefore is that common sense will not be transformed - leading at the policy level to the confirmation of the commonsensical status quo, that is, of existing bankrupt and ineffective policies for dealing with human problems generated by crime and criminalisation .

On a specific level, and directly relevant to this endeavour of critiquing Dorn and South we suggest that these general flaws can be illustrated in the specific shortcomings of their policy arguments. In particular, a partial account of the drug problem and a concern not to adopt utopian policies, leads eventually to a reaffirmation of prohibitionist status quo, a policy which while electorally realist is quite unrealistic in the sense of producing workable solutions to the problems that prohibitionism is meant to solve.

Dorn and South on heroin and heroin policy

In their contributions to A Land Fit For Heroin (1987), Dorn and South address or assume three principal and interacting themes concerning heroin and heroin policy. For convenience we call these Left Realist theory, the deficit model and the policy of harm and use reduction.

Left Realist Theory and Drug Policy

The theme of Left Realist theory in Dorn and South's work involves a standard Left Realist critique of other criminologists, especially those who through an alleged excess of theoretical zeal fail to address what Left Realists understand to be the 'real problems' that heroin produces. Their position may be deduced from the following passages:

"...it would be wrong to suggest that governments are fighting phantoms. Anybody trading places with a doctor or social worker, with parent or relative of somebody heavily involved with heroin, with a heroin user him or herself, with a drug trafficker or law enforcement agent would be hard put to maintain that their concerns were purely fictional." (1987:1)

"Nowadays, social scientists have turned from pronouncing that popular ideas are examples of 'mystification' or 'false consciousness' and have begun to ask how and why popular or leading ideas (e.g. about drugs) win acceptance. One possible - and perhaps obvious answer is that modes of thought become popular because they make sense of the social position in which social groups find themselves." (1987:2,emphasis in original)

Although, like others, the social problem is socially and historically constructed, it is sufficiently entrenched to resist being blown away by a few puffs of sociological rhetoric or 'deconstructive' analysis. (1987:3)

These are strong claims, but nowhere are those who commit the alleged crimes identified. Who suggests that drug dealers are phantoms? Who claims to remove the problems by a few puffs of rhetoric? Without substantiation, such rhetoric creates its own phantoms, straw persons and stalking horses but does not identify a real instance of poor policy argument that we can deal with or defend as the case may be. Rather an assertion of what is real is made, but no criteria of reality are offered. As with argumentative resort to the "real" elsewhere in the Left Realist analysis, this is argument by rhetoric rather than provision of an established case. An important instance of this is the claim that an explanation may be adopted because it "makes sense of" the social position of a group. Perhaps that is a useful criterion, but hardly a sufficient one. For example, Nazi ideology was popular with the petit bourgeoisie because it 'made sense' of their position; but that does not commend Hitler's racist chauvinism to us.

In short Dorn and South are making a covert appeal to revealed truth, implying that people believe certain things about heroin because they are self-evidently true. Self evident truth is not a criterion that appeals to us social scientists. Moreover, self-evident truth is not a category which has any secure place in critical social science, and it is incumbent on any writer engaging in a critique of the severity of that launched by Left Realists to provide both concrete examples of the failings noted, and also evidence that any examples discovered are typical of earlier critical criminologies rather than merely isolated overstatements made by a few individuals.

Furthermore, there is a logical problem with important aspects of their argument. On the one hand, we are told, the 'problems' associated with heroin are well established. On the other hand, we are told that they are "socially and historically constructed". If the latter is correct - and we certainly would not disagree with it- then the degree to which problems are "established" is not. of itself, a sign of some self-evident reality. Rather it is a sign of the degree to which a particular ideology is widely accepted. Unless a 'truth' is established simply by being widely believed there is no necessary association between the extent to which a definition of a problem is socially established and its status as knowledge acceptable in critical social science.

These devices amount to a refusal to engage directly with the need for any kind of theory. This is precisely the weakness of the general Left Realist claim to which we have alluded already, and its rhetorical force is to (attempt to) establish a position that does not need to be argued, merely asserted.

Deficit Drug Use and Left Realist Method.

The second feature of Dorn and South's position is a 'deficit' model of drug use, that is, that heroin use is evidence of a 'social deficit' in the situation in which users find themselves. Thus, for example, they argue that:

"In most countries, including the UK...there are severe pockets of deprivation in which poor housing and industrial collapse coexist. In such contexts young people have little prospects (sic) of employment, every prospect of lifelong poverty, and no alternatives - except perhaps to hustle in the irregular economy, which does not fit the cultural orientations of everyone. If heroin becomes available in such areas...it is likely to be spread by the hustlers and irregulars to the wider set of young people sharing the experience of economic and social depression. This is the most socially destructive pattern of heroin use, potentially drawing in people of a retreatist frame of mind who have few foci of economic and social involvement or pleasure other than the r drug". (1987:7)

Here, Dorn and South, in parallel with many other writers, envisage the use of heroin as a compensation for or escape from hard times. They dwell at length upon the connection between unemployment and heroin use, portraying users as victims of unemployment who resort to drug use as a compensation for the social deficit.

Such an argument represents a double leap. First, it involves confusing correlation with causation. It does not follow that if many heroin users are unemployed that one causes the other, even if the users themselves offer an account along those lines. We do not dispute that unemployment causes an environment in which one kind of psychotropic drug use may flourish. It is also a problematic context which working class people confronted by the multiplicity of problems associated with high unemployment could understandably experience as meaningfully linked to the widespread use of illicit drugs. Nonetheless, human understanding and motivation are more complex than is allowed by simple causal models in which individuals confronting problematic contexts "hustle" or "retreat" into a world of drugs. Such models, we agree, are congruent with those espoused by many 'members'.

Indeed, Dorn and South, in A Land Fit For Heroin and in their earlier work, exhibit a failure to address the issue of the theoretical status of a member's knowledge. Too easily, we maintain, do they accept the position that such knowledge gives access to the 'touchstone' to truth in a situation, implicitly suggesting that the alternative is to accuse users of false consciousness and to impose upon them, in elitist fashion, an alternative and distorted account. Against this, we would argue that the accounts that individuals give of their drug use are 'vocabularies of motive' (Mills, 1970). These are formed out of a variety of available cultural definitions, explanations and meanings, including the influence of official accounts. Similarly, Matza (1965) showed the dangers of accepting at face value delinquents' explanations for their actions, showing them to be built selectively upon official discourses of judicial justification and critique. More recently, Oldman (1978) has shown similar effects among 'compulsive gamblers', arguing that discourses of compulsion, which are not features of gambling settings, are taken on by those who have had problems in the settings as a part of an exit from them, while Browne (1989) has explored the way gamblers learn to control emotions and actions by adopting contextual accounts of their behaviour.

Vocabularies of motive for actions, especially socially proscribed actions, are complex. It is not simply that they are 'false' in the sense that those who offer them seek to mislead. Rather, what constitutes a warrantable account at any one time and place, warrantable both to others and to the person offering the account, is subject to change according to context or setting. Thus the experience of users, and of their working class kin, friends, victims, neighbours and so on cannot therefore be used in any unmediated fashion to construct an explanation of action nor to form a generalised social policy concerning drugs and drug use.

This problem is compounded in the area of illicit drug usage because although Dorn and South implicitly suggest a working consensus among practitioners, professionals, users and parents, in reality there are many, often conflicting accounts available. For instance, the account offered by a convert of a therapeutic community such as Odyssey House can differ markedly from an account offered by a member of a users' union. Perhaps some of these accounts are more politically palatable to one or other school of thought but it could not be denied that such people 'know' certain things. How are we to prefer one account over another?

The second leap is more problematic. To lay stress upon a deficit model of drug use is to neglect two important facts. First, that the fastest growth in illicit drug use arose in the affluent 60s and 70s. Second, that the bulk of use, even with heroin, is non-problematic, non-dependent use. (On the growth in the 1960's see e.g. Bean, 1974, esp. 95128; on the non-dependent use issue, see e.g. Faupel and Klockars, 1987, Hartnoll et al 1985 and Parker et al 1987).

Furthermore, much of the character of "the drug industry" is unintelligible in terms of a social deficit model. It was, for example, the privileged in search of pleasure, not the underprivileged in search of escape who provided the impetus for the development of large scale cocaine trade in America (see Fagan and Chin, 1989 for some discussion of this). The same principles clearly apply in licit drug markets too. While the alcohol industry sells huge quantities of beer and inexpensive wines to working class people, it also sells spirits, expensive wines, champagne and so forth, much of which is consumed by middle class and wealthy people. Being unemployed is likewise associated with certain kinds of psychotropic drug use in the present period, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for such use. As O'Bryan (1985:57-62) argues, work using such simple cause effect models:

"cannot account for the drug use of people in secure employment or for decisions not to use by substantial numbers of the long-term unemployed...one should make it clear that only a minority of young people are getting involved with drugs today, and a even smaller number are experiencing difficulties".

Why do Dorn and South overlook these fairly obvious facts? We think it is because they are unduly concerned to elevate to explanatory status the accounts of the heroin users - and probably only problem users at that themselves. This theme emerges frequently in A Land Fit for Heroin. For example, under the caption "Grassroot strategies: learning from experience", it is argued that:

"the experiences and perspectives of practitioners - professionals, community activists, parents of users and so on provide a touchstone for interpreting and evaluating policy ideas."(1987:151)

This is an example of the Left Realist position sketched earlier, and it omits two important factors. First, it is often the case that those most embroiled in a social context are least able to 'see the wood for the trees'. Firm conviction is not a substitute for a clear view. Second, the users that we are talking of have specific histories as a generational cohort. As O'Bryan (1985:57) has pointed out, this generation of youth workers, parents and professionals grew up with the sixties' definitions of drugs as retreatist media offering relief from a grinding reality, and may be predisposed to interpret events in the light of their own socially acquired assumptions and explanations. What Dorn and South do in starting from the appearance of things at the grassroots level is to become trapped in such common sense definitions of the modal heroin user as retreatist and dependent. Again, this returns us to the problematic status of membersl accounts, including the problem that Dorn and South gloss the fact that such accounts are generationally varied and often mutually contradictory.

Harm and Use Minimisation

The third feature of the account given by Dorn and South is a concentration upon the policy of harm and use minimisation. In itself, we have no problem with this argument, especially harm minimisation, and applaud it as the most practical and humane general policy goal. The pressing question, however, is which particular policies should be implemented to achieve the strategy?

The authors of A Land Fit for Heroin wish explicitly to develop a Left policy on heroin, and we support such an ambition. The question is, what is 'Left' and how does one achieve it? To answer that, Dorn and South sketch out what they see as the Right and Centre positions, as well as the (currently underdeveloped) left position.

The 'Right' policy response focuses on stopping the supply of drugs at third world sources, and on giving tougher sentences up to and including the death penalty for suppliers. These policies Dorn and South correctly criticise as susceptible to bankrupt sloganeering and of no demonstrable effectiveness. They also note the existence of a "radical right" free market position which views government constraints on any market as counterproductive and illegitimate, and which therefore favours decriminalization and the creation of an open market for drugs (Dorn and South 1987). This latter position is argued to have no political credibility at present.

The centre position locates the rise of drug problems in the erosion of the political and communal consensualism of the postwar years, a process blamed upon the divisive conflicts between Left and Right. Centre policies are identified as calling for increased welfare and social wage expenditure in order to reestablish a community and alleviate the deficit which generates drug use. This position is criticised by Dorn and South because it is no more than a palliative and in any case does not address the wider problems created by the widespread, ready availability of illegal heroin.

This leaves the Left position which, in their view, currently is underdeveloped and not distinctive, merely echoing the Right's call for a war on drug dealers, and the Centre's sympathy for their victims.

Dorn and South seek instead to develop a distinctively "Left" policy. Since they see little or no hope for international regulation or tackling the problem "at source" their main thrust is directed at use within national boundaries.

Once again the "grassroots experience" (1987:150-151) of professional workers, parents of users, and practitioners looms large as a touchstone of policy and their central model is the deficit/retreatist model of drug users. The countervailing strategies proposed to combat use involve efforts to "rebuild the framework of the family", reliance on community support, and so forth. These ideas are coupled with a rejection of punitive policing or of sanctioning users, things which are seen as amplifying deviance and favouring big suppliers who can evade the law (1987:159-60).

We would wish to make clear that we have no objection to these policies as such, for they are progressive when compared to many current ideas and no inhumane. Nonetheless, it should be clear that we regard policies based upon the assumption of retreatist/deficit drug use as dangerous if they are assumed to be other than limited range intervention addressing one particular type of user. Such models provide no foundation for an overall policy for heroin users in general nor for the whole area of illicit drug use. (Indeed, it might be noted here that while Dorn and South do restrict their comments to heroin use and thus cannot be criticised for overlooking other drugs, it is also the case that by happy coincidence or design, heroin is the only one of the commonly used drugs to which their deficit based model gives even a reasonable approximation. It could hardly be used to understand cocaine, for example, where research of a similar nature to theirs shows up a quite different pattern of social factors than deficit/retreatist- see e.g. Cohen, 1988; Erickson et. al., 1987)

Central to Dorn and South's policy of harm minimisation is, quite sensibly, the matter of use reduction. Obviously, since harm increases roughly as use increases, this must be a central plank of policy. Again, the question is how will this work? In A land Fit for Heroin and their earlier work (especially Dorn and South 1986) they attempt to answer this by describing a set of policies aimed to tackle national and local drug distribution.

Traditional policy responses to heroin use have, in Dorn and South's view, tended toward either supply-side or demand-side models. Supply-side models they suggest imply increased controls over third world countries and increased customs vigilance and they correctly observe that neither of these tactics has been effective. Demand-side perspectives they see as generating three broad policies. First, moral rearmament especially of the family; second, education of the consumer to highlight the harmful nature of drug abuse; and third, reduction in unemployment. In each case, they argue, there is no evidence to suggest that these policies have been effective in reducing demand, and in the case of unemployment reduction they note that this is not a policy readily to be effected at will.

Dorn and South suggest that instead of these three, or in addition to them, we need to attend to the distributive system which exists "between" demand and supply. This system is integrated with the "irregular economy", of theft, prostitution, fencing stolen goods etc. which they see as vital to understanding drug use. For Dorn and South, not only is drug distribution a source of income consistent with the characteristics of the irregular economy, but the latter also provides a network of conduits for the supply of drugs and tends to exist among those most vulnerable to the drug dealers (1986:526;1987:160-1). In their view, this irregular economy expands during recessions, or in depressed areas, as licit economic opportunities contract, and this process works to increase the availability of drugs under such conditions. The model is consistent with their general affiliation with deficit theory, being itself a deficit theory of deviance akin to Mertonian "innovative behaviour": people resort to illicit means of generating income when there is a deficit in the availability of licit means.

This may be a useful model for understanding patterns of drug distribution, directing our attention toward what may be important processes, and one that has political value, for it throws into sharp relief the point that it is the very policies of governments like that of Thatcher which exacerbate the conditions under which one kind of drug use (escapist/retreatist) flourishes. At this level we are in full agreement with the analysis Dorn and South offer.

Out of this, however, comes a general policy directive with which we find considerable difficulty, namely, to reduce drug abuse by restricting the size and scope of the irregular economy or, failing this, to displace or isolate drug distribution within the irregular economy. In one way, this makes logical sense, for if distribution is a key to one type of use, surely to disrupt the distribution must be a relevant tactic? Again, at the risk of repetition, the question is how? Here we think Dorn and South really venture into deep water. So busy are they to avoid policies like decriminalisation, which they see as not feasible, that they end up advocating policies that are even less feasible.

According to them, the key to the attack on distribution is the "deregulation" of certain illicit activities, such as loan sharking, which are central to the irregular economy. By lifting regulation on loans and credit, loan sharking, they argue would no longer be outside the law (1886:531). This would reduce the number of transactions taking place outside the law. In turn this would leave fewer activities in the irregular market (including drug distribution). The latter would then be "socio-economically isolated and, hence, reduced". (1986:532).

Dorn and South themselves are unsure of their reasoning, as they immediately admit that this policy may actually work to expand the drug network. But in a burst of free market enthusiasm, they suggest nevertheless that we should put "deregulation (of non drug parts of the irregular economy) on the agenda as a policy option...aimed at reduction of the drug problem" (1986:532). This is to be linked with "reversal or slowing down of economic and consequent demographic and social changes, and of some kind of management of those changes so that 'regular' jobs and opportunities are made available" (1986:531).

Apart from the fact that this enthusiasm for deregulation fits oddly with their (1987) denigration of "free market" policies in the instance of legalization of heroin use it also shows scant respect for their own criterion of feasibility. Let us be blunt here. While decriminalising or legalising drug use may be out of tune with the moral basis of Thatcherism, it is at least in tune with its laissez-faire economic rhetoric. The reversal or slowing down of economic' change for social goals is not only moral anathema to Thatcherites, it doesn't fit any part of the economic restructuring agenda either. Indeed, while it may be eminently socially desirable and socologically wise, it is hard to see how it its(now or in the mid 80's when these works were written) with any mainstream electoral and electable group in any major Western country. Perhaps it fitted with the British Labour party at the time, we can't say, but since that party didn't get elected at all in the decade of the 1980's, nor really looked like doing so, our basic point holds. Thus whatever the difficulties of the more 'utopian' option (legalisation) it cannot be less feasible than the policy that Dorn and South espouse.

Moreover, it is not clear that the policy would have the effects they claim, in the unlikely event that parts of it were put into practice. We cannot see why legalisation of some sectors of the irregular market is likely to separate them from the illicit drug trade. There seems to be an unsubstantiated assumption that licit loan sharks would not keep contacts with the irregular economy in general and drug networks in particular. Yet 'respectable' corporations are involved in all manner of legal and illegal profit making enterprises, and if their endeavours in the illegal sector are often facilitated by their licit status, then why should this not also be true for "legalized" enterprises currently in the irregular economy? All the more so in a deregulated sector! Far better than deregulating which leaves the weakest members of society to look after themselves, a policy which sits ill with Left thinking generally, we would suggest that a more programmatic policy of legalisation and regulation is at least as feasible an alternative.

The final problem for Dorn and South with respect to their policy of harm reduction is that by accepting the taken-for-granted "members"' accounts of deficit theorising, demand remains virtually unexplored. They operate on an unscrutinised but probably erroneous assumption that if supply (or rather "distribution") can be drastically cut, en demand will simply wither. Were we assume to the contrary, i.e. that demand is resilient and that historical precedent- such as the fate of alcohol prohibition in the United States suggests that it will not simply disappear hen the means of satisfying it becomes scarce, then their argument begins to falter. What if demand for drugs is basically a constitutive feature of modern society, not simply a contingent pathology that ebbs and flows in relation ) the economy? What if escapist/compensational use recedes in good times to be replaced by 'fun' use? What, more pressingly, if the use-for-fun is already a key feature of much drug use anyway, among the employed majority, existing alongside the type of use they write about?

Were these true, then the deficit model employed by Dorn and South would be rocked to the core. It is our contention, although we do not have room here to develop the argument in detail (cf end note) that these things are very likely the case. That is, we contend that when one sets out to theorise demand in a wider context rather than merely assuming a priori that one knows what demand consists of, what becomes very clear is that the demand for drugs, far from being an aberrant feature of modern society in fact reflects central values. Psychotropic drugs, whether licit or illicit deliver pleasure in a commodified form. Moreover, that pleasure is neatly packaged in temporal terms, allowing one to turn on at will in the leisure time that is the necessary corollary of commodified labour time. Furthermore, as more and more jobs enter the tertiary/service sector and more and more workers are thus pushed in the direction of managing their emotions in the workplace to fit in with employers and/or customers (Hochschild, 1985) so the demand for powerful 'take-me-out-of-myself ' entertainment grows. In turn, as urban life becomes more and more stimulating and as we become used to existing commodities, so the search for even more powerful stimuli to jolt the jaded senses becomes more urgent (see Simmel, 1950; Haug, 1986). In short, a whole series of social processes that are central to modernity, all push towards the same end - the commodification of pleasure and the pleasure of commodities. Processes such as urbanisation, industrialisation, bureaucratisation, the growing division of labour, the emphasis on clock time and money based exchange relations, not to mention the commodification of l leisure as new consumer industries develop, transform, and continue to transform modern society. The (highly complex) net effect of these processes includes the sharp separation, in common parlance, of leisure time and work time and leisure activities and their ethos from work and its ethos. We make this point despite the fact that the 'literature' on work/leisure distinction suggests that the two are difficult to separate. Our point is not that the two are readily conceptually separated but that there is an ideological notion that they are, which is well entrenched.

Indeed, one might argue that this split mirrors that between a (Protestant) work ethic and a hedonist ethic both of which are found, in an inter-twined but contradictory way, in modern society. As Bell (1976) points out, the central cultural contradiction of capitalism is its uneasy pursuit of these two competing directions - that of the protestant work ethic and that of the hedonist ethic.

In the context of modern 'leisure', the demand for entertainment sensations grows apace, developing new twists to old pleasures, and drugs (like sex, gambling and other excitements) are swept into the tide. One simple way of thinking the problem that Dorn and South are caught on, is to say that they seek to understand drug use negatively because they reason (implicitly) from within the work ethic while we seek to understand drug use more positively by emphasising the hedonist ethic and stressing consumption. We would argue, from this latter perspective, that one need not necessarily resort to some special explanation of drug users as consumers, just because the commodity which they consume is potentially harmful. We would suggest that it is more useful, in general, to conceptualise drug users as people who consume not because they are socially or psychologically deprived or deficient, but because they are members of a society in which commodity consumption is generally understood to be both normal and risk-bearing. While there are undoubtedly pressures to stop people consuming illicit drugs, there is any number of core-cultural pressures stimulating the desire for the type of effect they produce, claiming a form of legitimacy on the grounds that they give pleasure, and constructing vocabularies of motives for such use.

Our contention is that while we see clearly that there are definite problems attached to drug use and that those become pressing when such use is linked to deficits (individual or social) it is more and more the case that drug use does not arise from and cannot be reduced to, deficit situations. If deficit were all there is to drug use, Dorn and South would be advancing the best single case for drug policy. Since, however, deficit is not the only and perhaps not even the single most important context of use, to rely upon it distorts the argument and hence the policies.

We do not see demand withering away by supply/distribution policies. On the contrary, we see reason to suppose that demand will continue to be a central feature of modern society, albeit one that fluctuates to a degree as a matter of fashion.

In this case, a sensible strategy might be to regulate production and distribution rather than merely tO attempt to disrupt distribution. As has long been recognised (eg Young 1971) state regulation of quality and supply is one of the positive consequences of legalisation of any commodity. Dorn and South however do not seriously address this possible strategy for dealing with heroin, for the simple reason that it is pre-defined as a "nonfeasible" policy which they identify with the radical Right and its naive "freedom of choice" concepts.

In this respect Dorn and South's case is seriously misleading. Identifying legalisation with the ideas of Right libertafians is paramount to arguing that "freedom" and "choice" are concepts exclusive to the Right. Yet we would argue that concepts take their place in theoretical discourses. Freedom in critical theories has meanings and implications which are far from identical with those espoused by Hayek, Friedman and their ilk. Likewise legalisation need not have the implications of radically (and of course mythically) "deregulated" and "free" markets. Legalisation permits state ownership of production, regulation of supply and of distribution. In the "real" world of robust capitalism, the state appears as one of more feasible power centres which may at least partially be coopted by the Left to improve conditions affecting many working people. In short, pressure to generate reformist state measures has been and remains one of the repertory of defensible strategies of the Left. A policy based on alternative conceptions of why people use illicit drugs- alternative that is to the deficit model of Dorn and South - may look very different to that which they espouse. It may open up freedoms and choices which are restricted at the moment. But it is by no means therefore either "Right" or unrealistic.

It may at this point be argued that the damage caused by drug abuse is so great that an additional explanation is nonetheless required in order to account for such consumption. Indeed, a strong strand of such additional explanation is precisely that offered in the deficit theorisations which are based on the assumption that some additional account must be given for why safe, licit stimuli are not enough, or not available to certain categories of people. Our response to this point is two-fold. The first element is to emphasise that the distinction between licit and illicit stimuli cannot be sustained on the basis of harm alone, for no examination either of the relative dangers of the drugs, nor of the history of which drugs became illegal and why, leads anywhere near this position. The second response is related but distinct. It is that the generalised process of commodification creates all manner of "problems" from lung cancer as an effect of smoking tobacco, the road toll as an effect of privatised transportation commoditied, and up to and including the crises of global resource depletion and environmental destruction created by the consumer societies. It is not simply that some licit commodities are hazardous to their consumers. Many of them are, and moreover they are a risk collectively and are socially identified as such. In other words, harmfulness is not only a feature of commodity consumption regardless of "licitness", but moreover is recognised culturally as a "normal" risk of commodity consumption as an activity and as a form of social organization. We accept such harms, even catastrophic harms, as more or less unavoidable consequences of commodified living; we may try to mitigate the effects but most often the efforts made are not strenuous and usually stop well short of total prohibition. And we may be able to recognize that regulatory strategies (the use of seat belts, improved care design, ingredient and manufacturing standards for wines and spirits) have generally proven more effective (or less countereffective) than prohibitory strategies for the minimisation of harms flowing from the pleasurable commodities.

Conclusion

Dorn and South attempt to make a new foray into drug policy. They want to develop a 'Left' policy which breaks away from other political paths and which will be a new road towards a more constructive and humane policy, one that helps users and their families without persecuting them. This is a desirable road to follow and they have much to say that is sensible. But along the way they adopt a strategy that dooms them to reproduce failed or impractical policy initiatives. This strategy is a misguided belief that the royal road to truth lies through the experiences and knowledge of those embroiled in the drug using contexts. This leads them towards a sophisticated version of common sense and insofar as common sense itself is often a refuge for prejudice and half truths, so they become trapped in its logic. Surrounded by real problems, they can conceive of the demand for drugs only in negative terms as a contingent pathology that will be washed away by the cleansing power of economic change. They fail to realise that there may well be a demand for drugs that good times would accelerate rather than remove.

At the same time, their political agenda - to advocate policies that are realistic, in the sense of being electorally acceptable - leads them to make two mistakes. The first is to assume that the pursuit of use reduction (popular) can be advocated even if the corollary is that economic growth must be checked (very unpopular). The second, is to assume that because something is widely believed to work, it will work. We concede without argument that policies such as decriminalisation of drugs are not currently popular, are often labelled as defeatist or likely to lead to increased use and that it is widely believed that more enforcement is what is needed. What we don't concede, however, is that these beliefs are automatically correct. In the case of cannabis, for example, the evidence from several different countries such as Holland (van Vliet, 1989), South Australia (Sarre, Sutton and Pulsford,1989) and Alaska dohns,1989) all point in the same direction - that decriminalisation is clearly a viable policy that does not involve increased use, reduces enforcement costs and encourages a separation of the cannabis market from markets for 'hard' drugs. Such conclusions fit entirely the model developed by Kleinman (1989) which shows that 'less enforcement is better'.

While these sources all postdate Dorn and South's published works, the arguments they contain, and earlier collections of data, are all well known and must have been available to those authors had they wanted to consider them. The fact seems to be that they did not want to consider them, because the) already conceived of drug use in a perspective that eliminated these arguments. This self blinkering does no generate policies that are more feasible except in the sense of reiterating common prejudices.

Our policy thrust, which we only sketch here, would be quite different. Starting from the position that drug use is normal, another form of commodity consumption, we contend that demand cannot be stamped out legislatively, that it will not disappear by indirect manipulation of the existing distribution networks, and that in a commodified world a progressive and realistic distribution etc, be subject to state regulation rather than abandoned to the highest bidder. This model also undermines law and order prohibitionist conceptions of some drugs as acceptable and others as purely negative quantities leading to or arising out of pathology. Harm minimisation strategies need not assume an all or nothing, absolutionist conception of drugs. Alcohol use and abuse is dealt with by a complex array of harm minimisation strategies which stop short of assuming that alcohol is purely a negative drug resorted to pathologically. Other drugs, including heroin, we argue, should be dealt with realistically in this fashion, by policies which are at least as "feasible" as those viewed by Left Realists like Dorn and South and more likely to be effective.

This paper is part of a more general effort to critique Left Realism and Dorn and South's suggestions on heroin policy as a specific instance of it. We judge that the extended technical argument about Left Realism provided elsewhere is inappropriate to this short paper. Interested readers are, however, invited to write to the authors for a longer paper, which also includes an extended version of the argument mentioned in this article about theorising the demand for drugs. Please write to: Stephen Mugford Dept. of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, PO Box 4. Canberra, A.C.T. 260t, AuPnRlia

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