Are drug treatment services only for 'thieving junkie scumbags'? Drug users and the management of stigmatised identities.

This article uses qualitative interviews with 53 problematic drug users who had dropped out of treatment in England, UK to explore how they describe the stigmatisation of drug users and drug services. It discusses the construction of the category of the junkie through its association with un-controlled heroin use and criminality. It shows how some drug users carefully manage information about their discreditable identities by excluding themselves from this category, while acknowledging its validity for other drug users. The junkie identity was generally seen as shameful and therefore to be avoided, although it holds attractions for some drug users. For many of the interviewees, entry to treatment risked exposing their own activities as shaming, as they saw treatment as being a place that was populated by junkies and where it becomes more difficult to manage discreditable information. The treatment regime, e.g. the routine of supervised consumption of methadone,was itself seen by some as stigmatising and was also seen as hindering progress to the desired ‘normal’ life of conventional employment. Participation in the community of users of both drugs and drug services was perceived as potentially damaging to the prospects of recovery. This emphasises the importance of social capital, including links to people and opportunities outside the drug market. It also highlights the danger that using the criminal justice system to concentrate prolific offenders in treatment may have the perverse effects of excluding other people who have drug problems and of prolonging the performance of the junkie identity within treatment services. It is concluded that treatment agencies should address these issues, including through the provision of more drug services in mainstream settings, in order to ensure that drug services are not seen to be suitable only for one particularly stigmatised category of drug user

Providers’ constructions of pregnant and early parenting women who use substances

The research literature indicates that problematic substance use as a form of health behaviour is poorly understood, being sometimes viewed as deviance, at other times as a disease, and most often as a combination of these states. The use of substances by women who are pregnant or new parents is often conceptualised within an individualised framework. Yet drinking alcohol and using other drugs during pregnancy and early parenthood cuts across social divisions and is shaped by socio-structural contexts including health care. There is a growing body of literature that critically examines public health interventions that are aimed at implementing harm reduction and health promotion techniques in service delivery to help pregnant and early parenting women who are identified as problem substance users. We examine qualitative data from representatives of a recent harm reduction intervention, focusing, in particular, on providers' individual conceptualisations of the problematic behaviour. Our results show that most study participants regard any substance use during pregnancy, birth and the postpartum period as fundamentally unacceptable. This framing of problematic substance use is accomplished via gendered responsibilisation of women as foetal incubators and primary caregivers of infants. We discuss our results in light of the current literature and suggest policy implications

Crime and Partisanship : How Party ID Muddles Reality, Perception and Policy Attitudes on Crime and Guns

Objective In this article we theorize that partisanship is such a strong filter of information that it can affect how individuals make sense of their lived environment and how the geographic experience informs policy attitudes. As a result, although “independents” tend to be less politically knowledgeable and have less developed policy opinions, their policy attitudes on gun control are more informed by their lived experience than partisans. Methods We use data from an original survey of American adults about crime and gun control linked to crime statistics from the FBI. Results We find that stronger partisanship leads to resistance to information from the lived environment in the development of policy attitudes about gun control. Conclusion Democrats and Republicans have very different views about guns and, generally, these priorities are relatively unaffected by contextual experience; however, gun policy attitudes of independents are highly correlated with the level of gun crime in their geographic context

W.E.B. DuBois for the Twenty‐First Century: On Being a Scholar‐Activist in the Digital Era

W.E.B. Du Bois began his work as a scholar-activist at the dawn of the twentieth century, and this paper argues that his example has much to teach contemporary scholar-activists in the twenty-first century. In order to publish The Crisis, the magazine of the activist organization he co-founded, DuBois purchased a printing press. This meant he could own the means of his own knowledge production and foretold both the promise of what it means to be a scholar-activist in the twenty-first century and the limitations built into the current systems of knowledge production. Du Bois was also prophetic when he identified the problem of the twentieth century as “the problem of the color line,” as the focus of both his scholarship and his activism. The forms of systemic white supremacy we face today are both a continuation of a centuries-old dimension of racism in the U.S. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms. The paper explores the challenges of being digital scholar-activists within legacy institutions. It concludes with speculation about what DuBois might do now

The Unusual Suspects: An Educated, Legitimately Employed Drug Dealing Network

This article challenges the mainstream discourse that is often used to conceptualize illegal drug supply. In particular, it questions the assumption that drug dealers and the markets they inhabit are a social aberration, restricted primarily to social outsiders operating in socially and economically marginalized communities. Drawing on 6 years of ethnographic fieldwork with 25 “conventional” working-class “lads,” the article makes two overarching arguments. First, that the illegal drug trade is by no means confined to a subset of violent or marginalized drug distributors. Second, that the organization and structure of drug distribution networks can often be entwined into the fabric of conventional routines. The article concludes that criminological research must move toward better conceptualizing the so-called silent majority of drug dealers if we are to accurately reframe the current reductionist drugs discourse

Breaking bad, making good: notes on a televisual tourist industry

This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the ‘televisual tourism’ centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied travel experience enjoyed by fans of the show as they consume their way around the show’s sites, scenes, and tastes in the city of Albuquerque . This exploitation of media textuality through fan tourism is, we suggest, centred upon a carefully managed commodification of crime, criminality and transgression