Special Issue and Sixth Contemporary Drug Problems Conference—Embracing Trouble: New Ways of Doing,Being and Knowing

This special issue of Contemporary Drug Problems follows the theme of the sixth biennial conference; Embracing trouble: New ways of doing, being and knowing. Held in Paris in September 2023, the conference called for participants to embrace trouble to forge new paths of inquiry in drugs scholarship, inspired by the work of Donna Haraway (2016), among others.

Building on previous Contemporary Drug Problems conferences, which have opened up questions of how drugs are problematized; how the complexity of drug use can be attended to; how drug use might be understood as an event, assemblage, or phenomenon; how drugs and their effects are constituted in various forms of practice and interactions/intraactions, and how we might rethink change—the 2023 conference sought to attract papers that embraced trouble across methods, tools, and practices.

The conference was hosted in the historic Forum 104 with dinner in the Musee d’Orsay. In the midst of a Paris heatwave, the most popular seats in every session were ones that allowed hanging out of the window to get some fresh air. Luckily, the garden offered some respite and an opportunity for those in-between conversations that make for some of the most memorable moments of a conference. The weather allowed conversations to continue outside at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and on to evening picnics on the edge of the Seine. Thursday's dinner under the chandeliers of the Musee d’Orsay's dining room set the bar (unattainably?) high for future conferences.

The conference covered an exciting diversity of topics across people, places, and substances. One session troubled the categorization of youth and explored what agency means for that population. Another troubled what harm reduction practices can be and mean in a prohibitionist context. Participants discussed how trouble can be politically productive and instrumental in exposing the power structures and positionality that guide research. The conference saw reflections on these troubled times and the risks posed to solidarity and trust. In turn, presentations called attention to the role of researchers in ensuring our claims to knowledge, authority, and rigor are useful.

Three keynotes at the conference drove discussions during the week and seven papers published in this special issue mark new paths in critical drugs scholarship which embrace trouble in theory, methods, and practice. The keynotes and presented abstracts at Contemporary Drug Problems cemented its position as a place to make trouble and have troubled conversations.

The first keynote by Suzanne Fraser (Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health, and Society, La Trobe University) was “‘Staying with the trouble’ in ontopolitical research on drugs,” which is published in full in this special issue (2024). Fraser considers Donna Haraway's work in “Staying with the trouble” (2016) and its role in “ongoingness,” particularly how we imagine the seemingly intractable issues that are core to drugs scholarship. Fraser encourages us to resist “succumbing to abstract futurism” and instead be truly present to become capable of response. In this way, in the words of Haraway, we can “dream well while staying truly awake.” Building on Haraway's work, Fraser has proposed an approach that she calls “ontopolitically-oriented research” (Fraser, 2020) to consider how research approaches and practices constitute realities in research. Fraser reflects on how approaches to data generation and language are vital for creating different stories of drug use, kinship, and “addiction.” Her overall call was to troubleshoot how we think and do drugs, and her work invites us to ask new and different questions, analyze in new ways, and make new realities.

Maziyar Ghiabi (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter) presented the second keynote “On recovery beyond its possibility of being” calling on us to advance drug scholarship by rearranging ways of knowing and experiencing, reflecting on scholarship from the West and outside the West. Ghiabi drew on events in Iran, where the concept of “recovery” in drug use has seen a spike in popularity on online platforms. Ghiabi provides the example of an Instagram influencer in the recovery space who identifies with the rend, a nonconformist individual living in ruins. These influencers can be figures of counterculture and disrepute, a radical epistemological moment that contrasts with the proliferation of movements such as Narcotics Anonymous.

Annie Madden (Harm Reduction Australia) and Zoe Dodd (MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions) presented a powerful final keynote “Of Resistance & Reckonings in a Time of War,” to close the conference. Madden identified the ways that expressing positionality as a person with lived experience imposes a personal and professional burden. Bringing lived experience to high-level drug policy settings should not be seen as a challenge to “objectivity,” but instead an opportunity for creativity. In those high-level settings, Madden identifies the proximity to power as a potential threat where people with lived experience risk perpetuating traditional power structures through their participation. Dodd continued with a discussion of a need for praxis which is grounded in the dismantling of power. Dodd echoes Fraser's earlier evocation of Donna Haraway to “dream well while remaining truly awake” in her call for the development of a critique of harm reduction which dreams of a system free from oppression.

In this special issue, seven papers expand on the themes discussed in the conference. Zuluaga Duque's (2024) paper develops synergies between ontopolitically oriented research, Latin American feminist theory, and decolonial theory. Reflecting on her own research on coca cultivation in Colombia conducted while working in the Global North, Zuluaga Duque troubles notions of “universality” in research practice. She identifies how drug scholarship can default to normative Western concepts that perpetuate the power imbalances prevalent in systems of capitalism, imperialism, individualism, and neoliberalism.

Nichols (2024) explores the use of poetic assemblage as a method in research on drug use and reflects on how it can trouble stigma. Poetic inquiry is employed as a tool for data analysis, producing emergent questions and deepened theorizing from interviews with pregnant and parenting people who use drugs. This approach troubles prior knowledges about stigmatized behaviors, making it useful to “make and unmake relationships between the different levels of stigma.” Nichols employs examples of poetic assemblage to demonstrate its utility in exploring unstable concepts such as stigma.

Simon et al. (2024) present another methods-focused paper that applies a story-share model to develop community-driven research that centers on people who use drugs. Guided by narcofeminist theory (Dennis et al., 2023), the methodology has already been employed to develop training on overdose, hepatitis C, sex work, disability justice, and harm reduction for pregnant and parenting people who use drugs. The approach troubles traditional methods of data generation and asks how community-driven research can disrupt stigma. Narcofeminism and narrative theory interlink to disrupt dominant, individualized narratives of drug harms and to consider the constraints of wider structural factors.

Perri et al. (2024) draw on interviews with women who use drugs to develop theorizations of ontological (in)security to account for gender. Current theorizations fail to take into account the gendered constraints of women facing housing insecurity, particularly for women who use drugs and are othered because of their nonnormative behaviors. Gender-blind theories risk perpetuating harm to women and the paper highlights how those current theorizations overlook the gendered impacts of ontological insecurity on sense of being and autonomy.

Kiepek (2024) explores moralization language in judicial decisions to understand how drug-related harm is constructed in case law. In case law, judges rationalize their decisions and offer insight into the values that guide those decisions. Drawing attention to the use of moralizing language and concepts within judicial decisions can deepen understanding of institutionalized stigma and trouble perceptions of judges as neutral arbiters of the law. In paying attention to the use of moralizing language in the law, Kiepek underscores the way that judicial decisions produce and reproduce a focus on individual responsibility, minimizing the role of social context in people's actions.

Engel & Low (2025) draw on autoethnography to explore meanings of San Pedro and Peyote as psychedelic cacti. In the current booming psychedelic industry, the cacti traditionally used by First Nations people are creating new meanings through increasing use in clinical studies, international exportation, publicity via social media platforms, and increasingly widespread cultivation. The paper troubles the meanings of psychedelic cacti in the context of clashes between medicine, prohibition, and a consumer market.

The articles in this special issue span a breadth of different topics and geographies but are tied together in how they embrace trouble to offer deepened understandings of drugs in society—exploring the limits of theorizations that make claims to universality or overlook (and thus shape) gender, methods of data collection and analysis which center people who use drugs, or the institutionalized stigma which is evident in moralization language in judicial systems. The papers remind us that building on existing literature and disturbing accepted praxis is a core part of research. The process of troubling opens paths to advance critique and create new worlds that benefit people who consume drugs.