Is non-medical use normal? Normalisation, medicalisation and pharmaceutical consumption.

Autor: Dertadian GC; Centre for Crime, Law and Justice, Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW, Sydney, Australia. Electronic address: k.dertadian@unsw.edu.au.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: The International journal on drug policy [Int J Drug Policy] 2023 Sep; Vol. 119, pp. 104123. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Jul 14.
DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2023.104123
Abstrakt: The theory of the normalisation of youth drug use in advanced capitalist societies has had an enduring legacy in contemporary drug scholarship. While the literature on the normalisation of 'illicit' drugs is well developed, less has been written about application of the theory to emerging discourse of pharmaceutical 'abuse', and how this might necessitate different thinking around what can be considered normal consumption. Pharmaceuticals are not directly associated with criminality, and their use does not traditionally attract stigma. In fact, social science scholarship has illustrated how many substances deemed illicit are normalised in the context of an ever-growing set of medical treatments. This paper explores the assumptions about legality, sociality and pleasure which sit behind the drug normalisation thesis, by reflecting on the relevance of drug normalisation in relation to pharmaceuticals, as well as examining scholarship on the medicalisation of society and qualitative research on non-medical use to illustrate the parallel processes of normalisation that apply to pharmaceuticals. The paper argues that questions of normalisation in relation to pharmaceutical use require a deeper engagement with the normative expectations we attach to pleasure, consumption and medicine, and the way this is structured by proximity to medical authority, whiteness and middle-classness.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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