What is Critical Drug Studies?A Deeper Excursion by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 

What is Critical Drug Studies? A Deeper Excursion

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Critical Drug Studies is an emergent, interdisciplinary field that interrogates how drugs—as substances, policies, discourses, and lived phenomena—are enmeshed in power, culture, identity, inequality, and resistance. It does not settle for simplistic categories like “legal vs. illegal” or “addiction vs. recovery.” Instead, it probes how those categories are constructed, whom they serve, whom they harm, and how they might be reshaped.

To map its contours, we can look at its key texts, institutional anchors, major trends, and its goals and tensions.

Key Books and Major Texts

A number of landmark works lay the groundwork for critical drug studies. Darin Weinberg’s On Addiction: Insights from History, Ethnography, and Critical Theory (2024, Duke University Press) offers a synthetic account that pushes beyond biomedical binaries, showing how cultural and political forces shape what counts as “addiction.” Ido Hartogsohn’s American Trip (2020) demonstrates how psychedelic experience is inseparable from “set and setting,” situating the psychedelic revival in broader cultural contexts. Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream (2015) provides a journalistic narrative that critiques prohibition and humanizes those harmed by the war on drugs. Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs (2009) dismantles claims about antidepressant efficacy, exposing the limits of biomedical explanations. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain (2021) documents the role of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma in creating the opioid crisis, illustrating the entanglement of corporate power and drug policy. And Troy Duster’s The Legislation of Morality (1970) remains a classic demonstration of how drug laws are rooted less in science than in moral judgments. Alongside these, the work of Howard Becker (Outsiders), Craig Reinarman, Gabor Maté, Paul Preciado, Kathleen Frydl, Bruce Alexander, and Nancy Campbell continues to shape the field.

Journals and Associations

Critical Drug Studies has found homes in key journals and professional networks. Contemporary Drug Problems publishes critical, interdisciplinary research on psychoactive substances and their social worlds. The International Journal of Drug Policy has become a leading forum for debates about harm reduction, regulation, and decriminalization. Drug and Alcohol Review often leans biomedical but makes space for critical perspectives, and Social History of Alcohol and Drugs situates drug use and policy in historical contexts. Special issues such as “Gender and Critical Drug Studies,” edited by Nancy Campbell and colleagues, have broadened the field to include questions of pleasure, gender, and embodiment. Essays like N.D. Campbell’s Transnationalizing Critical Drug Studies (2022) push the field to account for non-Western and global South perspectives, challenging its Euro-American bias.

Institutionally, the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP) convenes scholars, policymakers, and advocates, creating space for cross-sectoral dialogue. Harm reduction networks in Europe and beyond serve as crucial bridges between scholarship and activism, ensuring that the lived experience of drug users informs both policy and research.

Trends and Growth

The field has expanded rapidly over the past decade. One trend is a shift from Western-centric research to global and transnational perspectives, examining how drug regimes and discourses play out differently in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Another is the emphasis on intersectionality: researchers highlight how drug policies and experiences are shaped by race, gender, class, and sexuality, and how pleasure and desire—long neglected—belong at the center of analysis.

A third trend involves interrogating health and biomedical paradigms. Scholars question the disease model of addiction, examine the ethics of pharmaceutical marketing, and critique the medicalization of mood and behavior. A fourth emphasizes ethnography and lived experience, bringing the voices of drug users themselves—so often silenced—into the center of scholarship. A fifth focuses on policy engagement: critical drug studies is not only descriptive but also normative, advocating for harm reduction, decriminalization, safe supply, and community-based interventions. Finally, some scholars experiment with digital and computational methods, using data analysis and mapping while critically reflecting on the biases and surveillance risks embedded in those tools.

Goals and Open Questions

Critical Drug Studies is animated by a set of ambitious goals. It seeks to reframe dominant narratives by moving away from moral panic and disease-only models, contextualizing drug use within histories of colonialism, capitalism, and structural racism. It aims to inform more humane policies, grounded in harm reduction rather than punishment. It amplifies marginalized voices, including those of racialized communities, gender-diverse people, the poor, and those in over-policed neighborhoods. It interrogates pharmaceutical power and asks who benefits when certain substances are criminalized and others medicalized. And it promotes methodological pluralism—ethnography, autoethnography, visual methods, participatory research, and data science, each held accountable through critical reflection.

Yet the field is also full of tensions. How can scholars balance critique with pragmatic engagement in policy? How should we assess medicalization when it alleviates some suffering but introduces new forms of control? How can global inequalities be addressed without reproducing Euro-American dominance? How might indigenous epistemologies and healing traditions be integrated respectfully, without appropriation? How do we center pleasure, desire, and agency, and not reduce drug use only to pathology? And how can digital tools be used responsibly given their ties to surveillance and inequality?

Growth and Momentum

Signs of momentum are everywhere: new books adopting critical frameworks; special journal issues on gender, pleasure, and global perspectives; greater media attention to opioids, psychedelics, and decriminalization debates; and the growing visibility of activist movements demanding safe supply, harm reduction, and drug law reform. The field is not fringe—it is becoming a recognized current within sociology, anthropology, criminology, cultural studies, and public health.

What Critical Drug Studies Is Not

It is not simply biomedical or pharmacological research, though it remains in dialogue with those sciences. It is not moralizing in the traditional sense, though it treats morality and stigma as vital objects of inquiry. And it is not uniform or dogmatic: scholars debate strategies, priorities, and theories. This internal heterogeneity is a strength, reflecting the complexity of the terrain.

Where 

Wild Flesh

 Can Contribute

Given its activist and poetic orientation, Wild Flesh can contribute by amplifying first-person narratives: essays, poems, and interviews with those whose lives are entangled with drugs and prohibition. It can trace local drug regimes—how policing, health care, and stigma shape experiences in Santa Barbara or elsewhere—illuminating the global through the local. It can analyze how we talk about drugs in media, art, and law, exposing metaphors and moral panics. It can spotlight alternatives such as decriminalization, safe supply, psychedelic therapies, and indigenous modalities, weighing their promises and risks. It can foreground intersectional perspectives, showing how race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonial histories structure the politics of drugs. And it can model reflexivity—acknowledging one’s own position, biases, and responsibilities in engaging with communities and knowledges that are often marginalized.