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In the last decade, the Japanese welfare system has dramatically expanded health-care services and introduced new therapeutic programs for people diagnosed with addiction problems. Staff and members of volunteer-led non-profit rehabilitation centers (known as DARCs) together with medical professionals, developed pilot clinical therapies and critical studies of current clinical models. By encouraging encounters between professionals and DARC volunteers, these programs serve as a basis for new social and economic welfare policies. They incorporate critical assessments of causality and responsibility in the context of social marginalization and the lack of medical care. Scholars of Japanese welfare and a wider scholarship of governmentality and drug policies have analyzed deinvestment in marginalized populations by focusing on medicalization and criminalization. However, the Japanese therapeutic expansion produced alternative experiential, moral, and medical understandings of drug use, as it enabled grassroots participation through new forms of citizenship, peer studies, and alliances across medical, penal, and welfare fields. This article therefore focuses on how grassroots activists engage with medical professionals and welfare officials through self-studies and research about these collectives. Drawing on the anthropology of addiction literature and critical drug studies, and 6 months of anthropological fieldwork in Japan, I interrogate the emerging collaborative politics of addiction in Japan, focusing on alliances between various actors and institutions, the organization of care in a time of economic abandonment of marginalized social classes, and the making of grassroots solidarity. Finally, I reflect on the politics of fault and practices of space-making that characterize these pragmatic alliances. I consider these alliances as interventions into the hegemonic understandings of fault and responsibility in the context of social assistance and addiction-specific welfare policies.

The orthodox construction of agency within addiction recovery discourse is built upon a fault line between two conflicting principles: that people who use drugs in harmful ways cannot control their behavior, but that they can also regain that control through intentional effort. The conceptual confusion inherent in this framework can harm people using drugs by producing inadequate accounts of commonly invoked aspects of recovery such as “triggers,” “self-control,” and “addictive behavior.” This ethnographic study involved qualitative interviews and observations with nine people over 6 months as they engaged in recovery from harmful methamphetamine use, to explore their experiences of agency, and how these experiences could be shaped by the discourse of volition/compulsion. Thematic analysis was conducted using a posthumanist theoretical framework. We found “relapse triggers” to be diffuse aspects of particular environments rather than specific stimuli, able to provoke what would normally be considered conscious, intentional behavior rather than only autonomic or “mindless” processes. Participants also described their identities as internally divided and multiple, with drug related behaviors separated from their true selves. Finally, agency was experienced as emergent and distributed rather than as a particular resource located within individuals. Attending to these complex experiences of agency can help resolve the tension between loss of control and personal responsibility for people who use drugs, by renegotiating the historically imposed categorical distinction between volitional and compelled actions, and the cultural constructions of “addictive” versus “normal” behavior.

Global momentum for drug law reform is building. But how might such reform be achieved? Many argue that human rights offer a possible normative framework for guiding such reform. There has been very little research on whether human rights processes can actually achieve such aims, however. This paper responds to this knowledge gap. It explores how one human rights mechanism—the “parliamentary rights scrutiny process”—deals with alcohol and other drugs. We consider how four Australian parliaments scrutinized proposed new laws that would deal with alcohol and other drugs for their human rights “compatibility.” We find that laws that would limit the rights of people who use alcohol and other drugs were routinely seen as justifiable on the basis that alcohol and other drugs were inherently “unsafe.” Crucially, safety was conceptualized in a gender-neutral way, without regard to the potential role of gender, including specific masculinities, in the production of phenomena such as family violence and sexual violence and other public safety problems. Instead, such problems were regularly constituted as consequences, simply, of alcohol or other drug consumption. In making this argument, we build on the pioneering work of David Moore and colleagues (e.g., 2020). Their work asks important questions about how the causes of violence are constituted across different settings, including research and policy. Drawing on ideas from scholars such as Carol Bacchi and John Law, they identify “gendering practices” and “collateral realities” in research and policy on violence, in which the role of men and masculinities are routinely obscured, displaced or rendered invisible. We find similar problems underway within human rights law. In highlighting these gendering practices and collateral realities, we aim to draw attention to the limitations of some human rights processes and the need for more work in this area.

Culture on Drugs: Narco-Cultural Studies of High Modernity by Dave Boothroyd, (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 240 pp., $26.00. Drugs and Popular Culture: Drugs, Media and Identity in Contemporary [...]