Dan --
There is, of course, the sociological tradition which starts with
Harry Levine, in parallel with the earlier stuff by Rothman and Foucault
on the discovery of the asylum. Harry's paper is at:
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/doa.htm
A more recent paper in the tradition, responding to the critiques by
Warner and Porter of Harry's timing, is Peter Ferentzy's "From sin to
disease: Differences and similarities between past and current
conceptions of chronic drunkenness" Contemporary Drug Problems
28(3):363-390, 2001.
Then there is Mariana Valverde's book, _Diseases of the Will: Alcohol
and the Dilemmas of Freedom_, Cambridge UP 1998. One strength of the
book is the effort to link together addiction concepts and the policy
arena. The weakness is that it ignores much of the existing secondary
literature, such as Levine.
There is also my overview piece:
http://www.janushead.org/6-2/Room.pdf in this tradition.
From the perspective of your question, none of these deal
specifically with the political arena. There, the modern historical
political-sociological tradition starts with Gusfield. One classic
piece of his which focuses on "Moral Passage: The Symbolic Process in
Public Designations of Deviance" Social Problems 15(2):175-188, 1967 --
also reprinted as a chapter in his book, _Contested Meanings: The
Construction of Alcohol Problems_ (U Wisconsin Press, 1996). But this
is a bit outdated (pre-Levine, for instance), and Roizen's dissertation
gives a more nuanced version of alcoholism and policy:
http://www.roizen.com/ron/disshome.htm
These are of course all about alcohol. On the drug side, along with
Lindesmith, Troy Duster's book is a classic: _The Legislation of
Morality: Law, Drugs and Moral Judgment (Free Press, 1972). An
influential sociological textbook, with a second edition now getting
long in the tooth, is Peter Conrad & Joseph Schneider, _Deviance &
Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness_ (Temple UP, 1992) -- it has
chapters on alcohol and on drugs, though specialist historians are
likely to wince a bit at some of it.
This is all very US-oriented. I have been thinking a bit about how
addiction concepts intertwine with the history of international drug
control (not that this gets far away from the US!)-- here is one piece
on it (in spite of its web reference, it's actually the whole paper):
http://www.senliscouncil.net/documents/Room_abstract (which is from the
conference book from this:
http://www.senliscouncil.net/modules/events/lisbon)
And there's some more stuff on addiction concepts and drug policy in
this:
http://www.foresight.gov.uk/Brain_Science_Addiction_and_Drugs/Reports_an
d_Publications/ScienceReviews/Social%20Policy.pdf (these two lines are
all one reference)
Lastly, let me give one of my favourite citations, though you will
probably have trouble finding it. Kettil Bruun's paper is partly a
useful pulling together and gloss on papers by Siegler and Osmond on
models of alcoholism and models of addiction, and partly a periodization
of Finnish history with respect to different dominant concepts. Kettil
Bruun, "Finland: the nonmedical approach", pp. 554-558 in L.G.Kiloh &
D.S. Bell, Proceedings, 29th International Congress on Alcohol and
Alcoholism (Australia (sic): Butterworths, 1971).
The basic story from Siegler & Osmond and from Bruun (and for that
matter from my dissertation) is that there is not a single "medical
model". In unorganized territories of medicine like alcohol/drugs,
doctors are optimistic pragmatists who will adopt by analogy any model
they think might work. So the question for them is not only whether
addiction is a disease, but what kind of disease it is -- is it a
disease like measles or smallpox (epidemic models), like bronchitis or
diabetes (chronic relapsing model), like Huntington's disease (genetic
malfunction), and so on. Behind the choice of words to go after the
"like" lies a whole action model, as I called it, which tends to dictate
policy as well as clinical work.
Clinicians, and for that matter others, fight over these models
parttly in terms of what points toward a "cure", but also partly in
terms of their implications for policy. The action model for "like an
epidemic", for instance, is strong and urgent -- focusing on the threat
that the user poses to others, and as strong an argument as terrorism
for overriding civil liberties, etc. Rather different from the action
model for "like diabetes", which, say, a clinician favoring methadone
maintenance is likely to have in mind.
The other aspect where I differ from the conventional sociological
wisdom is that I don't see medical and moral models as necessarily
antagonistic -- the medical models in this area are often quite
moralized. An extreme case was the Nazi doctors sterilizing alcoholics
and then eventually selecting them for extermination. But you don't
have to look very far to see less extreme versions.
I look forward to further contributions on your question. Robin
-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Courtwright, David
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2005 3:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Policy and perceptions of addiction
Dan:
One possibility is Alfred R. Lindesmith, The Addict and the Law, which
is a clearly written, historically oriented, and archetypically liberal
statement of the harms that flow from criminalizing addiction. The only
problem with Lindesmith's position, as Acker and I and others have
pointed out, is that, historically, the causality ran in both
directions: a change in the composition of the addict population (i.e.,
more lower class urban male "junkies") precipitated a hardening of
policy, which in turn exacerbated the health, behavior, and public image
of the users.
David
David T. Courtwright
John A. Delaney Presidential Professor
Dept. of History
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645
Home office: (904) 745 0530
University office: (904) 620-1872
Fax: (904) 620-1018
Email: [log in to unmask]
________________________________
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society on behalf of Dan Malleck
Sent: Thu 12/22/2005 12:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Policy and perceptions of addiction
I wonder what people think are the key texts (primary and secondary) on
connection between liquor or drug policy and perceptions of addiction?
That is, whether and how policy decisions affected concepts of
addiction.
This broad literature would include labelling theory of deviance, I
know, but what about more medical perceptions?
Stuff that would be accessible to undergraduate students would
especially be helpful.
Best of the season to you all.
Dan
Dan Malleck, PhD
Assistant Professor, Community Health Sciences Brock University 500
Glenridge Ave St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1
905 688-5550 ext 5108
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