Peta Malins’s research while affiliated with Monash University (Australia) and other places

Background: Drug detection dogs are increasingly being deployed by policing agencies in Australia and elsewhere to home in on people carrying illicit drugs in a broad range of social contexts including at music festivals, on public transport and in a range of everyday urban spaces. Significant concerns have been raised about their limited deterrence and detection efficacy and tendency to increase drug-related health harms including overdose. Yet the complex ways in which these effects play out, and the broader impacts they have on social and emotional wellbeing, are not yet well documented. This study builds on a growing body of poststructural critical drug studies research to explore the complex social, emotional and health impacts of drug dog use in these broad social contexts. Methods: Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 people who had been searched by drug detection dogs at or near music festivals and events, licensed venues and public transport spaces in Australia. Participants were asked about their experiences of being searched, how it impacted upon them in the short and long term, and how it shaped their drug use behaviours, sense of self and social relations, including relations with police. Results: This study supports previous findings that these drug dog operations do not tend to deter people from consuming illicit substances, but instead encourage a range of adaptations that increase the likelihood of health harms including overdose. The rationalities underpinning responses to drug dogs, and the impacts of those responses, are shown to be deeply spatial, temporal, social and embodied. More specifically, drug dog deployment is shown to have significant short and long term impacts on social and emotional wellbeing and can produce deep embodied trauma. Conclusion: These findings suggest that the use of drug dogs in these broad social contexts is based on untenable assumptions about the rationalities of deterrence, is producing substantial harm without evidence of benefit, and should be urgently reconsidered.

While critical drug researchers have long pushed for an acknowledgement of pleasure in discourses of drug use, few have explored the alternative possibilities offered by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire. In this paper I map out some of the conceptual differences between pleasure and desire and explore the opportunities opened up by attending more closely to desire in critical drug studies. I suggest that while discourses of pleasure do make an important intervention into and against dominant narratives of risk, harm, and addiction, they may inadvertently be working to keep in place the very binaries and forms of neoliberal western subjectivity that support those narratives. I argue that a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology of desire is a better tool with which to make sense of the complex relations that form between drugs and bodies, challenge medical and criminal responses to drug use, and bring forth assemblages that enhance, rather than diminish, bodily capacities.

Public health "perspectives" position school-based drug education as a key site whereby public health imperatives can be brought to life through the "empowerment" of young people to take charge of their bodies to ensure their own good health. Foucauldian governmentality scholarship has been extremely useful in the task of critically examining these attempts to govern the population's health and drug use, drawing attention to the ways in which classrooms function as biopedagogical spaces where particular sorts of knowledge and truth are mobilized to produce subjects who are rational, autonomous, and "empowered" to make the "right" healthy, drug-free choices. Although the work of Foucault has helped in drawing attention to expert knowledges, discourses, and truths that operate in the production of "healthy" subjectivity, it has been less useful for exploring the affective, desiring, and embodied aspects of school drug education or for examining its potential side effects, including its impacts on bodily capacities, social relations, and empathy. In this article, then, we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to build on and supplement these governmental approaches: to consider what actually happens, affectively, in classrooms when drug education biopedagogies are put into motion, and what implications this has for embodied relations beyond the classroom. We argue that by attending to the affective, desiring, and embodied aspects of school drug education, we get a more nuanced sense of the broader impacts of school drug education: how it functions as a biopolitical site and how it might affect upon health and well-being in ways not considered by discourses of public health nor those of governmentality.