| This dissertation examines how drug use and users have been regulated in the U.S. since the 1980s by assessing the regulatory regimes that govern: tobacco, cocaine, marijuana, steroids and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). The first section investigates the practical means (tactics, procedures, and mechanisms) used by regulators to achieve their goals with regard to drug control, and probes how regulators perceive drug use as a social and/or public health problem, how this perception changes over time, and the cultural shifts and/or political movements that facilitate these changes. In so doing, it identifies the modes of thought and forms of knowledge or expertise that undergird the use of regulatory mechanisms.; This dissertation's second section analyzes the regulation of all five drugs comparatively by examining the role of the regulatory regime in the production of "good" and "bad" drugs, drug use and users. The current variability in drug regulatory polices is not based upon the pharmacological properties of each drug, nor is it the result of social or political conflicts over specific drug users or consumption sites. Rather, the variation in the way drugs are regulated is a consequence of each drug's regime designation. This is because the regime designation circumscribes the range of political choices available to regulators and compels certain outcomes. Regime designation decisions determine the social meaning and legal status of each drug and those who consume it.; This section contemplates how these regulatory regime designations are made, and the extent to which they are based upon scientific evidence or political, ethical and/or moral judgments about denying the sick versus those labeled healthy, idle or dangerous, and to entitlement based on race, gender or class. This section also examine how drug regulatory regimes produce particular forms of "truth"---that is to say, how regulatory regimes create certain presumed facts about specific drugs that shape or reconfigure popular understandings of the drugs and those who consume them. Thus, it examines the forms of user/consumer identity that drug regulatory regimes seek to forge by investigating the way each regime problematizes drug use and penalizes and/or reforms drug users. |
