Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 353358

Commentary

Erasing pleasure from public discourse on illicit drugs:

On the creation and reproduction of an absence
David Moore
National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth WA 6845, Australia
Received 2 April 2007; received in revised form 5 July 2007; accepted 17 July 2007

Abstract
In 1988, sociologist Stephen Mugford argued that the dominant framework in the drugs field was the pathology paradigm and that, as a
consequence, considerations of pleasure in relation to drug use were marginalised. As Mugford noted, an understanding of the subjective
motives for drug use, including pleasure, is an essential part of any coherent response. Twenty years on, it appears that little has changed. In
this paper, I consider some of the processes that may have contributed to the ongoing absence of discourses of pleasure in the drugs field. The
paper is divided into three sections. In the first, following Bourdieu, I focus on drug research as a social field, arguing that power relations
between research disciplines work against considerations of pleasure, and that researching pleasure does not generate useful forms of research
capital. Second, I argue that harm reduction policy and practice, in its construction of a neo-liberal drug-using subject, limits opportunities
for considering the role of pleasure in drug use. The final section explores the broader historical and contemporary context for drug research,
policy and practice by considering the discursive formations that contribute to the legitimacy granted to particular forms of pleasure in the
privileging of a civilised body over a grotesque body.
2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Drug use; Discourse; Pleasure; Research; Harm reduction; Bodies

Introduction
In 1988, sociologist Stephen Mugford argued that the
dominant framework in the drugs field was the pathology paradigm and that, as a consequence, considerations
of pleasure in relation to drug use were marginalised
(Mugford, 1988). As Mugford noted, an understanding of
the subjective motives for drug use, including pleasure, is
an essential part of any coherent response. Twenty years
on, it appears that little has changed. A scan of the 2001,
2004 and 2006 programs of the International Conference for
the Reduction of Drug-Related Harm reveals no instances of
pleasure in the titles of presentations. (The 2002, 2003 and
2005 programs were not available electronically. I attended
these conferences and noted two papers in 2005 that contained pleasure in their titles.) A Google advanced search
(conducted 9/11/2006) yielded the following results:

Tel.: +61 8 9266 1600; fax: +61 8 9266 1611.

E-mail address: D.Moore@curtin.edu.au.

0955-3959/$ see front matter 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2007.07.004

Search term

Google hits

Drugs and pleasure

Drug-related harm
Drug benefitsa
Drug problems

2,030
151,000
1,050,000
1,600,000

a A scan of the first several pages of hits suggests that the term drug benefits often
appears in relation to claims about the properties of pharmaceutical drugs.

A search of several commonly-cited drug journals (conducted 9/11/2006)

yielded the following results:
Journal (years searched)

pleasure in titles
or abstracts

harm in titles
or abstracts

Addiction (19972006)
Drug and Alcohol Dependence
(19752006)
Drug and Alcohol Review
(19902006)
International Journal of Drug Policy
(19982006)

512a
6

2,151
46

84

179

a A scan of the first 50 articles suggests that the term pleasure often appears
in studies of alcohol or tobacco use or in neurobiological research rather than in
discussions of the subjective motives for drug use.

354

D. Moore / International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 353358

In this paper, I consider some of the processes that may

have contributed to the ongoing absence of discourses of pleasure in the drugs field. First, following Bourdieu, I focus on
drug research as a social field that is, as a space of social
forces and struggles (Wacquant, 1989, p. 38) arguing that
power relations between research disciplines work against
considerations of pleasure, and that researching pleasure does
not generate useful forms of research capital. Second, I argue
that harm reduction policy and practice, in its construction
of a neo-liberal drug-using subject, limits opportunities for
considering the role of pleasure in drug use. The final section
explores the broader historical and contemporary context for
drug research, policy and practice by considering the discursive formations that contribute to the legitimacy granted to
particular forms of pleasure in the privileging of a civilised
body over a grotesque body.
Before proceeding, it is also worth acknowledging that
defining pleasure is not straightforward. As I show below,
the disciplines involved in researching drug use define
pleasure in different ways, when they are not ignoring
or reframing it as something else. The Oxford English
Dictionary (http://dictionary.oed.com; retrieved 27/11/2006)
defines pleasure as the condition or sensation induced by
the experience or anticipation of what is felt to be good or
desirable. Desirable sensations are central in the following
evocative description of drug-related pleasure from Stewarts
The Heroin Users (1996, p. 36):
I murmured a wordless response as the smack came on.
The rush is so hard to describe. Its like waiting for a
distant thunderstorm to move overhead. A strange foreboding. A bizarre, awesome calm. Its in your blood, moving
towards your brain, relentlessly; unstoppable, inevitable.
A feeling starts to grow like a rumble from the horizon.
The feeling swells, surging, soaring, crashing, screaming
to a devastating crescendo. The gear smashes against the
top of your skull with the power of an uncapped oil well.
You wont be able to bear the intense ecstasy. It is all
too much. Your body may fall apart. The rock that is in
your head shatters harmlessly into a million sparkling, tinkling smithereens. They tumble at a thousand miles an hour
straight back down over your body, warming, insulating,
tingling, denying all pain, fear and sadness. You are stoned,
you are high. You are above and below reality and the
law.
Are you OK? he asked again.
My chin was on my chest, my eyes closed, I suppose.
Im just great, I murmured. Im fine. Its fantastic. Its
wonderful. I want to do this forever . . ..
For the purposes of this paper, I define drug-related
pleasure as desirable bodily experience arising from the interaction of pharmacology, subjectivity, culture and history,
while, at the same time, acknowledging the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of constructing an analytical,
discursive account of such corporeal experience.

Drug research as a social eld

First, as Stewarts work demonstrates, discussions of pleasure are not completely absent from research accounts of drug
use with drug users themselves articulating such discourses.
Qualitative researchers (e.g., Fitzgerald, Louie, Rosenthal, &
Crofts, 1999; MacLean, 2005), reporting the views of their
research participants, have also written about the pleasures
of drug use. But these are subjugated knowledges particularly the discourses of drug users that struggle for equal
legitimacy with the dominant discourses of medicine, psychology and epidemiology. This domination is underpinned
by and preserved through greater funding, numerical superiority in terms of researchers and projects, and the use of
methodological and analytical approaches that are accorded
greater scientific credibility. More broadly, this domination
has evolved as part of the development of neo-liberal forms
of governmentality involving the expert surveillance, classification and regulation of populations.
A useful way of thinking about subjugated/dominant
knowledges is to see drug research as a social field. For
Bourdieu, a social field is:
. . . a network . . . of objective relations between positions
objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or
institutions, by their present and potential situation . . . in
the structure of the distribution of species of power (or
capital) whose possession commands access to the specific
profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination,
homology, etc.). (Wacquant, 1989, p. 39)
Furthermore:
As a space of potential and active forces, the field is also
a eld of struggles aimed at preserving or transforming
the configuration of these forces. Concretely, the field as a
structure of objective relations of force between positions
undergirds and guides the strategies whereby the occupants of these positions seek, individually or collectively
to safeguard or improve their position, and to impose the
principle of hierarchization most favourable to their own
products. (Wacquant, 1989, p. 40)
Applying this frame, the drugs field is constituted through
a network of positions occupied by individuals (e.g., policy makers, practitioners, researchers, community members)
and institutions (e.g., federal, state and local government,
drug services, research centres). These positions are related
through relations of domination, subordination or equivalence, and through struggles over a distribution of power that
enables and reproduces access to scarce resources.
What do the dominant research disciplines have to say
about pleasure and drugs? Epidemiological work reflecting
its public health origins, the duty of modern citizens to be

D. Moore / International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 353358

health-promoting and risk-averse, and the role of institutions

and governments in encouraging self-care tends to focus
on quantity and frequency of drug use and related harms or
on risk factors. More recently, the more neutral term outcomes of drug use has been used, thus encompassing both the
risks/harms and the benefits of drug use, which could conceivably include its pleasures. But the term benefits imports
a utilitarian focus, which removes pleasure from the realm of
bodily experience. This may be the result of what Campbell
(1987, p. 60) has termed the original careless formulation
of utilitarianism:
. . . utility is described as that property which produces
benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. Since
these are very different concepts (or, at least, the third is not
equatable with the first two), the subsequent development
of utilitarianism required that some selection should be
made from this list, and . . . the good became identified
with the necessary, that which served to meet human
needs, with the consequence that the concept of pleasure
was largely ignored.
Furthermore, the term benefits is usually coupled with
risks as if to ensure that benefits, including pleasures, cannot
be thought of outside their relationship to risks.
Psychological work also rarely focuses on pleasure and
drugs. According to the Introduction to a special issue on
the psychology of pleasure, pleasure is the most neglected
topic . . ., at least in relation to claims about its importance
(Russell, 2003). Psychology transforms pleasure into positive emotion, impulse driven behaviour and hedonic tone.
In these discourses, pleasure is seen as frivolous in comparison with more pressing health issues, or unscientific,
because it cannot be quantified (Coveney & Bunton, 2003, p.
161). In neuropsychology, psychiatry and medicine, the interactions of pharmacology with historical, cultural, social and
spatial processes are eschewed in favour of a reductive scientific focus on sensation-seeking syndrome (Zuckerman,
1979), dopamine release (Keane, 1999) and neuronal activity (Martin-Soelch, Leenders, Chevalley, Missimer, & Kunig,
2001). Such dominant knowledges reinforce unassailable
truths about drugs beyond or separate from ideology or
power (Driscoll, 2000, p. 8).
A recognition of power relations forces a consideration
of the resources at stake in the drug research field such as
funding and impact on policy and practice and who has
access to them. The capital possessed by psychology, epidemiology and medicine allows them better access to these
profits of the field. Struggles over funding arise in a wider
institutional research landscape in Australia in which universities must position themselves as research-intensive.
There is increasing pressure to generate external funding from
nationally competitive research bodies, government research
tenders and consultancies. Health agencies such as Australias National Health and Medical Research Council have
limited funds, often supporting priority areas, so are unlikely

355

to fund studies of pleasure. Drug research must compete for

these scarce resources with heart disease and cancer, so there
is a vested interest in focusing on, and possibly amplifying,
drug-related harms. Government tenders may also entail a
degree of funder control over the analysis and dissemination
of findings (Miller, Moore, & Strang, 2006). Health funds
and government departments are also more comfortable with
quantitative methods and analysis, or with rapid assessment
approaches, and their timelines are more suited to these types
of research. Aware of these limitations, researchers selfregulate and strategise through second-guessing what they
think is likely to be funded.
Another important area for drug researchers is their impact
on policy and practice. In order to have maximum impact,
research needs to focus on assessing or reducing harm. The
rise of evidence-based policy and practice also creates
problems, as accounts of pleasure produced by interpretive, theoretically driven research, or by drug users, may be
accorded less weight. In this climate, it is hard to sell the
importance of studying pleasure despite implicit acceptance
of its existence. And there is also a professional risk in writing
about pleasure, of being identified as pro-drug or accused
of not taking seriously drug-related problems. Interestingly,
Stewart follows the passage cited earlier by stating that she
does not seek to advertise a deadly pursuit but to record an
experience that is attractive.
These processes contribute to the erasing or marginalising
of pleasure in research accounts. Writing about pleasure does
not earn a researcher much in the way of research capital, so it
is professionally safer to accept the focus on risks and harms.

The subject of harm reduction

The second set of processes that may have contributed to
the ongoing absence of pleasure centres on harm reduction.
Drawing on ideas developed more fully elsewhere (Moore &
Fraser, 2006), I argue that harm reduction policy and practice,
in its construction of a neo-liberal drug-using subject, limits
opportunities for considering the role of pleasure in drug use.
OMalley and Valverde (2004) have noted that harm reduction is silent on pleasure there are instead references to
drug use for personal and social needs (as they note, the
term needs is redolent of necessity and thus compulsion).
This, they argue, is very puzzling because harm reduction
operates with a rational actor, who freely selects behavioural
options on the basis that they deliver more pleasure than pain.
OMalley and Valverde suggest that one possible explanation
is that rational choice models engineer choice in favour of
desired outcomes in this case, the non-use of drugs.
An analysis of the politics of harm reduction offers
another possible explanation. Harm reduction policy and
practice constructs a particular form of drug-using subject a
health-conscious citizen capable of rational decision-making,
self-determination, self-regulation and risk management in
order to minimise drug-related harm. This neo-liberal vision

356

D. Moore / International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 353358

of the drug-using subject is a positive development in the

sense that it attempts to dislodge previous understandings
of drug users as irrational, and it accords them the status
and attributes granted to other citizens of neo-liberal democracies. Neo-liberal subjectivity may also be experienced as
empowering by drug users, thus enabling them to deal with
drug-related problems and services more effectively.
But there is also a downside. Adopting a neo-liberal subject obscures the material constraints on practice that arise
from inequitable social and political structures. It may also
prevent drug users from developing a more politicised view
of their life situation. Most importantly for this paper, adopting a neo-liberal subject displaces from view attributes that
do not sit comfortably with this version of the subject
pleasure, desire, emotion. Applying Luptons (1995) poststructuralist critique of health promotion, we could argue that
people may resist, negotiate or ignore harm reduction imperatives because of a conscious sense of frustration, resentment
or anger, . . . [or] because they derive greater pleasure . . .
from other practices of the self (1995, p. 133). Furthermore
(Lupton, 1995, p. 156):
Resistance to and negotiation of [harm reduction] imperatives . . . may also originate at the emotional level or
the unconscious, places where desire, fear and pleasure
are repressed, emerge and are constantly in tension with
external government imperatives, or at the level of the
non-conscious, where bodily practices are adopted and
reproduced as part of the habits of everyday life.
Recent research on Vancouvers safer injection facility
(SIF) provides some relevant data (Kerr, Small, Moore, &
Wood, 2007). While supportive of the facility, some SIF users
stated that they did not always use it if their aim was to experience heavy intoxication, as SIF staff would typically rouse
those who appeared to be copping a nod in order to avoid
overdose:
Same thing when youre on the nod, and youre sitting
there enjoying your high, and all of a sudden youve got
some nurse, Hey! You okay? You all right? Shaking you
and shit like that. Like, a lot of people take offence to that,
right? [Yeah]. Yeah, fuck, Im all right . . . cant I even
enjoy my fucking high?
Hence, drug users did not use the SIF in precisely those circumstances that placed them at high risk of overdose, because
of the desire to experience acute pleasure.
However, to insist on the incorporation of such attributes
as desire, pleasure and emotion in any form of subject for drug
users is also extremely risky. It may reinforce the stigmatisation of drug users as irrational and animated by compulsive
desires and pleasures, and further entrench discrimination in
employment, health and welfare contexts. There is no clear
answer to which of these options embracing the neo-liberal
subject or rejecting it in favour of alternative formulations

best advances the interests of drug users, but the adoption of a

neo-liberal subject in harm reduction policy and practice may
have erased as a legitimate activity consideration of pleasure
and its pursuit.

Bodies, pleasure and drugs

The third set of processes that may have contributed to
the erasing of pleasure concerns historical and contemporary Western discourses on bodies, pleasure and drugs. As
Douglas (1986) has noted, scientific work is not isolated from
the wider cultural and social contexts in which it is situated. My starting point is the historical process, beginning
in the Enlightenment, whereby bodies, subjects, spaces and
social relations were increasingly constructed through contested hierarchies of high and low (Stallybrass & White,
1986; see also Elias, 2000). High discourses were associated
with the church, the state, the university; low discourses with
the urban poor, the marginalised, the colonised (Stallybrass
& White, 1986, p. 4). A central theme in this struggle was the
privileging of high representations of the bourgeois, liberal
body of progressive rationalism an ordered, classical, transcendentally individualist body which prioritised the upper
regions the head, the spirit, reason and which was
directed by rationality. By contrast, in the high discourse, the
low body was deemed to be grotesque, sensual, carnivalesque it was erotic, licentious, physical. Grotesque bodies
were associated with carnal pleasures which emerged from
the sensuous body a vulgar, volatile body that refuse[d] to
be disciplined, was highly disordered, dangerous and polluting (Coveney & Bunton, 2003, p. 169) and unpredictable,
perverse and risky (Coveney & Bunton, 2003, p. 171). By
contrast, the liberal body was associated with disciplined
pleasure, pleasure that has been rationalized (Coveney &
Bunton, 2003, p. 170), emerging from the verbal and cognitive realm, to be reflected on as aesthetic, civilized pleasure.
It was [r]easoned, reasonable and safe (Coveney & Bunton,
2003, p. 171).
Where do illicit drugs fit in this struggle between the
grotesque and the (neo-)liberal body? Illicit drugs threaten
the liberal body and its disciplined pleasures. They are
incompatible with rationality and discipline contaminating,
corrupting, seducing and destroying the will (Keane, 2002;
Manderson, 2005, p. 38). They are a powerful and destructive force (Keane, 1999, p. 64) and present a promise of
pleasure so potent, so alluring, that it tricks the subject in
the first place, then traps them and finally entombs them
(Manderson, 2005, p. 44). Drug possession leads to loss
of identity and agency; the drug user, most specifically the
addict, is a threat to the modern liberal ideology of autonomy and freedom (Keane, 2002, pp. 34; Manderson, 2005,
p. 49). Addiction is seen as depriving a person of free will
and the capacity for autonomous choice both key attributes
of liberal actors (Keane, 2002). In particular, addiction is
equated with disorder, fragmentation and self-destruction. It

D. Moore / International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 353358

undermines the reason and rationality necessary to practice

disciplined pleasure. Drugs represent illusory pleasures that
lead to compromised will in the form of craving (Keane,
1999). In this view, drugs lead away from valorised forms
of disciplined pleasure to produce grotesque bodies. Interestingly, whereas illicit drugs are positioned as corrupters of
liberal bodies, medically prescribed drugs such as antidepressants are positioned as restorers of liberal bodies.
My first example of the discourse on grotesque, drugged
bodies concerns the methamphetamine skater, as depicted
in an Australian current affairs program entitled The Ice
Age (broadcast by the ABC, 20/3/2006). Below I reproduce
an extract describing the program on the ABC website:
Its cheap, highly addictive and ultra-powerful. Ice, or crystal
methamphetamine, is now more popular than heroin, playing havoc with
the minds and bodies of nearly 50,000 Australians.
Ice is filling emergency wards with psychotic, dangerous patients, to the
alarm of doctors who thought theyd seen everything.
Theyre the most out of control, violent human beings I have ever seen
in my life and Ive been around for a long time, says one. It makes
heroin seem like the really good old days.
Four Corners goes to the heart of this destructive new epidemic. Reporter
Matthew Carney takes his camera into
a netherworld inhabited by hardcore ice addicts or skaters as they call
themselves who live for their next hit.
This tribe of junkies roams the inner city, scoring and shooting up. They
stay manically high for up to a week, without food or sleep. Finally, they
crash and eat, before the welfare cheque arrives and the cycle starts all
over again.
Were the fringe-dwellers, says Mick, whose veins are so wrecked he
can barely find a place to inject. His mate Mattie cant imagine a life
without ice: It just seems to find me, its like everywhere I go, its there
. . . who knows whats gonna happen in 10 years time mate?
Lenore boasts 23 personalities, each with its own name.
She obsessively sorts through rubbish for days on end when shes on ice.
Its her way of making order out of her chaos. Asked what would stop
her from using ice, she replies: Death.
Another friend, John, is covered in scabs. He
picks constantly at his skin to rid himself of ice bugs that he imagines
to be living inside him, the result of a bad batch of ice. His delusion is
common among ice addicts.
(http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1593168.htm; 2007
ABC; retrieved 8/11/2006, emphasis added)

In the televised program, Ice is also linked with other

instances of the grotesque body such as the hypersexual
emergency patient who masturbates for 16 hours and a drug
user who discusses injecting Ice into his penis. The website
extract and program inscribes several of the themes identified above: illicit drugs as threats to autonomy and freedom;
as dangerous, powerful forces; as producing disorder and
fragmentation; and as polluting.
My second example of discourses of grotesque, drugged
bodies concerns the hypersexual crack whore. Maher
(1997) argues that one of the ways in which women drug users
are denied agency is through the discourse of crack-pipe-aspimp, which positions female crack users as overdetermined
victims of pharmacology (Maher, 1997, p. 8). The media
and much social science literature, according to Maher, represent women crack users as prone to violence, immorality,

357

and sexual depravity. Although she notes that drugs have

often been a vehicle for articulating profound social anxieties, including the despoiled or hypersexual woman,
and that womens bodies have often been seen as dangerous, diseased, and polluted, their sexualized status within
contemporary drug discourse warrants special consideration
(Maher, 1997, pp. 194195). She focuses on the hypersexual hypothesis, in which crack use is graphically equated
with chemically induced sexual slavery. Women crack users,
in this discourse, respond indiscriminately to opportunities
for income generation. They are inscribed in a discourse
of risk and contagion and readily positioned as vectors of
AIDS, drug use, and moral contamination (Maher, 1997,
p. 195), [c]orrupted and polluted by their passions for the
glass dick (Maher, 1997, p. 194).
However, as Valverde (2002) has noted, whereas in the
above discourse, excessive use of dangerous drugs leads
away from truth and rationality, there is another longstanding, albeit less prominent, discourse on bodies, pleasure and
drugs. Romanticism, the artistic and intellectual movement
originating in the late eighteenth century, accorded drugs a
less sinister, even a valuable position. In this discourse, the
risks of drugs could be managed by self-governing users
who pursue occasional civilised pleasures. Drugs could
take one closer to truth, could reveal, through hedonistic
self-exploration, the real, authentic self, buried beneath capitalism and social convention. This ethic, over time, became
linked to commodity consumption and pleasures. The consumption of pleasurable commodities became an avenue
to new experiences and new identities (Campbell, 1987;
OMalley & Mugford, 1991).
The most recent expression of this view is offered by
Measham (2004). She argues that the normalised drug use
of English youth is not pathological but part of a broader
shift to commodified pleasure in the leisure sphere a calculated hedonism or controlled loss of control. This form of
drug use occurs within temporal, spatial, social and consumptive limits, and expresses a rational cost-benefit analysis in
recreational drug use (Measham, 2004, p. 319). It allows a
time-out release from work and other responsibilities without necessarily interfering with them. Such drug use can be
considered as both problem and solution in contemporary
society, as both a reaction to and expression of capitalist consumer society. Where there is ontological insecurity
and a culture of control, reflexive risk-calculation allows a
sense of autonomy and a form of escape (Measham, 2004,
pp. 321322).
This may be a period, then, where the dominant discourse
drugs as corrupters of rationality, drugs as producers of
grotesque bodies is being challenged by another discourse
in which drug use and disciplined pleasure are not seen as
incompatible. The discourse of normalisation poses a category threat the pursuit of disciplined and commodified
pleasure via substances that are associated with irrationality,
disorder and fragmentation. Although, like Holt (2005), we
might question its valorisation of sensible and strategic use

358

D. Moore / International Journal of Drug Policy 19 (2008) 353358

and, following Lupton, query its promotion of neo-liberal

norms and the regulation of unruly bodies, which might
further stigmatise those unable or unwilling to adopt such disciplined practices, the normalisation discourse does highlight
the cultural links between drugs, pleasure and capitalist consumer society. It exposes a fundamental and ongoing refusal
by the drugs field to accept the close interweaving of drug
use and contemporary forms of culture an ongoing inability to genuinely step outside the pathology paradigm. Making
drugs and pleasure more visible might be a first step towards
creating a discursive space in which, as Driscoll (2000, p. ix)
has argued in the US context, we can construct other discourses about drugs [and, we might add, about drug users]
that will not produce the damaging consequences that we are
currently experiencing.

Acknowledgements
The National Drug Research Institute receives core funding from the Australian Government Department of Health
and Ageing. I thank Suzanne Fraser, two anonymous referees and co-editors Martin Holt and Carla Treloar for helpful
comments on earlier drafts.

References
Campbell, C. (1987). The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Coveney, J., & Bunton, R. (2003). In pursuit of the study of pleasure: Implications for health research and practice. Health, 7(2), 161179.
Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Driscoll, L. (2000). Reconsidering drugs: Mapping Victorian and modern
drug discourses. New York: Palgrave.
Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process (Revised ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Fitzgerald, J. L., Louie, R., Rosenthal, D., & Crofts, N. (1999). The meaning of the rush for initiates to injecting drug use. Contemporary Drug
Problems, 26(3), 481504.
Holt, M. (2005). Young people and illicit drug use in Australia. Social
Research Issues Paper 3 (National Centre in HIV Social Research).
Retrieved 21st December 2006 from http://nchsr.arts.unsw.edu.
au/pdf%20reports/SRIP03.pdf.

Keane, H. (1999). Adventures of the addicted brain. Australian Feminist

Studies, 14(29), 6376.
Keane, H. (2002). Whats wrong with addiction? Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press.
Kerr, T., Small, W., Moore, D., & Wood, E. (2007). A micro-environmental
intervention to reduce the harms associated with drug-related overdose:
Evidence from the evaluation of Vancouvers safer injection facility.
International Journal of Drug Policy, 18(1), 3745.
Lupton, D. (1995). The imperative of health: Public health and the regulated
body. London: Sage.
MacLean, S. (2005). It might be a scummy-arsed drug but its a sick buzz:
Chroming and pleasure. Contemporary Drug Problems, 32(2), 295318.
Maher, L. (1997). Sexed work: Gender, race and resistance in a Brooklyn
drug market. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Manderson, D. (2005). Possessed: Drug policy, witchcraft and belief. Cultural Studies, 19(1), 3663.
Martin-Soelch, C., Leenders, K. L., Chevalley, A.-F., Missimer, J., & Kunig,
G. (2001). Reward mechanisms in the brain and their role in dependence: Evidence from neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies.
Brain Research Reviews, 36, 139149.
Measham, F. (2004). The decline of ecstasy, the rise of binge drinking and
the persistence of pleasure. Probation Journal, 51(4), 309326.
Miller, P., Moore, D., & Strang, J. (2006). The regulation of research by
funding bodies: An emerging ethical issue for the alcohol and other drug
sector? International Journal of Drug Policy, 17(1), 1216.
Moore, D., & Fraser, S. (2006). Putting at risk what we know: Reflecting on
the drug-using subject in harm reduction and its political implications.
Social Science and Medicine, 62(12), 30353047.
Mugford, S. (1988). Pathology, pleasure, prot and the state: Towards
an integrated theory of drug use. Paper presented at the Australian
and New Zealand Society of Criminology Annual Conference, Sydney,
August 22.
OMalley, P., & Mugford, S. (1991). The demand for intoxicating commodities: Implications for the War on Drugs. Social Justice, 18(4),
4975.
OMalley, P., & Valverde, M. (2004). Pleasure, freedom and drugs: The uses
of pleasure in liberal governance of drug and alcohol consumption.
Sociology, 38(1), 2542.
Russell, J. A. (2003). The return of pleasure. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2),
161165.
Stallybrass, P., & White, A. (1986). The politics and poetics of transgression.
London: Methuen.
Stewart, T. (1996). The heroin users. London: Pandora.
Valverde, M. (2002). Experience and truthtelling: Intoxicated autobiography
and ethical subjectivity. Outlines, 1, 318.
Wacquant, L. D. (1989). Towards a reflexive sociology: A workshop with
Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 2663.
Zuckerman, M. (1979). Sensation seeking: Beyond the optimal level of
arousal. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.