Theories of Drug Use & Addiction

1. Theories of Drug Use & Addiction Adapted from Faupel, Sociology of American Drug Use

2. The Dislocation Theory: Understanding the Spread of Addiction 1. Globalization of Capitalist Free Market System 2. Decline of Psycho-Social Integration 3. Poverty of the Spirit • Proliferation of Addiction3

3. Social Location • Social categories shape our identities, our experiences and perceptions, and our life chances. • Gender • Sexuality • Race • Class • Age • Intersectionality • Race, class, and gender intersect to shape experience in unique ways • Capital– material or non-material resources that confer social power to the carrier (there are four types). Follows a definite distribution.

4. The Forms of Capital • Economic Capital – access to income, wealth or property • Cultural Capital – prestige associated with specialized knowledge. Symbolic, not tangible. • Social Capital – our social connections to others and the benefits those connections confer • Symbolic Capital – capability of actors to use certain practices symbolically to defend or maintain their positions in social space • Capital is partially transferable– “Cashing in” social capital for a job that increases your economic capital

5. Social Class and Drug Addiction • Considerable drug use and crime in “conventional communities” • “Invisible” addictions of the more advantaged • Less likely to seek treatment and “recover naturally” • Social support– drug use can be sustained longer before needing help. • When help is needed, easier to pull selves out. • “Private addictions” are less targeted and less “suspect.” • Harder to measure– most data comes from official crime and treatment reports– self data notoriously unreliable • Conventional life: Buffer or trap? • Do “pro-social” bonds prevent us from using drugs? Or is too much attachment a bad thing?

6. Granfield and Cloud: Discuss • How did participants’ social capital translate into an ability to recover from addiction without treatment? What were the different types of social capital working for them, and how did they work? • How might G&C’s argument revise the disease model of addiction?

7. “Natural Recovery” among Individuals with High Social Capital • Granfield & Cloud: Evidence that a number of people overcome addictions without treatment • Interviews with 46 drug users who were able to recover “naturally” • Link between social capital and likelihood of natural recovery • Relationships • Economic and non-economic resources • Capacity for “self-actualization,” “self-efficacy,” and “self-esteem” • How “social” is addiction?

8. Granfield and Cloud “Those who possess larger amounts of social capital, perhaps even independent of the intensity of use, will be likely candidates for less intrusive forms of treatment such as those associated with brief intervention and natural recovery.”

9. “Two Women Who Used Cocaine Too Much” • How did each woman's race, class, and gender shape her access to and experience with cocaine? What kinds of social/economic capital did they possess? • How do race and/or class and/or gender intersect to shape experience with drugs? • Class X Gender • What theories from class can explain their entry into use? • The differences in their addictions? • Their pathways out of addiction? • How did each woman’s class position enable her to control her drug use (or not?)

10. Murphy and Rosenbaum: “Two Women Who Used Cocaine Too Much” • Part of a classic study of female cocaine users, 1990 • Single comparative case studies • The intersection of race, class, and gender shape our experiences with drugs.

11. The rise of “binge drinking” or “drinking like a guy” • Drinking as a “rite of passage” in college • “Binge drinking” among undergraduate women on the rise • Data suggests more women are drinking more, as the gender gap is shrinking • Widest gender differences in drinking occur in societies with most traditional gender roles

12. Recap: Social Location and Addiction • Race, class, and gender shape drug experiences as much as the drugs themselves. • Poverty, racism, and sexism cannot be separated from drug use. • Individual consequences or outcomes from drug use are determined in part by the drug user’s social location.

13. Righteous Dopefiend Drugs & Society – SPRING 2014

14. Righteous Dopefiend – Intro Work in groups to find definitions for the following from the introductory chapter: Photo-ethnography and ethical dilemmas “Moral economy” among Edgewater homeless Cultural relativism “Theory of lumpen abuse” Symbolic violence & Structural violence Habitus

15. “How can they live like that?” CULTURAL RELATIVISM POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

17. ~Habitus~ Links a person’s position in social space with their practices Dispositions, shaped by early experience, that “generate & organize” practices throughout life, which become like enduring “habits” within the person Habitus is deeply embedded within the person Embodied – physically enacted! Flexible and durable– guides patterned action, but also improvisation The way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions (tendencies toward action, thought, feeling) Examples: Career expectations, who to marry, how to raise kids, whether or not to talk about politics at dinner…

18. ~Habitus: Interplay betweenstructure and practice Social positions in a field Habitus– deeply rooted, but flexible guidelines that “orient” the person toward a particular way of seeing and being in the world. Repeated experiences in the positions you occupy shape your dispositions throughout life… HABITUS Practices: actions, behaviors, choices, etc. that signal your social position The habitus mediates between positions and practices.