Addiction veridiction: gendering agency in legal mobilisations of addiction discourse

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the question of whether and in what ways the law and legal processes work to stabilise addiction as a health problem or ‘disease’. In undertaking this analysis, we also explore the associated gender implications of these practices and the means through which legal processes that stabilise addiction simultaneously stabilise gender. Using the work of science and technologies scholar Bruno Latour, in particular his anthropological analysis of scientific and legal ‘modes of existence’, we explore legal processes of what he calls ‘veridiction’ – or the specific processes by which law distinguishes truth from falsity – associated with addiction. We focus on processes that are largely hidden from public view and as such receive little scrutiny, but through which the meaning of addiction as a disease is secured. Our aim is to consider the role of legal negotiations in establishing agreed facts, and to explore lawyers’ understanding of these processes. We argue that although in public discourse judges are ascribed the status of the law’s key decision-making figures, lawyers’ accounts do not necessarily support this view. Instead, their accounts of the judicial process foreground their own and other lawyers’ role in decisions about addiction, despite an absence of training or education in the area. We also note that lawyers’ accounts suggest little independent oversight – even from judges – of the work lawyers do in stabilising addiction ‘facts’. Based on these observations, we consider the ways such processes of stabilisation impact on women in the legal system whose lives are in some way affected by discourses of addiction as a disease. We argue that legal practices of veridiction are centrally implicated in the making of both gender and health and that elements of these processes, which are not often publicly visible or subjected to scrutiny, require more analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Addiction
• veridiction
• law
• drugs
• gender
• Bruno Latour

Acknowledgements

We thank all those who participated in interviews for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹Room (2003), Levine (1978).

²Sedgwick (1993).

³Fraser et al (2014).

⁴Fraser (2015).

⁵Carter et al (2014).

⁶Karasaki et al (2013).

⁷Carter et al (2014).

⁸Carter et al (2014, p 206).

⁹Leshner (1997).

¹⁰Fox (1999).

¹¹Hall et al (2015).

¹²Reinarman (2011), Courtwright (2010), Brook and Stringer (2005).

¹³Lucke and Hall (2014).

¹⁴Seear and Fraser (2010).

¹⁵Moore et al (2015).

¹⁶Seear and Fraser (2014a).

¹⁷Fitzgerald (2008), Murphy (2011, 2012), Tiger (2011), Vrecko (2009).

¹⁸Seear (2015), Seear and Fraser (2014b).

¹⁹In this sense, our paper is part of an emerging body of scholarship that draws upon elements of Latour’s work and applies it to different legal and regulatory settings or questions. Kyle McGee’s (2014) recent work represents a notable example, as does the work of Sanderson (2013), among others.

²⁰We acknowledge that Latour is not the first theorist to critically examine the way that particular legal processes and practices make truths, and the implications thereof. In Feminism and the power of law, for example, Carol Smart (1989, p 4) explored ‘law’s ability to impose its definition of events on everyday life’ and – speaking specifically about gender and truth making – argued that ‘law manages to retain the ability to arrogate to itself the right to define the truth of things in spite of the growing challenge of other discourses like feminism’. Latour’s work differs from Smart’s in important ways, however. Whereas Smart arguably frames events and everyday life as objective realities that to some extent exist prior to legal discourse, practices and processes, Latour would argue that what counts as events and everyday life is constituted through the law.

²¹Latour (2013).

²²Latour (2013, p 54).

²³Latour (2009).

²⁴Latour (2013, p 366).

²⁵Latour (2013, p 54).

²⁶Latour (2013, p 359).

²⁷Latour (2013, pp 358–359).

²⁸Latour (2013, pp 359–360).

²⁹Latour (2009, p 205).

³⁰According to Latour,

we should distinguish ‘objectivity’ as the basis of a mood of indifference and serenity as to the solution, from what might be termed ‘objectity’: the ordeal by means of which a scientist binds her own fate and that of her speech to the trials undergone by the phenomenon in the course of an experiment. Whereas objectivity, paradoxically, pertains to the subject and his interior state, objectity pertains to the object and its peculiarly judicial role. (2013, p 236)

 

³¹Latour (2009, p 240).

³²King et al (2014, p 218).

³³King et al (2014, p 218).

³⁴For more on case management, see Australian Centre for Justice Innovation (2013).

³⁵Latour (2009, p 206).

³⁶Ritter and Cameron (2006).

³⁷Tiffen and Gittins (2004).

³⁸Ritter et al (2011).

³⁹de Vel-Palumbo et al (2013).

⁴⁰Although there are some state- and territory-based Charters in Australia, such as Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006, these generally do not offer the same level of protections as the Canadian Charter.

⁴¹ Canada (Attorney General) v PHS Community Services Society [2011] 3 SCR 134.

⁴²Fraser (2016).

⁴³Miles and Huberman (1994).

⁴⁴ Canada (Attorney General) v PHS Community Services Society [2011] 3 SCR 134.

⁴⁵See http://supervisedinjection.vch.ca/ (accessed 12 February 2016).

⁴⁶ Canada (Attorney General) v PHS Community Services Society [2011] 3 SCR 134.

⁴⁷ PHS Community Services Society v. Attorney General of Canada 2008 BCSC 661 at para 47, http://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcsc/doc/2008/2008bcsc661/2008bcsc661.html (accessed 22 August 2015).

⁴⁸ PHS Community Services Society v. Attorney General of Canada 2008 BCSC 661 at paras 48–59.

⁴⁹For more detail on how these processes unfold, see, for example, https://www.legalaid.vic.gov.au/find-legal-answers/family-violence-intervention-orders/going-to-court/what-can-happen-hearing (accessed 9 September 2015). For more on rates of resolution and contest, see, for example, Victorian Department of Justice (2009), Wearing (1996).

⁵⁰Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (2011).

⁵¹See Seear and Fraser (2014b).

Additional information

Funding

This pilot study was supported by funding from the National Drug Research Institute, which receives core funding from the Australian Government’s Department of Health. Kate Seear is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellowship [DE160100134]. Suzanne Fraser is also supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [FT120100215].