Shifting solutions: tracking transformations of drugs, health and the ‘human’ through human rights processes in Australia

ABSTRACT

Global drug policy is in a period of change. Human rights can play an important role in such change, but more work is needed to understand the how rights work and why they might come to matter. Drawing on insights from a major study on drug policy and human rights, I argue that important new dynamics in respect of how drugs are thought to relate to health are emerging, including a conceptualisation of some drugs as capable of generating or improving health, rather than undermining it. Drugs are in some cases coming to be understood not as the origin of social problems but as the solution for them. I introduce the concept of ‘solutionisation' as a tool for understanding the mechanisms by which human rights shapes ontologies, positioning ‘solutionisation' as corollary and counterpart to Carol Bacchi's work on policy ‘problematisation' (Bacchi [2009]. Analysing Policy: What is the Problem Represented To Be? Pearson). I argue that both ‘problematisation' and ‘solutionisation’ have value for sociological analyses of human rights and that we need to pay careful attention to the co-constitutive dimensions of drugs and human rights, to understand how norms about health, self and subjects are made, sustained, and brought under pressure.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• alcohol and other drugs
• problematisation
• solutionisation
• proportionality
• Carol Bacchi

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the research assistance provided by Dr Sean Mulcahy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example: https://www.svhm.org.au/newsroom/news/australia-s-first-psychedelic-clinical-trial-commences-recruitment. Accessed: 12 February 2023; https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/world-first-psilocybin-clinical-trial-in-the-treatment-of-generalised-anxiety-disorder-receives-ethics-approval. Accessed: 19 February 2023.

2 It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine this claim in depth but a growing literature on human rights and drug policy explores these intersections (see, for example: Foster (2023); Bone (2020); Takahashi (2019); Lines (2017)).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number FT200100099].