7th ATODA Conference 2014

What’s the drug policy ‘problem’?

Understanding policy work

Three narratives – ways of describing what policy is:

1. Policy as - authoritative choice (decision-making by authorities)

–EG: Registration of pharmacotherapy maintenance medicines (buprenorphine)

2. Policy as - structured interaction (governance; networks)

–EG: Kings Cross, Thomas Kelly’s death, lockouts and closing times

3. Policy as - social construction (processes of problematisation)

–EG: UKDPC and ANCD consensus statements on ‘recovery’

Links to what we think ‘problems’ are:

Problem defined...

• Problem as self-evident, objectively exist ( lends itself to authoritative choice: need medications for opioid dependency)

Or

• Problems as ‘framed’ – language (lends itself to structured interactions which come to define & boundary the problem: contest over problem definition in Kings Cross example)

Or

• Problems do not self-evidently exist (lends itself to social construction: how does recovery construct the problem of drug use?)

This conference themed around: policy as social construction, and Bacchi’s work, where no problems objectively exist, but the policy solutions themselves come to form the problem.

Bacchi: what’s the problem represented to be?• Complex analysis, grounded in post-structuralism (Continental Philosophy and critical

theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze… and more)• Beyond me (and beyond one day…)• All three narratives are valid, but today’s opportunity is to think beyond authoritative

choice• Blending the interaction/governance and the social construction perspectives

• Simplified questions:

1. Given that the policy solution is: e-cigarettes, medicinal cannabis, drug driving testing and regulated NPS, what is the problem represented to be? What language frames the problem?

2. What is silenced in this representation? (other versions of the problem, other problems?)

3. What is the match between the problem and the solution?4. What is the impact of this solution (and thus the associated problem representation

and the language/framing) on consumers, families/carers, the AOD sector, politicians, & community at large?