Canada's official recreational drug users: Fifty years of making publics


Patricia Cormack, St. Francis Xavier University; James Cosgrave, Trent University

Jurisdictions around the world are moving to decriminalize or legalize recreational cannabis consumption, with other illicit drugs like psilocybin and LSD also on the radar. Regardless of the legal and regulatory models adopted, the figure of the recreational drug user will emerge as socio-legal subject variously defined by the state and its agents of public administration. In this paper, we employ a genealogical method that considers the state and official discursive formulations of drug use and users (Foucault 1977; Durkheim 1995; Cosgrave and Cormack 2023). A genealogical approach uncovers the social, historical, and political forces that coalesce to enable the conditions of possibility, and discursive transformations constitutive of, legalized drug and their users. Through what we will characterize as a “rationalization of morality” notions like vice and the prohibitionist state begin to be replaced by scientific and health discourses, but a moral discourse nevertheless persists, constructed around good and bad drug practices, habits, and attitudes. Being “informed” about the consequences of drug use becomes an obligation of the citizen who puts faith in scientific and expert pronouncements. Canada first criminalized recreational drugs in 1908 with the Opium Act, aimed primarily at Asian workers in western Canada (Boyd, 1984; Carstairs, 1998; Comack, 1991). Federal ministries of health and law enforcement worked together to define and criminalize drug production and consumption from these early days, legitimizing and entrenching their legal-bureaucratic power by entwining public health and public protection in their discursive rhetorics (Giffen, et al, 1991; Hewitt, 2016). Periodic moral panics, supported by media, shored up fear of drug vendors and users through the 20th century, often cut through with racist overtones (Carstairs, 1999). Social transformations of the 1960s—high immigration, cultural and commercial nationalism, conflicts related to Quebecois nationalism, youth movements and student protests (Boudreau, 2012), contributed to the decline of Protestant value hegemony and a shift of English-Canadian society out of the Victorian era (Morton 2003). We take 1969 as a Canadian discursive turning point, because it marks a conscious “modernization”, indicated by omnibus Bill C-150, which liberalized contraception and abortion, “homosexuality”, divorce, and gambling. Also in 1969, Canada’s first royal commission to investigate recreational drug use, the Le Dain Commission, was struck. Beginning with the Le Dain Commission, we find that a general discursive figure of the utilitarian pleasure-seeker, the risk-assessing consumer, the media dupe, along with figures like endangered “youth”, emerge in state discourse, domesticating the citizen toward state mediation of drug use. We argue that the cannabis consumer under the 2018 legalization regime is historically prefigured in the Le Dain Commission Report and becomes discursively set over the 50 years of such official accounts. Examining official government representations of drugs and drug users covering a fifty-year period, we ask how these representations, along with broader cultural trends, shape the state-citizen relationship. Documents examined include: The Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs (Le Dain Commission Report), 1973; Report of the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs (Nolin Commission Report), 2002; the Cannabis Task Force Report, 2016; and the Cannabis Act, 2018. These documents are grounded in differing mandates and authority: two are royal commissions, one is a task force, and one is federal legislation. The first discursive layer of these documents involves their own authority to speak about the drug user. As will be discussed, the committee members root their own authority in that of science and scientific information, although some of them hold political authority without being scientists themselves. A second discursive layer involves their assertions about human nature in general as grounds for their construction of the drug user. Again, in some cases the authority of named philosophers is invoked, in other cases more general demographic assertions are made about types of people – e.g., “youth”. Finally, we examine their assertions about the nature of the state and its mediation of drug use. Legal cannabis (and other drug) markets in Canada cannot be understood without consideration of the state’s role in discursively constructing drugs as substance, and the user as a subject. As the drug user is to be socialized by discourses about health, safety, and risk, the emergence of legal markets reveals the state’s ongoing construction of threats, forms of deviance, and an illegal “outside”. These threats include those who encourage or support drug consumption or experimentation by youth, uninformed consumption, illicit producers and vendors. A world of experiential, local and user knowledge is now marginalized and discredited as public health publics arise and legitimate state-expert-bureaucratic administration of pleasure and recreation.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: