Drug User Activism and Institutional Ethnography


Charlotte Smith, York University

The past few decades have witnessed the growth of a trajectory of critical drug policy activist research that is informed by the goals and demands of drug user activism and takes seriously the need to be grounded in the lived experiences of people who use drugs. This body of scholarship includes drug user activists as researchers, researchers working alongside drug-user activists in community and/or co-publishing articles with drug users, and working within or alongside drug user organizations to lend legitimacy to their movements and/or goals via scholarship and its associated social and institutional capital. This area of scholarship is explicitly critical of criminal law, the regulation and punishment of people who use drugs, and punitive approaches to drug use. This scholarship has also been important in promoting the health and well-being of drug users, as well as explicating the harms produced by drug prohibition - such as increase in risks fatal and nonfatal overdoses, incarceration, marginalization and isolation, poverty, violence, and trauma. At the same time, there has been a trajectory of activist scholarship wherein researchers working with institutional ethnography, as well as political activist ethnography, have sought to address questions activists encounter in their work and produce knowledge that is useful to them by making visible how the ruling regimes that they are up against and that organize their experiences are organized. Despite the recognition of institutional ethnography as an activist research methodology, it has been seldom employed within critical drugs research. In this presentation, I place institutional ethnography in dialogue with this body of critical drug policy work. I argue that the ethical and political implications of institutional ethnography are commensurate with the core commitments of the body of critical drug policy work I discuss above and consider how institutional ethnography might aid in forwarding the goals of this scholarly/activist work. As institutional ethnographers take everyday and lived experiences as an entry to inquiry, it is a promising method of inquiry for scholarship that is grounded in the questions and problems facing people who use drugs. While the existing scholarship in this area of critical drugs research has explicated people’s experiences of drug prohibition through voicing their experiences and concerns, drugs researchers working with institutional ethnography can make visible how these experiences are hooked into and organized by ruling relations that organize drug prohibition – such as criminal law, medicine, public health services and regulation in these systems. Focusing on some of its core tenets, in this presentation I consider how institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry might propel the ways that drug criminalization and punitive policies are typically analyzed and written about in this area of drugs scholarship. Might different sorts of questions might be asked - and answered - that contribute to meeting peoples experienced needs and movement goals? And how might institutional ethnographys focus on transforming institutional relations dismantle ruling regimes that organize the experiences of people who use drugs and open up avenues that contribute to drug user liberation? 

This paper will be presented at the following session: