Youth subcultures, normalisation and drug prohibition: The politics of contemporary crisis and change?

Abstract

This article provides a new reading of the crossover between youth subculture and drug consumption, and seeks to demonstrate that drug prohibition has entered a legitimation crisis in social and political policy (Habermas, 1975). This article argues that contemporary drug normalisation is at the centre of the apparent failure of drug prohibition to understand and respond to the growth in oppositional messages derived from digital communication and the use of drug representations by mainstream capitalism to sell everyday commodities for profit. At the same time, UK and US newspapers have questioned the validity of the 'war on drugs' owing to political corruption and human rights abuses in Mexico, Afghanistan and Colombia. The article considers that drug normalisation has disrupted drug policy because intoxicants have become incorporated into everyday culture, and in particular youth subculture. Within the recent literature, young people's drug use has been theorised within a generalised framework of postmodernity. This article argues that drug normalisation theory is not a postmodern concept. It is a theory derived from the work of the Chicago School articulated by Alfred Lindesmith, Howard Becker and David Matza, who in turn influenced the UK National Deviance Conference and the subsequent CCCS theory of subculture. This created the theoretical opportunity to interpret substance consumption as a condition of normalisation separate from crime.

Taking Relationships to School: Power, Authority and Identity Work in Young People's Dispositions to Schooling

“…That is not to say the principles in question are not valuable, but the discursive formation with which they are practised and articulated diverges. The work of Hall andJefferson (1976, 1993), Willis (1977), McRobbie and Nava (1984), Wexler (1987), Levinson et al (1996), McDonald (1999), Munns and McFadden (2000), Wacquant (2003), Blackman (2005Blackman ( , 2010, Muggleton (2005) and Henderson et al (2007) characterises the approach outlined here. McFadden helps focus attention, stating that: convergence and divergence of intercultural relations in concrete problem contexts (for example, in schools between teacher and student cultures) ... is a question of intercultural articulations and connections and how they structure social options for individuals and groups in certain social settings.…”

Drug Policy Governance in the UK: Lessons from changes to and debates concerning the classification of cannabis under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act

“…This was achieved primarily by assigning causation rather than correlation to the long-standing issue of cannabis use and its links with mental illness. Blackman (2010) suggests that the Brown Government was attempting to reassert its commitment to prohibitionist policies, via the construction of a 'popular preventive. ' Mills (2013) shows how in the history of cannabis policy decisions that ostensibly appear to be about cannabis are in reality about something else.…”

“…Drawing on the work of Habermas, (1975), Blackman (2010 suggests that the fallout over the drug classification between the Government and members of the ACMD signified a 'legitimation crisis' in the government's drug policy; where 'institutions are out of step with social and cultural values and government faces a loss of public confidence' (Blackman, 2010:348). This crisis, for Blackman, stemmed from the government's commitment to the war on drugs, despite the fact that some success appeared to be forthcoming with the more pragmatic policies being employed such as a reported downturn in cannabis prevalence in the population, as evidenced by various sweeps of the then British Crime Survey.…”

Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

“…This article considers how the study of youth cultural practices in Eastern Europe, and in particular late Soviet and post‐Soviet Russia, might inform wider understandings and conceptualisations of youth culture today 1 . Its context is the well‐documented subculture/post‐subculture debate (see: Bennett 1999, 2000, 2005; Blackman 2005, 2010; Haenfler 2006; Hesmondhalgh 2005; Hodkinson 2004, 2012; Leblanc 2006; Malbon 1999; Moore 2010; Muggleton 2000; Pilkington 2004; Pilkington et al. 2010; Polhemus 1997; Redhead 1993, 1997a,b; Shildrick and MacDonald 2006; Thornton 1995).…”

“…3 A clear advantage of such an approach is the potential for understanding the relationship between more traditional forms of 'deviancy' (substance use, gang formations, racist subcultures) and 'risk' practices within 'subcultures'. An explicit call for the integration of a Chicago School approach with CCCS theory of subculture in the study of the 'normalisation' of drug use is made by Blackman (2010), while empirical investigations of young people's substance use in this vein are provided by Hunt et al (2010), Shildrick (2002) and Pilkington and Sharifullina (2009). Of course, it should not be forgotten that the CCCS emphasis on the material underpinnings of subcultural practices emerged out of an explicit critical engagement with symbolic interactionist approaches to deviancy.…”