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Contemporary Drug Problems Conference

In this paper, I will draw on panpsychist thought to propose a speculative alternative to the moralism that arises from the separation of facts and values. If, as the premise of this talk suggests, we consume drugs to induce change, then surely feeling is what matters. By feeling, I refer to the sensory experience achieved by the connection between us and a drug (or multiple drugs), which, as I will argue using panpsychism, serves as an inherent source of value creation. Refuting the mind/body dualism that positions consciousness solely in the mind apart from the body, panpsychism posits a single ontology. All entities feel. Feelings, as the speculative philosopher and panpsychist Alfred North Whitehead states, are ‘vectors”; they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. As the Whiteheadian philosopher Jonathan Delafield-Butt posits, ‘they [feelings] are inextricably, unequivocally, undeniably a feature of our natural world. We know they are because we are them; they are our experience of the world.’ Although the title of this paper suggests a contest between moralism, which adopts a materialist view of existence and allows for judgments about drug use as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and aesthetics (feeling), it is not intended to provide guidance on policy or, indeed, practice. Rather, my aim is to provoke thought on what might become possible by privileging what users of drugs suggest is the essential role of feeling.

Manchester, 27–29 August 2025

Boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers

We imagine, study, live and make drugs through boundaries. Drugs move transnationally, as do the people who cultivate, consume and sell them. Drugs travel across borders of ‘producing’ and ‘consuming’ countries. Drugs move between bodies, permeating boundaries of interiority and exteriority, skin, blood and brain. Laws categorise drugs through binaries: as licit or illicit, medicinal or non-medicinal, intoxicating or therapeutically transformative. Drugs are made through distinctions between human and ‘non-human’ worlds, and anxieties about and practices concerning drug use are constituted through binaries of control and compulsion.In cultural contexts that celebrate control, rationality, authenticity, and order, people who use drugs and those who are understood be experiencing ‘addiction’ become devalued, because they are constituted as compulsive, irrational, duplicitous and chaotic.

As those working with tools such as feminist theory, narcofeminism, queer theory, Science and Technology Studies, new materialism, Indigenous knowledges and decolonising methodologies have shown, it is important to identify and probe these boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers. What do these boundaries mean, do and make possible? Are they barriers to understanding and progress in relation to drug law reform? How might we think and do drugs otherwise if we work todissolve borders between people and drugs, human and non-human, licit and illicit, subject and object, blood and brain? What becomes possible when we disrupt disciplinary boundaries, including through explorations of disciplinary siloing? What do we learn when drugs are the subject of new and interdisciplinary perspectives, or approaches including ancient or ancestral knowledges? How can thought and practice engage centrally with boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers of various kinds, including between drugs, bodies, subjects and objects, the reshaping, reinforcing and dismantling of state borders, and the binaries that shape drugs? Is there value in maintaining boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers?

Building on CDP’s previous conferences, which have opened up questions of how drugs are problematised; how the complexity of drug use can be attended to; how drug use might be understood as event, assemblage or phenomenon; how drugs and their effects are constituted in various forms of practice and interactions/intra-actions; how we might rethink change; and the need to embrace ‘trouble’ in our work, the 2025 conference seeks submissions for presentations that consider the many boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers that structure how we do drugs, including work that challenges, dissolves, dismantles, questions, pushes, problematises, decolonises, disrupts, transgresses, reconsiders or restructures them.

We welcome research from those working in anthropology, cultural studies, law, criminology, social epidemiology, history, human geography, public policy, gender studies, sociology, social work and related disciplines, and encourage the innovative use of methods, concepts and theoretical tools. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol and other drug policy
  • Co-production and/or consumer participation in policy, service design/delivery and research
  • Diagnosis and assessment
  • Drug courts or other specialist, ‘restorative’, ‘problem-solving’ justice approaches
  • Drug trends
  • Education/health promotion in schools and universities
  • Experimentation on humans, plants and animals in drug research
  • Harm reduction services and measures
  • Human and ‘non-human’ actors in drug research, policy, law and practice
  • Legal practices, processes and case law
  • Monitoring/surveillance systems
  • Neuroscientific approaches to drug effects and addiction
  • Popular culture enactments of drug use
  • Power and positionality between/with researchers and people who use drugs
  • Prohibition and international drug conventions
  • Quantitative measures of alcohol and other drug use and harms
  • Qualitative concepts of subjectivity, agency, affect and identity
  • Consumer accounts and narratives of drug use, addiction and recovery
  • Reflexivity and research identities, including processes of categorisation (‘lived experience’, ‘expertise’)
  • Risk discourse
  • Social media websites and apps
  • Treatment models and practices
  • Youth and other drug services

Other relevant topics are also welcome.

Call for papers

Abstracts are now closed. All applicants will be notified of the outcome in early March, 2025.

Keynote presentations

Moral Materialism vs An Aesthetics of Drugs

Professor Marsha Rosengarten

In this paper, I will draw on panpsychist thought to propose a speculative alternative to the moralism that arises from the separation of facts and values. If, as the premise of this talk suggests, we consume drugs to induce change, then surely feeling is what matters. By feeling, I refer to the sensory experience achieved by the connection between us and a drug (or multiple drugs), which, as I will argue using panpsychism, serves as an inherent source of value creation. Refuting the mind/body dualism that positions consciousness solely in the mind apart from the body, panpsychism posits a single ontology. All entities feel. Feelings, as the speculative philosopher and panpsychist Alfred North Whitehead states, are ‘vectors”; they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. As the Whiteheadian philosopher Jonathan Delafield-Butt posits, ‘they [feelings] are inextricably, unequivocally, undeniably a feature of our natural world. We know they are because we are them; they are our experience of the world.’ Although the title of this paper suggests a contest between moralism, which adopts a materialist view of existence and allows for judgments about drug use as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and aesthetics (feeling), it is not intended to provide guidance on policy or, indeed, practice. Rather, my aim is to provoke thought on what might become possible by privileging what users of drugs suggest is the essential role of feeling.

About Professor Marsha Rosengarten

Marsha Rosengarten is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London, and Emeritus Professor in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic in Information and Flesh, co-author with Mike Michael of Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV and co-editor with Alex Wilkie and Martin Savransky of Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures and, also, co-editor with Fay Dennis and Kiran Pienaar, Narcofeminisms: Revisioning drug use.

Her work explores the contributions that speculative modes of thought can make to transforming scientific conceptions of nature when making epiphenomenal the role of the sensory.

The Borders and Boundaries of Care: The Absence of Care in Healthcare for People Who Use Drugs

Dr Danielle M. Russell

Focusing on the compounded impact of borders and barriers in both the U.S. and Australia, this presentation explores the intersections of state violence, stigma, and access to medical services through the lived experience of people who inject drugs (PWID). Drawing from my experience as a researcher, drug user activist, and my time spent navigating medical resources in the U.S. and Australia, I reflect on my own health challenges related to skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI), and I examine and contrast how these national contexts shape health outcomes for myself and other PWID.  In Arizona, systemic violence manifests in overt discrimination and denial of care, while in Australia, the discrimination is less overt but is still present in the form of paternalistic care. Despite the differences, both systems operate under frameworks that infantilize PWID, positioning them as objects of charity rather than as people deserving of solidarity and self-determination.

By framing these health crises as outcomes of systemic boundaries and borders constructed and maintained by state and medical institutions, we can highlight how the suffering of PWID is deeply entangled with the political and cultural binaries of "us versus them" and the ongoing social refusal to see PWID as fully human and deserving of care. The enforcement of boundaries constructed around binaries of “us vs them” and “deserving vs undeserving” perpetuates a cycle of neglect, suffering, and premature death.  Ultimately, resources and support must be rooted in solidarity and self-determination, not charity.  There is an urgent need to rethink health systems that transcend these artificial boundaries, respect and preserve the dignity of drug users, and offer compassionate, accessible resources for all, services that could truly be referred to as “care”.

About Dr Danielle M. Russell

Dr Danielle M. Russell earned her PhD from Arizona State University.  She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, specializing in community-based research to promote health equity for people who use illicit drugs. Her commitment to drug user rights and health equity has been recognized with the inaugural Jude Byrne Award, which fosters expertise and resilience in emerging female leaders with lived/living experience of drug use. Having personally experienced many of the harms directed at people who use illicit drugs, she is passionate about mutual aid and working to change the structures that impose harms on the bodies of drug users.

Further keynote presenters will be added here as they are announced.

Registration

Registration for the 2025 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference is now open. You can register at this link. All presenting authors must be registered to attend. There are options to register: as an early bird for a discounted rate (closing 15 June); full registration; as a student or community member; and for one day attendance only. Registrations close on 15 August and cannot be re-opened. There is also a conference dinner option; spots for the dinner are limited and will close once the allocation is exhausted.

Satellite event: Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body

‘Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body’ is a seminar to be held as a satellite event on Monday 25 August 2025 alongside the 2025 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference, funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Submissions for papers and presentations for the Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body seminar are now open and details can be found on the call for papers and presentations. To be considered for the seminar, please submit your (max. 250 word) abstract and other details to the seminar convenors via email. Travel bursaries are offered to postgraduate students to enable attendance. This will include either two bursaries of £100 each or four bursaries of £50 each, depending upon demand. Please indicate, when you submit your abstract, if you are seeking a travel bursary.

Submissions for this satellite event have now closed.

Conference convenors

Hosted by Contemporary Drug Problems, the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University (Australia); the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney (Australia); the Department of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, The University of Manchester (England); the Advanced School for Social Sciences (EHESS) (France); the Behaviours and Health Risks Program, Burnet Institute (Australia); Turning Point, Monash University (Australia); the Department of Science and Technology Studies , Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA), Deakin Law School, Deakin University (Australia); and the Department of Social Work, Stockholm University (Sweden), this conference will bring together leading international researchers in drug use and addiction studies from a range of research disciplines and methods – both qualitative and quantitative. The conference committee comprises:

The conference is generously sponsored by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Australia.

2023 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference

Archival information is available for the 2023 Contemporary Drug Problems Conference, held in Paris, 6–8 September 2023.