The normalisation of illicit drug use admissions among British politicians: a narrative perspective

Alexandrescu, Liviu ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5744-4591 (2023) The normalisation of illicit drug use admissions among British politicians: a narrative perspective. In: Normalisation re-visited: Drugs in Europe in the 21st century. Pabst Science Publishers, pp. 76-92. ISBN 9783958538849

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Abstract

In recent years, top government and opposition politicians in the United Kingdom have increasingly admitted to personal experiences of using criminalised drugs. Acknowledging the symbolic discrepancies between how such transgressions are framed as trivial stories, and the moral injunction they carry for less powerful others to submit to drug prohibitions, this chapter provides a discussion of narrative scripts used to convey encounters with controlled substances. Observing these as past encounters (part of formative journeys), ambiguous encounters (that blur the agencies of subject and substance) and displaced encounters (in settings far from home), this chapter argues that accounts of breaking drug laws indicate a contradiction. This entails a gap between a normalisation of ‘drug talk’, on one side, and a further normalisation of current prohibitive drug control regimes, on the other, that also inhibits possibilities of reimagining existing but unjust arrangements.