Narcofeminism and its multiples: From activism to everyday minoritarian worldbuilding

Sociology has a long-standing interest in the consumption of licit and illicit drugs, particularly as a feminist concern with scholars highlighting the ways in which drugs are used as regulatory technologies to control the conduct and subjectivities of women and other marginalised groups. This monograph flips the focus from a feminist sociological 

 with drugs as a means of confining minoritised peoples, to explore what they can do as a feminist 

. Employing the drug-user activist concept of ‘narcofeminism’, it aims to rethink how drugs are conceived in sociology and chart their role in shaping selves and worlds. This article introduces the guiding philosophy of the narcofeminist movement as articulated in an interview we conducted with founding narcofeminist activists from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Threaded through the interview are vivid examples of the ingrained and overlapping hostilities that differentially constitute drug consumption practices for women and gender minorities, and the brave acts of resistance they perform in response. In introducing the collection, we foreground a key aim that has guided its development: thinking with the insights of narcofeminism, we have sought to address the complexities of drug use and to hold in focus its potentialities both in terms of its harms and benefits, risks and rewards and, importantly, to reflect on how people navigate these counterposing forces in their situated practices of drug use. We also discuss how the collection advances the sociology of drugs by bridging disciplinary divides and disrupting binary distinctions between licit and illicit drugs, volition and compulsion, pleasure and pain, and discourse and practice, among others. This article provides an overview of the contributions that comprise the monograph, highlighting how they grapple with the ethico-political commitments of narcofeminism to rethink drug consumption as a mode of living, capable of transforming social worlds.

Narcofeminism – Living and responding at the margins

Living and responding at the margins: A conversation with narcofeminist activists

Narcofeminism: A feminist auto-ethnography on drugs

Drugs and gender – Technologies of oppression and resistance

Refusing recovery, living a ‘wayward life’: A feminist analysis of women’s drug use

The drinking at home woman: Between alcohol harms and domestic experiments

Acid feminism: Gender, psychonautics and the politics of consciousness

Technologies of abjection: The possessive logics and performative sovereignty of drug dog operations in New South Wales, Australia

Drugs and sexualities – Practices of care and connection

Drugs, techno and the ecstasy of queer bodies

Narcofeminist ‘chemsex’: Rethinking sexualised drug use in a shifting queer landscape marked by public health emergency

Pleasure, drugs, materiality and tensions in harm reduction in practice: The case of safer injection programmes

Ambivalent pleasures: Towards narcofeminist alterlife

Afterword: Tensions and possibilities for a narcofeminist sociology

Narcofeminisms: Revisioning drug use

Within the frameworks of the Paradigma Coalition, Youth RISE and Students for Sensible Drug Policy International have partnered up once again to provide a Youth Response to the UNODC's World Drug Report. 

This response is written by youth advocates from across the world. As young people we hold keen insights into youth drug use and as advocates, we represent youth perspectives on drug policies. 

 to learn about our reflections on the 2023 World Drug Report and our recommendations for future publications of this report. 

Also watch out for the release of this Youth Response on Monday 21st August, a week before this launch event and come with your questions and comments! 

Youth Response to the UNODC World Drug Report 2023

For the first time, regular and ongoing community drug-checking clinics are now available in Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin.

A drug user in his 20s, who lives in Wellington, is looking forward to visiting the new clinic. He prefers to get his drugs checked because he said it’s quite common for dealers to bulk out drugs with other substances in order to make more money.

"I was a little bit more relaxed knowing that what I was taking, what I spent my money on, isn't going to potentially kill me,” he said.

1720 drugs were checked to determine what was in them. A third of those were completely or partially different from what people thought they were

The new clinics, provided by the Needle Exchange Services Trust, are part of a nearly four-million-dollar government investment towards the cost of delivering drug-checking services and harm reduction advice.

Regular drug checking clinics now open in three cities of New Zealand / Aotearoa

Learn about global drug trends from the authors of the World Drug Report 2023!

UNODC experts will present the World Drug Report 2023, giving an overview of the latest developments and diving into the most up-to-date global data. In the second section of the webinar, civil society representatives will give their perspectives on some of the key topics of this year’s report.

Interpretation in French, Russian and Spanish will be available.

19 July, 3PM to 4.30PM CEST (Vienna time, UTC+2)

Global summary of the World Drug Report 2023 by 

The World Drug Report 2023 - Webinar for civil society

Patterns of drug use and developments in the drug market in Europe are becoming more complex and dynamic, with major implications for drug monitoring and research. This observation prompted the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drg Addiction (EMCDDA) to conduct a futures exercise 2030 to inform the agency’s strategic reflection on how to improve its activities in the context of both ongoing rapid changes in the information environment and the new information needs likely to emerge over the next decade. A summary of this work is provided here.

The future of drug monitoring in Europe until 2030: A report summarising the findings and lessons learnt from the EMCDDA’s ‘futures study’

In recent years, critical alcohol and other drugs scholars have been seeking to trouble foundational ideas and claims about alcohol and other drugs, including taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature, effects and harms associated with drug use. Importantly, this critical scholarship also calls for accountability in our own roles as researchers in producing and reproducing ideas about and depictions of alcohol and other drugs and troubling our concepts and methods. As Suzanne Fraser argued at the 2017 

 conference in Helsinki, Finland, all research projects are intrinsically performative: ‘They are as intimately involved in the making of everyday material realities as they are in reflecting them. As such, researchers have the obligation not only to track the realities being made by their research, but to approach the design and conduct of the research with this action in mind’.

These developments in drug research are inspired by insights from several fields, including feminist theory, narcofeminism, queer theory, Science and Technology Studies, new materialism, Indigenous knowledges and decolonising methodologies. When we trouble methods, we reflect on our own role in the production of realities, the ethics and politics of different ways of knowing and doing, the positionality of researchers, and the relationship between all of these practices and the production of realities. In the contested fields of drug policy, biomedical research, and harm reduction, this troubling also generates ethical, epistemological, and empirical questions: what does this mean for political claims-making and advocacy in research? How can we embrace trouble in politically productive ways? In troubled times that seem to be eroding trust and solidarity, how do we ensure our claims to knowledge, authority and rigour are useful?

What would it mean to embrace trouble in the ways we do and make research methods and knowledge? What responsibilities and obligations might this confer on researchers, policy practitioners, and institutions? What new knowledges and paths of inquiries could this open? What changes might be necessary in the assumptions informing policy and other forms of social and political action? How might we think about identity, reflexivity, power and positionality in research collaborations, including understandings of lived experience and expertise? How might diagnostic instruments, treatment systems, legal processes, health promotion and popular culture be changed to benefit people who consume drugs, and, in turn, all of us?

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, and how we might rethink change, 

the 2023 conference seeks submissions for presentations that engage with and trouble our own methods, tools and practices in alcohol and other drug research.

Substances

Narcofeminisms: Revisioning drug use

Youth Response to the UNODC World Drug Report 2023

Regular drug checking clinics now open in three cities of New Zealand / Aotearoa

The World Drug Report 2023 - Webinar for civil society

The future of drug monitoring in Europe until 2030: A report summarising the findings and lessons learnt from the EMCDDA’s ‘futures study’

Contemporary Drug Problems Conference 2023