What's in a Name? A Story About Critical Drug Studies

While critical research on drug consumption predates critical drug studies by decades, we argue that the field is now stabilised enough as an entity to be named in academic publications, researcher biographies and course syllabi. Therefore, the 2025 Contemporary Drug Problems conference offered an opportunity to reflect on and interrogate what critical drug studies is and what it might become. Is it a bounded field (as enacted in this abstract and recent publications), and if so, what is included and excluded by its boundaries? Or is it better thought of as an approach, a methodology, a political ethos? What are its founding assumptions? What makes it coherent? What does it mean to do critical drug studies? To organise this admittedly inchoate mix of descriptive and normative concerns, we will address each element of the name: What makes the field critical and what should we be critical of? What substances, objects and other forces are included in its foundational category of drug and what do they have in common? And what kinds of studies are carried out by critical drug scholars and where should we turn our attention to in the future?