From raid to aid: epistemic sequencing and discursive leadership in drug policy paradigm change

Over the past three decades, drug policy discourse in British Columbia, Canada, has shifted from an enforcement-centered paradigm toward harm reduction and public health. This article asks how discursive paradigms change in domains characterized by heightened moral contestation. Drawing on discursive institutionalism and scholarship on epistemic authority, we develop a theory of discursive leadership as temporal sequencing, whereby actors with recognized professional expertise introduce interpretive frames that subsequently migrate across institutional actors. Using a corpus of 5,560 media-reported statements (1995–2025) and transformer-based text clustering, we test hypotheses concerning temporal priority, epistemic advantage, and crisis amplification. Results show that health-sector actors exhibited temporally prior and direction-setting shifts in harm-reduction and decriminalization discourse, with crisis conditions amplifying rather than originating these frames. Discursive leadership was measurable, cluster-specific, and domain-bounded. The study operationalizes discursive leadership as a testable temporal mechanism for application in various hybrid moral–crisis policy contexts.