Drugs, risk and society: Government, governance or governmentality?

This themed issue of Health, Risk those threatening the established order of society. The papers in the final section of this issue consider ways in which individual drug users resist such control and develop their own assessment of risk and their own patterns of drug use. Harrison and her colleagues (2011) consider the Australian government efforts to control the consumption of alcohol, in order to minimise its harmful effects and in particular to reduce young people's harmful ‘binge’ drinking habits. The participants in this study saw themselves as engaging in ‘controlled drunkenness’. These young people were interested in the pleasurable not the harmful aspects of alcohol consumption. In terms of the public health guidelines, most of these young people were binge drinking however they saw their drinking as reasonable and safe. McGovern and McGovern (2011) examine crack cocaine: an illegal ‘heavy-end’ drug which drug regulators consider causes considerable harm to its users and others and wish to prohibit. However for the crack cocaine users it was a purposeful activity. It enabled users to create meaning in otherwise meaningless lives. Crack cocaine enabled individuals to develop and demonstrate specialist and valued skills and knowledge and negotiate the dangerous ‘edge’ inherent in heavy-end crack cocaine use and control the uncontrollable.