'Rave' new world

DRUGS - Cultures, Controls and Everyday Life: Nigel South - Editor; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 32, M Block Market, Greater Kailash-I, New Delhi-110048. œ14.99.

EVERYDAY LIFE in the post-modern world with its quest for hyper- reality and consumption as the dominant form of social expression, and the rise of recreational drug use among people in the 1990s, provide the context for the debate about drugs in this collection of scholarly articles. They are presented in two sections: ``Cultures'' and ``Controls''.

``Dance with drugs...'' gives a bird's-eye view of the rise and course of the drug culture during the last decade. Uncertainty regarding the future, cynicism about the political process and loss of credibility of religion, the author says, have engendered a search for alternatives to reality, for altered states of consciousness, and for a sense of community, and these are the factors behind the venture after ``rave new world'' through loud music and stimulant-based dance culture.

After an initial reaction of moral panic on the part of the state and society about it, the author says, the rave culture has become a legitimate and lucrative arm of the leisure industry in the West.

The use of drugs by women - especially young ones - compared to men seems to be increasing.

But the next article questions the feminists' claim that men are the agents of women's oppression through drug use.

It calls for a new research paradigm that will be sensitive to variations in the different subcultures of drug use.

The author, for one, found that drugs were used by the female subjects of her study to compose a new lifestyle and secure an identity in the social world.

The next article examines the racialisation of drugs in the U.K. The author characterises the present approach of linking drugs, crime, race and violence to certain localities, based on received reports as ``naming and shaming'' and deems it to be detrimental to ``mainstreaming'' those who are thus marginalised.

The first article in the second section, ``Controls'', describes the changing policy responses to drug misuse which in turn depend upon the ways the social problem is defined and also the character of social policy - stringent or liberal - in a given society.

It points out that the drug problem has three dimensions - medical, social and moral - and each of them has successively dominated policy responses to it in the 20th century.

Medical perception focusses on the interplay of psychological and biochemical factors within the individual. Socio-medical approaches see these factors as mediated by a social environment.

This is considered the most influential policy line in the English speaking world.

The sociological approach focusses on the socio-economic factors. The moral approach throws the blame back on the individual - in terms of genetic make-up with strong racial connotations and advocates containment and incarceration of disadvantaged youth.

Community-centred, multi-agency partnership approaches are commended for adoption in dealing with the drug problem.

The next article on drugs and policing in Europe begins with the observation that the sovereign state is no longer capable of providing full security, law and order and crime control within its territorial boundaries.

Crime is no longer ``an exceptional event requiring an explanation and exculpation but an everyday risk to be assessed and managed.''

This is particularly the attitude salient in policing drug misuse in Europe. The ownership of the problem is shifted to the community by giving it the crime prevention role.

Policy failure is avoided by changing the terms of the engagement from winning the war (against drugs) to managing it.

This article also deals with the problem of rendering similar and compatible the laws relating to drugs across the nations in the European Union.

The contradictions and complexities involved in controlling drugs in sports is the theme of the next article.

The author has given thought-provoking reasons against the prohibition of the use of drugs by competitors in international sports: other forms of foul play are let off lightly.

Testing as a means to detect drug use is problematic: some chemicals like human growth harmone are naturally produced by body. It is possible to outsmart the testing system and use new drugs not yet included in the banned list. The cost of testing is often too high for Third World countries.

The debate between those who want to prohibit by law the use of drugs in general and those who are against it is detailed in the next article. The latter category includes paradoxically conservatives, liberals and radicals. The difficulties in fool- proof legislation and using such legislation to promote a collateral, hidden political agenda are cited by the legislators.

The nexus between drugs and violence is the reason put forward by the prohibitionists. This nexus, particularly the cause-effect relationship between drugs and violence, argues the author, is far from established.

The last article is an attempt to locate the place and meaning of drug use in the post-industrial era in the West, more specifically in the U.K. and the U.S., based on facts and figures in four national surveys (two pertaining to each).

``Respectable fears'' perpetual of every generation about the moral degeneration of the upcoming younger generation, provides the framework for understanding the thesis that the use of drugs is getting normalised.

The conclusion is that the notion of normalisation exaggerates levels of drug use by the youth.

It calls for a discourse that is sensitive to variations in patterns of drug use over time and across subcultures and also reckons with the proportions and attitudes of non-users.

Though not directly relevant to the Indian condition, policy makers, social activists and researchers can profit by reading this book.

D. RAJA GANESAN

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