More readings: Sociology of the Body

I haven't found much writing on the embodiment of addiction, but here are a few pieces that are relevant.

Gomart, E. (2004).  Surprised by methadone: in praise of drug substitution treatment in a French clinic. Body & Society, 10(2-3): 85-110.

Bergschmidt, V. (2004).  Pleasure, power and dangerous substances:  applying Foucault to the study of heroin dependence in Germany.  Anthropology & Medicine, 11(1): 59-73.

Bourgois, P. (2000).  Disciplining Addictions:  The Bio-Politics of Methadone and Heroin in the United States.  Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 24: 165-195.

Lewis, B.  (2003).  Prozac and the post-human politics of cyborgs.  Journal of medical humanities,24 (1/2), pp.49-63.

O’Malley, P. and M. Valverde. (2004).  Pleasure, freedom and drugs: the uses of ‘pleasure’ in liberal governance of drug and alcohol consumption.  Sociology, 38(1): 25-42.

Weinberg, D. (2002).  On the embodiment of addiction.  Body & Society  8(4):1-19.

Reading Lists: sociology of drugs

My PhD requirements include orals examines on three reading lists.  Below are a selection of readings I especially liked on the sociology of drugs/medication:

Medication & the Rise of the Pharmaceutical Industry

Cohen, D., McCubbin, M., Collin, J., and G. Perdeau. (2001).  Medications as social phenomena.  Health, 5(4): 441-469

Busfield, J.  (2006). Pills, Power, People: Sociological Understandings of the Pharmaceutical Industry. Sociology, 40: 297-314.

Parrish, R. (2005).  Defining drugs: How Government Became the Arbiter of Pharmaceutical Fact.  Transaction Publishers.

Fox, N., Ward, N., and A. O’Rourke. (2006). A Sociology of Technology Governance for the Information Age: The Case of Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Advertising and the Internet. Sociology, 40: 315-334.

Social Construction of Addiction

Tiger, R.  (2008). The Medicalization of Addiction, the Rise of the Therapeutic and the New Public Health in Drug Courts and Coerced Treatment: The Social Construction of “Enlightened Coercion.”  PhD Dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center.

Jarvinen, M.  (2008). Approaches to methadone treatment: harm reduction in theory in practice.  Sociology of Health & Illness.  30(7):1-17.

Bjerg, O. (2008).  Drug Addiction & capitalism:  too close to the body.  Body & Society, 14(2):1-22

Dingelstad, D., Richard. G., Martin, B. and Vakas, N. (1996).  The Social Construction of Drug Debates. Social Science and Medicine, 43 (12), 1829-3.

May, C. (2001). Pathology, Identity and the Social Construction of Alcohol Dependence. Sociology. 35(2): 385-401.

Nelkin, D. (1973). Methadone Maintenance:  A Technological Fix. New York, NY: G. Braziller.

Peele, S. (1985). The Meaning of Addiction:  Compulsive Experience and its Interpretation. Lexington, D.C. Heath.

The Medicalization of Addiction

So...  I'm on a very slow course to get my PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center.  I also work full-time at The New York Academy of Medicine; hence the aforementioned slow pace.  Both endeavors, however, have allowed me to focus my research on a newish drug treatment technology, buprenorphine.  Below is a snippet I wrote about why this drug/medication interests me as a sociologist.

Conrad and Schneider (1992) noted the increasing medicalization of deviance through which behaviors once viewed as moral failings are increasingly viewed as illnesses.  One hallmark of the medicalization of deviance has been the widespread adoption of medications to treat problems previously understood as behavioral (Diller, 1998).  In October 2002, in a radical departure from almost a century of U.S. drug policy, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the pharmaceutical buprenorphine to treat opioid dependence in office-based settings. Unlike methadone, which remains mired in restrictive government oversight and requires daily attendance at a highly regulated clinic, buprenorphine is available through any certified physician in any office–based setting.  Buprenorphine has been heralded by addiction medicine experts as the technological breakthrough that will finally move the treatment of addiction into the medical mainstream. 

However, addiction is unique among medicalized social problems in that neither alcoholism (Valverde, 1998) nor drug dependence (Smart, 1984) fit easily into the medicalization model, even though the medical model of addiction has gained in prominence in the U.S. over the past thirty years. Medical responses to addiction that frame the problem as a failure of biochemistry or genetics continue to co-exist uneasily with behavioral and legal responses that frame the problem as failure of will or a crime.  Thus, the world of addiction and addiction treatment has been and remains one of contestation, confusion, and slippage.  Buprenorphine enters directly into this contest as the first real medical “solution” to opioid addiction since the introduction of methadone four decades ago.  It represents a clear attempt by medical professionals to further medicalize addiction and to resolve some of the discursive ambiguity surrounding addiction treatment.  As such, it offers a unique opportunity to study the processes and conditions of medicalization and to better understand why addiction has been so resistant to medicalization. 

In addition to exploring processes of medicalization, my dissertation project is concerned with the sociology of body and the relationship between the social construction of addiction and the formation of the self.  The body has increasingly become a site where notions of self and identity are both produced and regulated (see for example, Budgeon, 2003; Butler, 2004; Shilling, 2003), and doctors play a particularly important role in labeling and legitimizing bodies and in managing subjective experiences of our bodies (Shilling, 2003, p.126).  Moreover, biomedical technologies (Persson, 2004), like buprenorphine, and the doctors that employ them are intimately and importantly involved in the production of self.   Through this research, I will also examine how these treatment technologies, like buprenorphine, are embodied and understood by the patients that use them and how it shapes their subjectivity and identity.  I hope to build on work that bridges the sociology of medicine and the sociology of body by exploring the ways in which the processes of medicalization impact, regulate, and produce the self.

 -Julie Netherland

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