Governing families: State discourses and professional practices in the making of Irish drug policy 1971–2016

In the past two decades, families have increasingly become a focus of drug policy and professional practices. This development has received limited critical and theoretical examination with respect to the presuppositions and assumptions underpinning its rationale. In this thesis, I ask how families have been problematised in Irish drug policy. Further objectives include exploring the operation of policy discourses as they are interpreted and negotiated by professionals in the drug field; and, understanding how families are governed and the political implications of this. The study is situated within an emerging body of international drug policy research that understands realities as being constituted through policy discourses and practices. This body of work has not addressed families as a focal point for analysis, a gap that this study addresses.

This study adopts a poststructuralist perspective, drawing on Foucauldian-influenced governmentality studies as the theoretical framework. The study analyses the Irish 2009 National Drugs Strategy and seven other official drug policy documents, using Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach to policy analysis. Interviews with 17 professionals in policy making, policy coordination, research, advocacy, and service provision roles are analysed using aspects of Bacchi and Bonham’s (2016) ‘Poststructuralist Interview Analysis’ approach.

In the 2009 strategy, families are represented as different ‘problems’: (1) Families are constructed as victims of drug-related intimidation but, at the same time, families are called upon to take responsibility for addressing the issue. (2) Affected families are constructed as service users in their own right and as responsible and self-regulating actors and, at the same time, as a source of social recovery capital for their close relative. (3) Adolescent drug use is constructed as a ‘problem’ of deficits in family functioning, while families are also understood as contributing to the solution. (4) Parental drug use is represented as ‘problems’ of family dysfunction, deficit parenting and child protection; with the primary concern being children’s future potentiality in terms of future drug use and life outcomes. Technologies of responsibilisation and risk, characteristic of neoliberal forms of rule, dominate how families are governed through problem representations in drug policy. Professional discourses largely reproduce dominant policy discourses on parental drug use, adolescent drug use and affected families. However, they also problematise the way that drug-related intimidation is represented as a ‘problem’, the taken-for-granted role of family involvement in treatment, and the evidence based paradigm that dominates drug policy making and professional practices. Professional discourses also draw attention to the complexities of governing ‘at a distance’. The study highlights how the problem representations of drug-related intimidation and parental drug use may have unintended consequences that may produce potentially harmful effects for families.

Devaney, E. (2017) ‘The emergence of the affected adult family member in drug policy discourse: A Foucauldian perspective’, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 24(4), 359-367.