International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 415–419

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International Journal of Drug Policy

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Commentary

Explaining drug policy: Towards an historical sociology of policy change

Toby Seddon ∗
Regulation, Security and Justice Research Centre, School of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The goal of seeking to understand the development over time of drug policies is a specific version of
Received 20 October 2010 the more general intellectual project of finding ways of explaining social change. The latter has been
Received in revised form 13 May 2011 a preoccupation of some of the greatest thinkers within the social sciences of the last 200 years, from
Accepted 7 June 2011
Foucault all the way back to the three nineteenth-century pioneers, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. I describe
this body of work as ‘historical sociology’. In this paper, I outline how a particular approach to historical
sociology can be fruitfully drawn upon to understand the development of drug policy, using by way of
Keywords:
illustration the example of the analysis of a recent transformation in British drug policy: the rise of the
Policy
History
criminal justice agenda. I conclude by arguing that by looking at developments in drug policy in this way,
Sociology some new insights are opened up.
Politics © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Introduction the constraints of a short piece to provide a comprehensive account

As drug policy researchers, one of the most obvious and central
matters we might wish to be able to explain is the development
of drug policy over time. Why is drug policy different in 2010
than it was in, say, 1990, or 1910 for that matter? What drives
these changes? In other words, can we develop a framework for
understanding drug policy development? A related but different
challenge is the comparative project, which seeks to explain why
drug policy is different in different places. This is an equally under-
developed area but my focus in this article is on the question
of policy change over time. The potential promise of an analyt-
ical framework of this kind is that it might help us not only to
account for historical change but also, in so doing, to deepen our
understanding of the nature and foundations of contemporary drug
policy. This may, in turn, be useful for those who wish to see future
policy move in particular directions, as they might be able to draw
on insights about what drives policy change. In other words, this
is not solely an intellectual endeavour, it is also relevant to those
who are more practically minded and policy-oriented.
One way of looking at this question is to see it as a specific
instance of a more general problem: how can we explain social
change? This general question has been a preoccupation of some of
the greatest thinkers within the social sciences for at least the last
200 years, from Foucault all the way back to the three nineteenth-
century pioneers, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, via Habermas, Elias,
Polanyi, Beck and many others. It is not possible, of course, within
∗ Tel.: +44 161 306 6549; fax: +44 161 306 1261.
E-mail address: toby.seddon@manchester.ac.uk
of this wide-ranging, diverse and voluminous body of work. My
more modest objective here is to draw selectively on some key ideas
from this long-running conversation between history and sociol-
ogy, an area of scholarship that has become known as historical
sociology.
As Dean (1994, p. 1) suggests, the terrain of historical sociology
is ‘somewhat larger than a sub-discipline of sociology or a hybrid
of sociology and history’. I will elaborate my own version in the
main body of this paper but I will make some brief remarks here
to clarify exactly what it is I am referring to. Historical sociology
covers a very broad span of work but, at its heart, what all this
work holds in common, regardless of its varying theoretical and
methodological orientations, is the attempt to find tools to explain
the development over time of modern capitalist societies. Meeting
under the umbrella of this grand ambition, historians and sociol-
ogists, together with many with less clear disciplinary affiliations,
have engaged in this ‘hybrid activity’ (Dean, 1994, p. 8). I take it to
have three key dimensions:
1. A belief that to understand the contemporary social world
requires an understanding of its historical formation. In other
words, it is a view that sees societies as the product (in part)
of a process of historical development.
2. A goal of providing accounts of change over time that are explana-
tory rather than simply descriptive, attempting to move beyond
just documenting change towards unravelling the question of
why change occurs.
3. An interest in bringing together the ‘big picture’ of broad his-
torical processes with the fine-grained detail of specific events,
individuals and action. That is, it seeks to resolve the tension

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doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2011.06.002
416 T. Seddon / International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 415–419
between looking for general structural patterns and recovering
the detail of contingent events.
This idea of historical sociology is likely to be unfamiliar to
some readers of this journal. For those who wish to find out more,
a collection of essays edited by Delanty and Isin (2003) provides
a good introduction, covering the foundational contributions of
Marx, Weber and others but also taking in more recent work. I
have also found Mitchell Dean’s book, Critical and Effective Histories
(Dean, 1994), to be an extremely insightful contribution, although
those immune to the merits of Foucault may not find all of it to
their taste. A classic article by Abrams (1980) is also worth reading.
Perhaps an even better way to get to grips with historical sociology
is to read some substantive examples. Here, readers are spoilt for
choice but my own personal recommendation would be Garland’s
(1985) book Punishment and Welfare which not only ticks all the
boxes as ‘state-of-the-art’ historical sociology but is also a wonder-
ful read. Sadly, the study of drug policy has been relatively slow to
take on board these intellectual developments. Whilst there have
been some superb histories written (e.g. by Virginia Berridge, David
Courtwright and others), there is little that I would describe as his-
torical sociology, certainly not in terms of books or monographs,
although there have been one or two recent signs of an emerging
interest in the field (e.g. Seddon, 2010). This paper makes a case for
the importance of filling this gap.
Historical sociology and drug policy analysis
I will attempt to make this case for the potential utility of his-
torical sociology for the analysis of drug policy, by using a specific
episode of recent British policy, the ‘criminal justice turn’, for illus-
trative purposes. I begin by very briefly summarising this policy
episode.
The idea of the ‘criminal justice turn’ in, or the ‘criminalisation’
of, British drug policy refers to a significant shift that has taken
place over the last 20 or so years (see Duke, 2006; Seddon, Ralphs, &
Williams, 2008), in which the ‘drug problem’ has come to be viewed
largely through the lens of the drug-crime link. There are three
related indices of this change.
First, an increasing interest amongst policy-makers in the notion of
‘drug-related crime’. It has become a widely accepted belief in policy
circles that heroin and crack users stealing to ‘feed their habit’ are
responsible for spiralling neighbourhood crime rates, despite the
equivocal nature of some of the supporting evidence (see Dorn,
Baker, & Seddon, 1994; Seddon, 2000). The (unsourced) claim that
between one third and one half of all acquisitive crime is committed
by drug users has appeared in numerous policy documents (e.g.
Home Office, 2008).
Second, the prioritisation of reducing ‘drug-related crime’ as a
central aim of drug policy. The three-year national drug strategy,
Tackling Drugs Together, produced in 1995, included ‘increasing the
safety of communities from drug-related crime’ as one of three
overarching strategic objectives. Since then, reducing ‘drug-related
crime’ has remained central to drug policy, arguably rising in
prominence and priority since 2001.
Third, the embedding of drug treatment within the criminal justice
system. Accompanying the policy prioritisation of the drug-crime
link has been the construction of an entire infrastructure for drug
interventions in the criminal justice system, brought together
under the umbrella of the Drug Interventions Programme (DIP).
Teams of drug testers are now based in police custody suites up
and down the country and drug treatment workers have perma-
nent office bases not just in police stations but also in magistrates’
courts, probation offices and prisons.
Taken together, it has been argued by many commentators
(Duke, 2006; Hunt & Stevens, 2004; Seddon et al., 2008; Stevens,
2007; Stimson, 2000), that British drug policy today is crime-
focused to an extent that it can be viewed as distinctively and
substantively different compared to earlier policy directions. How
might we explain this policy change?
The ‘big picture’: drug policy and social change
Over the course of the last 40–50 years the world has changed.
Described variously as the rise of neo-liberalism, the shift to late
modernity, or the coming of the risk society, most developed West-
ern societies have been through a profound set of social, economic,
cultural and political changes since the 1960s, as the old certainties
of mid-twentieth-century welfarist politics have melted away. So
the first question posed by an historical sociology is this: how can
we locate drug policy changes within this bigger picture of social
change?
As might be expected, there are many different theoretical
perspectives on these profound social transformations of the last
half-century. I do not wish to argue here for the privileging of any
one theoretical argument over another. This self-imposed restric-
tion is, in part, simply because it lies far beyond the scope and
purpose of a short paper like this to adjudicate between these differ-
ent approaches. But it also rests on a more fundamental point about
social theory. The selection of a theoretical perspective is not simply
a matter of assessing its explanatory power. Different theoretical
lenses reveal different aspects of the phenomenon under study.
In this sense, theory selection can be partly informed by strategic
concerns, depending on what the analytical focus of the research
is. In this paper, I mainly use the concept of risk as a framework
for analysis as it casts light on some distinctive aspects of recent
drug policy development but, in doing so, I am not suggesting that
other theoretical angles may not also be fruitful. In other words,
the argument presented in this paper should be seen as illustrative
of the broader claim about the potential of historical sociology for
drug policy research, rather than as making a case for a particular
way of doing this.
The conventional interpretation of recent British drug policy
developments holds that the criminal justice turn is a relatively
recent shift, starting properly in the mid-1990s, and that it has
represented an unwelcome reversal of the public health approach
which had been in place since the emergence of the HIV threat
in the mid-1980s. Perhaps the most authoritative and influen-
tial statement of this view is in a much-cited article by Stimson
(2000) but other commentators have argued similarly (e.g. Hunt &
Stevens, 2004; Stevens, 2007). But viewed from the perspective of
the wider social change of the last half-century, the picture looks
rather different. Instead of sharp breaks in policy direction, we can
start to see family resemblances between ostensibly different pol-
icy approaches which are suggestive of a strategic coherence that
stretches back perhaps as far as the mid-1960s. Let me briefly flesh
out this claim.
Using the lens of risk helps us considerably here. There is a long
history of viewing drug users as a threat or danger, going back to at
least the late nineteenth century. Marek Kohn’s book Dope Girls pro-
vides a superb account of how anxieties about race and gender in
the first couple of decades of the twentieth century became inter-
twined with new conceptions of drug users as threats to society
(Kohn, 1992; see also Seddon, 2008). But in the late 1960s, we start
to see these conceptions mutate in a subtle but significant way, as
the idea of ‘danger’ (a characteristic of individuals) is replaced by
that of ‘risk’ (a set of factors applying across a population) (for the
classic account of this, see Castel, 1991). Perhaps the first sighting
in British drug policy of this shift is in 1965 and the publication
of the second report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Drug
 T. Seddon / International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 415–419
Addiction, known as the second Brain report (Ministry of Health,
1965). This described addiction as a ‘socially infectious disease’ and
made recommendations for the monitoring, surveillance and con-
tainment of the problem. I see this as an early marker of a new
orientation towards the issue, in which the drug question starts to
be viewed as a matter of the administration or management of risk
across a population. From this point on, we see the notion of risk
become a key organising principle in the field, reflecting the wider
rise of risk within neo-liberal forms of governance, as famously cap-
tured in Beck’s (1992) landmark book Risk Society. And it is this that
reveals to us these longer-running family resemblances between
approaches. Put simply, since the mid-1960s, the drug problem has
been recast as a matter of risk factors – whether in relation to a
metaphorical ‘socially infectious disease’, a real contagious disease
(HIV), or criminal victimisation – which need to be monitored, con-
trolled and managed. Control strategies have been based on urging
and enjoining drug users to act prudentially, by making responsi-
ble choices about their consumption practices—for example, not
to share injecting equipment or to consent to attend treatment
under probation supervision. Here, we see very clearly the strategic
fit with the emergence of neo-liberalism which has been charac-
terised, in part, as a form of government that ‘seeks to govern not
through society but through the responsible and prudential choices
and actions of individuals’ (Dean, 1999, p. 134).
The criminal justice turn is, in this sense, merely the latest phase
within this long-running strategy, rather than an entirely new
direction as conventional accounts have suggested. But, clearly,
simply to diagnose drug policy as becoming risk-oriented does not
tell us on its own very much about the exact form it may take at any
given moment, as criminologist Richard Sparks observes in relation
to penal policy:
Even if it is true [. . .] that today major political arguments take
place on the terrain of risk, it in no way follows that we can know
in advance how those arguments will turn out, still less that they
will turn out identically in different national-political settings
[. . .] We can, for this reason, no more deduce the contemporary
condition of the penal realm from a totalising idea such as the
‘risk society’ than we formerly could form an undifferentiated
notion of ‘capitalism’, though both can be seen as crucial to its
analysis. (Sparks, 2001, pp. 161–162, emphasis in original)
In other words, identifying a ‘strategic coherence’ in drug policy
across a particular time-span cannot be the end of the story for our
attempts to understand policy development. Looking at the ‘big
picture’ can help us to unearth the underlying generative structure
in which policy is based but this is only the first step.
The politics of drug policy
One dimension of drug policy that we miss entirely when we
focus on the ‘big picture’ is the role and significance of politics.
The idea that the drug field is particularly susceptible to politici-
sation and political manipulation has considerable resonance for
anyone involved in it. The criminal justice turn is viewed by many
as one of the clearest examples of this, as politicians have sought to
tighten the screw on problem drug users by ratcheting up coercive
treatment measures for those going through the criminal justice
system. The Drugs Act 2005, for example, which contained sev-
eral such measures, was rushed through the parliamentary process
immediately before the General Election that year and was seen as
the product of exactly this kind of political populism (see Stevens,
2007). It is telling that the criminal justice components of the leg-
islation were described by the government as the ‘Tough Choices’
project, consciously echoing the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s
417
famous (and profoundly ‘political’) pledge in the 1990s to be ‘tough
on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
But what does ‘playing politics’ actually mean in the context
of drug policy? Drawing on the work of the great anthropologist
Mary Douglas, Richard Sparks has argued that terms like ‘poli-
tics’ and ‘populism’ are generally deployed in policy analysis in
‘decidedly thin and unilluminating’ ways which are ‘not them-
selves explanations’ but rather ‘are introduced when explanation
fails’ (Sparks, 2001, p. 172)—‘wheeled in after other explanations
are defeated’, as Douglas (1992, p. 167) puts it. In other words,
when a policy development appears not to make ‘rational’ sense,
it is dismissed as the result of politicians ‘playing to the gallery’. A
more fruitful approach, Sparks argues, is to understand the concept
of risk as an inherently political notion in which social anxieties
and cultural preoccupations are embedded. So instances of ‘politi-
cisation’ are not only to be expected but also may tell us much
about the organisation and values of particular communities or
societies.
Applied to drug policy analysis this suggests some important
lines of enquiry to follow. From this perspective, we would expect
that the construction in specific times and places of particular
aspects of the drug experience as risks would be shaped by the
prevailing cultural preoccupations of that time. Following Garland
(2006), I see the ‘cultural’ as referring to a distinctive aspect of social
relations which concerns attitudes, values, meanings, sensibilities
and so on. The politics of drug policy, in this sense, refers to the
ways in which the policy-making process interacts with, reflects
and reproduces these wider cultural meanings.
We can interpret the criminal justice turn, then, partly as a
specific instance of a more general cultural formation during this
period in which anxieties about crime and insecurity have risen to
the fore. Garland’s (2001) Culture of Control, Simon’s (2007) Govern-
ing Through Crime and the late Ericson’s (2007) Crime in an Insecure
World together make up a stellar criminological trilogy that seeks
to explain how anxieties about crime have led in recent decades
not only to the ‘heating up’ of penal policy but also to the ‘crim-
inalisation’ of social policy more broadly (Rodger, 2008). Viewed
in this light, we can better understand the politics of drug policy,
not in terms of populism or ‘playing to the gallery’, but rather as
embodying and relaying the widespread cultural preoccupations
of the time. The name of the ‘Tough Choices’ project, at first sight
arguably an exemplar of crass political populism, starts to look quite
different from this perspective. A Home Office factsheet explains
the project title:
Tough Choices was chosen as a name because it was felt to
succinctly describe the change in the consequences drug mis-
users face if they do not take advantage of the opportunities for
treatment and support that exist. (Home Office, 2006)
This can be read quite clearly as a contribution to a wider societal
conversation between state and citizens about mutual responsi-
bilities and expectations concerning what should be done about
perceived sources of insecurity like drug-driven crime. This is cer-
tainly about the politics of drug policy but not in the narrow sense
of that term.
I should clarify here that this type of argument does not amount
to a suggestion that drug policy is purely a political-cultural con-
struct, divorced from a material ‘reality’. There are certainly some
streams of social theories of risk, notably Foucauldian ones (e.g.
Dean, 1999), that would take that line but the more cultural orien-
tation towards risk that I have set out above, inspired by Douglas
(1992), engenders a strong focus on the political realm as a dis-
tinctive style of cultural engagement with ‘reality’. In my view, this
sheds light on a very significant dimension of the making of drug
policy.
418 T. Seddon / International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 415–419
Drug policy actors
Conventional historical scholarship has often sought to remind
us of the significance of individual actors in bringing about change.
For these scholars, to explain change over time requires us to inves-
tigate the role of specific actors in making decisions and taking
action. A similar, albeit less prominent, strand can also be found
within sociology. A good example here is Paul Rock’s series of
micro-sociological studies of criminal justice policy-making (e.g.
Rock, 1995, 1996). I argue that historical sociology also requires
such a focus if it is to provide a comprehensive account of change.
Applied to the study of drug policy, my contention is that the
micro-environments of policy-making are not merely reducible to
the playing out of larger structural or cultural forces. Rather, they
constitute a significant sphere of action which needs to be described
and accounted for. It follows that an explanatory account of policy
change will need to attempt to generate detailed descriptions of
the roles of individuals in the making of policy. What is required is
a form of historical recovery of the process of policy development.
For the study of contemporary or recent policy, this would typi-
cally be based on two main sets of empirical material: analysis of
documents (reports, memos, minutes of meetings, strategy docu-
ments, action plans, emails, etc.) and interviews with policy actors
(politicians, civil servants, political advisers, campaigners, policy
researchers, etc.).
But this is not the end of the story. Loader and Sparks (2004),
drawing on the work of Quentin Skinner (Skinner, 2002; Tully,
1988), suggest that we can and should aim to go beyond descriptive
accounts of the micro-processes of policy-making. Indeed, this is
self-evidently essential if we are to explain rather than just describe.
The central insight that Loader and Sparks (2004) take from Skin-
ner, drawing on Wittgenstein’s aphorism that ‘words are deeds’,
is that we should attempt to understand not only what policy
actors are saying but also what they are doing in saying it. In other
words, we need to try to uncover something of the motivations
and intentions of the range of actors involved in influencing and
shaping policy. This requires us to look at the social and political
context in which these actors engage in the various negotiations,
compromises and struggles out of which policy is made. Picking
up our ‘Tough Choices’ example again, we would be interested
in exploring how different actors interpreted the possibilities and
limits presented by the ‘political and institutional settings they
find themselves operating in’ (Loader & Sparks, 2004, p. 13) and
how, as a result, they encoded/decoded keywords like ‘tough’ and
‘choice’ in particular ways. Operating within the Home Office;
for example; the word ‘tough’ would no doubt have a distinc-
tive ‘meaning-in-use’ (Loader & Sparks, 2004, p. 13) which would
not necessarily be the same for actors based in other institutional
settings. According to Rothstein (2006), the concept of risk is a par-
ticularly useful analytical tool for understanding this kind of action
and decision-making within institutions, as risk has increasingly
colonized contemporary governance (see also Rothstein, Huber, &
Gaskell, 2006).
We can see then that a focus on policy actors is also critical
to our historical sociology of drug policy change. We cannot gen-
erate a comprehensive explanation for change without engaging
with these micro-processes of action and decision-making. This
also points to an important theoretical matter that I will pick up
in conclusion.
Conclusion
So what have we learnt about the potential for historical soci-
ology to help us explain drug policy change? We can think of it as
having three domains or axes or levels.
1. There is what is best described as a macro or structural level. This
refers to the attempt to locate drug policy developments in the
wider context of structural shifts in society. So, I have argued
that we can understand the criminal justice turn partly as a man-
ifestation of the transition to neo-liberalism in which risk-based
forms of governance have become central.
2. There is also a cultural or political dimension. It is here that we
can attempt to understand the politics of drug policy and public
discourse about it, both of which have long been recognised as
vital parts of the story.
3. There is also a more contingent or micro dimension. This concerns
the role that individual actors play in shaping policy decisions
and action. This should offer more than simply a narrative
account of ‘who did what, when and where’ in the policy-making
process (although that descriptive or narrative element is impor-
tant and interesting in its own right). It should also seek to
generate a contextualized account of the motivations and inten-
tions of individual actors involved in influencing or making
policy (see Loader & Sparks, 2004, pp. 11–13).
I described these three areas above with deliberate impreci-
sion as domains, axes or levels. Which of these terms we choose
is of some significance. The term ‘levels’ implies a hierarchical
relationship of some kind; ‘axes’ suggests a set of intersecting rela-
tionships operating across different dimensions; whilst ‘domains’
carries the idea of relatively autonomous fields in the same plane.
The critical question all this points to is this: how can we concep-
tualise the interplay or relationships between these three aspects
of our explanatory framework? This is a complex question. Socio-
logically minded readers will have noticed that it is a version of
one of the oldest and thorniest questions within sociology con-
cerning the theory of action: what is the relationship between
structure, culture and agency? I do not claim to have a definitive
answer here, although my inclination is to think of structure and
culture as setting the boundaries or parameters within which pol-
icy actors operate (and for this reason, I slightly favour the term
‘axes’). Garland (1990, p. 128) points to the crux of the matter:
Structures do not work all by themselves, somehow managing
to control all the outcomes by automatic means. Instead, it is
a matter of decision-making agents [. . .] who consciously per-
ceive the bounds of political possibility and adjust their actions
within them, sometimes struggling to change the rules of the
game, more often making compromises with the constraints
which they face. This argument suggests that structures are
made effective – or are made to change – through the medium
of human action and the specific struggles and outcomes which
such action will always involve.
In other words, the three areas of my explanatory theory are
not entirely separate but are, in fact, inter-linked and mutually
constitutive. This chimes with Giddens’ (1984) well-known the-
ory of structuration in which he argues that structure and agency
are two sides of the same coin, rather than separate spheres (see
also Archer, 1995). In a similar vein, Loader and Sparks (2004) argue
for a nuanced reading of the interplay between these domains in
which neither the role of individuals nor the realm of culture are
reduced to being seen as merely ‘epiphenomenal to the master pat-
terns of structural change’ (2004, p. 16). They position the concepts
of ‘politics’ and ‘political culture’ at the heart of their account of this
complex interplay.
Assuming you are persuaded that my approach to historical soci-
ology could be used to help explain the development of drug policy,
you may still have one unanswered question: what new things
might we learn from such an analytical strategy? Clearly this will
 T. Seddon / International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 415–419
vary depending on the substantive area of drug policy we choose
to look at but I think there are potentially three general benefits.
First, it should help us to understand the connections between our
own specialized field of drugs and the ‘bigger picture’ of politics
and social change. Seeing these connections can only deepen and
enhance our understanding of what is going on in our own cor-
ner of the social world. Second, it can open our eyes to where the
levers for change lie. A better understanding, for example, of the
nature of the policy-making process and its relation to the cultural
and political realms could help the development of more sophisti-
cated campaigns for drug policy reform. Third, an appreciation of
the ways in which policy is constructed, and how it varies signif-
icantly over time, should alert us to the critical point that future
change is always possible. What seems inevitable or fixed today,
did not necessarily seem so at certain points in the past—and so it
need not be again in the future.
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