Drug abuse: from subjectivity to legitimacy through psychiatric discourse

Abstract

Drug abuse has been considered a medical issue by practitioners of medicine since the 20^th century. Several explanatory theories and practices directed at both the treatment of addicted individuals and the minimization of the damage caused by the use of such substances have been developed. However, medical discourse is still dominated by the theory that the mere use of psychoactive substances a problem, even though there have been several attempts to understand the phenomena related to the use of drugs through theoretical models associated with cultural issues. The views imposed by modern medicine continue to expand because of value judgments based on the discourse on drug abuse. In this paper, we analyze the impositions of the medical discourses on other fields of knowledge, including the social sciences and humanities, regarding the relationship between psychoactive substance use (cultural practices) and addiction (disease). We advance a thesis that the examination of drug use can and must be focused from other points of view that do not reduce the issue to the assessment of the disease but that rather analyze the relevant social and cultural issues.