Julia Loughlin

The Invention of Science

Social and cultural studies of science revolutionized our understanding of science during the last quarter of the 20th century. This achievement has been accomplished in the face of great resistance and at great cost to the critics and theorists of science. In this paper, we explore some of the reasons for the resistance to and costs of analyzing science as a social fact. At the same time, we try to regain some of the momentum science studies achieved in the 1960s and 1970s. Our approach is to consider the consequences of bringing science into the dialogue on orientalism and occidentalism. We discuss the invention of science in terms of the traditions against or in opposition to which it was invented. Science, no matter how we define it, is intertwined with the industrial, and military technologies that grounded European movement into and around the world. Social theory is not only a route to critique and theory in science studies, but also a route for saving science as an intellectual enterprise.

Seeing Defective Individuals

We set out to understand adolescent worlds. The research began by locating these worlds through participant observation conducted by fieldworkers who accompanied adolescents in their schools, neighbourhoods and friendship groups. The study continued by means of interviews in which the line of questioning assumed the existence both of social worlds and of the interviewee’s involvement in those worlds.1 In contrast, most researchers who investigate adolescent drug use are looking for entities other than social worlds. Operating from the epidemiological and political models discussed in Chapter 1, they expect personality variables, physiological effects and deviants. Their experiments and surveys deliver these entities to them as surely as our participant observation and interviewing bring us social worlds.

How Adolescents Use Drugs

We have seen that the answers to the question of why adolescents use drugs vary in terms of the patterns of use; the reasons they themselves give are both social, in the case of boredom and custom, and individual, in the case of depression and self-control. Listening to adolescents talk about their drug use and their observations of others’ use immediately suggests the importance of understanding how drugs are used, that is, the social routines which define appropriate drug use and the instances in which drugs are used primarily to achieve some desired physiological change in the user.

Seeing Social Worlds

We have argued that mainstream drug research begins by looking for and therefore seeing individuals whose psychological or social deficiencies explain their use of drugs. The alternative perspective which informs our research views individuals in terms of their social locations. We take a more inclusive sociological perspective than that of the drug-abuse literature, which defines location as a collection of demographic characteristics (e.g. Lukoff, 1980: 204). Nevertheless, the drug-abuse literature does contain hints of what such a perspective would include. Survey researchers find, for instance, that adolescents who take drugs are typically involved in other delinquent activities as well (Robins and Wish, 1977; Johnston et al., 1978; O’Donnell et al., 1976). They also find that the earlier the opportunity to use marijuana, the more likely it is that a teenager eventually will use the drug (Miller, 1981), and that frequent users of marijuana are more likely to use other drugs than are occasional users (Johnston, 1980).

Why Adolescents Avoid Drugs: Light Users and Non-users

The preceding chapters have established, if nothing else, the ubiquity of drugs in the world of those adolescents who use them. We have concentrated on those who are heavy users, who take drugs for granted as a part of social life and who have mastered the techniques for obtaining and using drugs. In this chapter we will look at those who do not use drugs, or who use them very infrequendy and with caution. A reasonable if ironic question to ask about adolescents who are non-users or light users is: how come they do not take drugs?

A Methodology for Listening

In the following chapters we will allow 100 adolescents to speak for themselves. We will present several quotes from each of them and identify similarities and differences among their perceptions and behaviours. We will use their own words, not responses they have selected from multiple choices on a survey, but our discussions with them were directed and structured, not casual conversations. The kind of detailed discussion and multiple comparisons achieved in this study required an innovative methodology. This chapter describes that methodology: how the adolescents were chosen and interviewed, the management of the voluminous data that resulted, the process used in selecting excerpts from the interviews, and how to evaluate adolescents’ assertions about their lives.

Distributing and Understanding Drugs

In the analysis of why and how adolescents use drugs it is clear that they rely on an elaborate belief system about the immediate and long-term effects of different types of drugs and that drug-taking implies social rituals for predicting and modifying such effects. In this chapter we will review adolescents’ knowledge and beliefs about drug use. First, however, we will describe how they obtain the drugs they use. In reviewing the extensive discussions of drug-related behaviour which the subjects provided we found not only rich descriptions of their folk pharmacology but also a surprising omission: there were very few references to the difficulty of obtaining drugs or to fear of arrest when purchasing drugs. The process of obtaining drugs was taken for granted as a routine transaction which involved, for almost all purchasers, contact only with people they knew well, at least by reputation.

Competing Explanations: Epidemiology, Politics, Social Worlds

Adolescent drug use scares adults. The spectres of addiction, psychosis, alienation and rebellion provoke dramatic responses: legislators enact laws and create control agencies; therapists invent treatment and prevention programmes; parents worry and try to protect their children; social scientists conduct studies; and all of these efforts are documented, evaluated and modified. In all of these activities, however, the perspective of the adolescents themselves is neglected. They, too, are concerned about the dangers and are influenced by these controls, but their concerns are of a different sort. They are the ones who choose which drugs, if any, to try, who decide which use patterns to settle on, and who experience the effects of drug use. Our goal in this study is to understand the ways in which drug use is a part of the adolescent social world — the uses, meanings and consequences of drug use as adolescents themselves report them. The data are extensive interviews with 100 12- to 20-year-old residents of a northeastern American city, and observations of their interactions with each other in school and in their neighbourhoods.