The concept of ‘the user’ or ‘person who uses drugs’ is central to how we talk about drug supply and distribution. It implies a singular individual who has a continuous relationship with drugs and a defined trajectory through which they become drug experienced. The non human elements of drug use …

When the whole world has been opened to capital, there is nowhere to expand into. There are no more sources of cheap labour or raw materials, and no more ways to mechanise complex tasks. You can only expand inward, through every more fiendish financial engineering, engineered solutions to non-problems such …

I want to engage with a type of argument that is self-undermining. The months after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 birthed an immoral decision. The USA at the highest level began publicly legitimising torture as a means to an end in the War on Terror. As …

One of the annoying things academic competition does is push us to develop elaborate ways of not quite saying what is staring us in the face. There is a tendency to produce theoretical solutions to problems that only exist because there is something we want to avoid saying, in this …

…really just one social fact Crime is behaviour that is intentional, measurable and directly harmful. The only reason to care about crime is that it gets in the way of the good life. Ignore anything about obeying the law for its own sake because otherwise our moral sphere will crumble. …

Never ask me ‘do you think this is fence electrified? Are these berries poisonous? Is this knife super-sharp?’ Or somesuch. I know only one path to knowledge and am the sort of person who likes to find out what something is by jabbing it with my finger/licking or eating it …

This post is inspired by an invitation from Andreas Hackl to a workshop organised by himself and Margie Cheesman on The risks of working online: refugees in the internet economy, supported by the UNHCR. The digital society has various used for refugees beyond the usual. Digital traces might be used …

This is the draft of a paper I am presenting at the International Forum on Drug Policy, hosted by the International Center for Drug Policy Studies at Shanghai University. The theme of the forum is  ‘The Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids Crises: New Challenges and New Responses’. Introduction: the present …

Deep time understanding is why Finland now sits atop a network of nuclear bunkers that can house most of the population. It is why media savvy elite Russians can talk in a liberal discourse and be supporters of what to outsiders is violent Russian nationalism at the same time. It …