Habits: Remaking Addiction

What is 'addiction'? What does it say about us, our social arrangements and our political preoccupations? How are ideas about and responses to addiction changing, and what is at stake in these developments? These are the questions this book seeks to answer. Using Science and Technology Studies theory and an impressive range of international empirical data including interviews, policy documents, media texts and scientific literature, this book traces three burgeoning areas of addiction attribution and concern: the "much feared" 'meth' epidemic, new concerns over youth 'binge drinking', and the rise of 'food addiction'. How is addiction being remade in new debates about stimulant drugs, alcohol, and 'highly palatable' foods such as sugar? How might the primary source of accepted wisdom on drugs – scientific knowledge – contribute to these definitions? Are there points at which the sciences (and the public discourses that rely on them) trip over their own blind spots or repeat unexamined assumptions, inadvertently undoing their own certainties about drugs and addiction? As this book finds, addiction is habit in more ways than one.

Suzanne Fraser is Associate Professor at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Australia. She leads the Social Studies of Addiction Concepts Research Program and has published widely on drug use, health, the body and science.

David Moore is Professor at the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, Australia. He leads the Ethnographic Research Program and has written extensively on the social and cultural contexts of alcohol and other drug use.

Helen Keane is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She has written extensively on alcohol and other drug use, pharmaceutical drugs, understandings of addiction and harm reduction. She is the author of What's Wrong with Addiction?

Introduction
1. Models of Addiction
2. Stabilising Stimulants: Amphetamine Dependence and Methamphetamine Addiction
3. Making Methamphetamine in Drug Policy and Consumer Accounts
4. A field in Disarray? The Constitution of Alcohol Addiction in Expert Debates
5. Assembling Alcohol Problems: Young People and Drinking
6. Junk: the Neuroscience of Food Addiction and Obesity
7. Stepping to the Side of Addiction: Everyday Realities of Overeating and Obesity
Conclusion: a Multiverse of Habits – 'Addicting' Science, Policy and Experience