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There are only three other books on drugs and cinema published prior to Susan Boyd's Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the United States (2008). Most significantly, Michael Starks' illustrated history Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness (1982) looks at films from around the world. Boyd examines Canadian "drug" films, as well as British and U.S. productions, from 1912 to the present.
"I also write about alternative films and stoner flicks," she says, "and I include a chapter on women and maternal drug use. I also include films from 1980 to the 2006. My perspective is quite different due to my focus on drug prohibition which emerged at the same time as the discovery of film. Their histories intersect in interesting ways. I am less interested in the portrayal of each drug, rather my focus in on war on drugs narratives (and ruptures) and how cinematic representations of illegal drug use and trafficking (regardless of drug type) are associated and linked to discourses about the Other, nation building, law and order, and punishment."
Boyd says some of the most significant Canadian drug films are: High (1967) directed by Larry Kent; Curtis's Charm (1995) directed by L'Ecuyer; The Barbarian Invasions (2003) directed by D. Arcand; (2006); On the Corner (2003) directed by N. Geary; and Trailer Park Boys (2006) directed by M. Clattenburg. Her favorites are The Barbarian Invasions (2003) and Trailer Park Boys (2006) -- and their 2004 Showcase episode titled Trailer Park Boys X-Mas Special (2004). Favourite joint productions are Atlantic City (1980) directed by L. Malle; and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) directed by D. Leiner.
Chinese Opium Den, produced in 1894 is considered to be the first drug film. It was a half-minute long silent film (Kinetograph) featured at penny arcades. The film was made for Thomas Edison's film studio Black Maria. Its popularity sparked a host of other "opium" films but unfortunately only stills of Chinese Opium Den now exist. "Getting permission to include film stills was an education and it took months to figure out the copyright issue," she says. "I was able to include films stills from the joint Canadian film, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."
Some of the films stills included in her book are from Broken Blossoms, 1919; Narcotic, 1934; The Pace that Kills, 1936; Assassin of Youth, 1935; The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955; The Trip, 1967 Easy Rider, 1969; The Panic in Needle Park, 1971; Trainspotting, 1996; Gridlock'd, 1997; Cleopatra Jones, 1973; The French Connection, 1971; New Jack City, 1991; Maria Full of Grace, 2004; Reefer Madness, 1936; Valley of the Dolls, 1967; Postcard from the Edge, 1990; Blow, 2001; Marihuana, The Weed with Roots from Hell; Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, 2004; Layer Cake, 2004; and Drugstore Cowboy, 1989.
As a long-time community activist and resident of B.C., living in Vancouver's east end, Susan Boyd was an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and the Department of Women's Studies at SFU before becoming an Associate Professor of Sociology/Criminology at Saint Mary's University. She subsequently became a professor in the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria.
Susan Boyd has an M.A. in clinical psychology from Antioch University and a Ph.D. in criminology from Simon Fraser University. Boyd has worked with harm reduction and anti-drug war groups. From 1992 to 1999 she was an outreach worker with Drug and Alcohol Support for Women (DAMS) and Keano Women's Healing Circle. For the last three years she has been working with SNAP (SALOME/NAOMI Association of Patients), who meet at VANDU (Vancouver Network of Drug Users) every week. Her academic interests are focused mainly on drug policy and law, maternal drug use, reproductive autonomy, and media representations. She was Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia, University of Victoria when she co-edited With Child with Lenora Marcellus. Susan Boyd was an Associate Professor in Studies in Policy and Practice at the University of Victoria when she published From Witches to Crack Moms, her feminist analysis of the impact drug law and policy have on women in the U.S. compared with women in Britain and Canada. The drug war's impact on women and indigenous peoples of Colombia is also considered. Since then Boyd worked with Bud Osborn and Donald MacPherson to chronicle the history of resistance in the Downtown Eastside for harm reduction and a supervised injection site. More recently she has been examining media representations of criminalized drugs and the people who use them. Boyd was awarded the Distinguished Professor Award at the University of Victoria in 2014 for her research, teaching, community service, and publications on drug policy.
Co-written with Connie Carter, a senior policy analyst for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice (University of Toronto Press, 2014) documents fifteen years of scare tactics about marijuana growing fueled by a few vocal spokespeople, the RCMP and media. After wide-reaching analysis, Boyd and Carter conclude in the final chapter such scare tactics have little merit. They cite the findings of the federal government's justice department's own study on marijuana grow ops that challenges claims made by the RCMP and media regarding organized crime, violence and public safety. That justice department report is corroborated by scholarly research--but the justice department study was never released. Boyd and Carter obtained a copy of the unreleased study from a reporter who received it following a Freedom of Information request.
"The second important finding," says Boyd, " concerns civil initiatives and by-laws, municipal multi-partner initiatives that have sprung up all over B.C. and elsewhere since 2004. There is little oversight of these initiatives as they are outside criminal justice. BC Hydro, the city government, police, RCMP, firefighters and electrical inspectors all work to identify high electrical usage, and then enter homes without a warrant, and there is an assumption of guilt rather than innocence. These homeowners are fined regardless of whether or not evidence of marijuana growing is found."
Specifically, on page 146, Killer Weed discusses the so-called "smart meters" that have been forced upon BC Hydro customers.
According to the authors of Killer Weed, a fifteen-year drug scare about marijuana grow ops has helped to facilitate changes in federal law (mandatory minimum sentencing for some drug offences, including growing more than five plants (resulting in six-month jail sentences), as well as changes in the medical marijuana program (eliminating personal growing and designated growers), provincial legislation, and civil by-laws and multi-partner initiatives.
"We question these changes," says Boyd, "and the turn to law and order responses, many that contravene charter rights, and the impact on vulnerable populations such as youth, aboriginal people and the poor."
Up until the early 1950s, heroin was a legal prescription medicine in Canada, used since its discovery in 1898 for pain relief and as a cough suppressant. Then it became an illegal substance and users faced punishment and disrepute. Criminalizing drug users has been a failure says Boyd in Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood $30). In this history of Canadian heroin regulation over the last two centuries, Boyd shows that flawed ideas about heroin and drug users have shaped drug laws. She turns instead to documentary evidence, the experiences of people who have actually used heroin, and harm-reduction advocates to shine a light on the violence of drug policy that uses prohibition and criminalization as the main response to drug use. Instead, Boyd recommends following the ideas and movements headed by drug users themselves, which is more likely to lead to collective good health and well-being.
DATE OF BIRTH: 11/14/53
EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: professor at University of Victoria
BOOKS:
Mothers and Illicit Drugs: Transcending the Myths (1999, University of Toronto Press)
(Ab)Using Power: The Canadian Experience (2001, Fernwood)
Toxic Criminology: Environment, Law, and the State (2002, Fernwood)
From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law, and Policy (2004, Carolina Academic Press)
With Child. Substance Use During Pregnancy: A Woman-Centred Approach (Fernwood, 2007). Edited by Susan C. Boyd and Lenora Marcellus. 136pp ISBN: 978-1-55266-218-2 $17.95
Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the United States (Routledge, 2008)
Raise Shit! Social Action Saving Lives (Fernwood, 2009 $26.95). With Bud Osborn and Donald MacPherson.
Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice (University of Toronto Press, 2014) $28.95 9781442612143. Co-author with Connie Carter, a senior policy analyst for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition
More Harm Than Good (Fernwood, 2016) co-authored with Donald MacPherson and Connie Carter
Busted: An Illustrated History of Drug Prohibition in Canada (Fernwood, 2017)
Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood, 2022) $30 978-1773635163
[BCBW 2022] "Drugs"
Heroin: An Illustrated History
by Susan Boyd (Fernwood $30)
Heroin, discovered in 1898, was heralded as a pain reliever and up to the early 1950s was prescribed for therapeutic use in Canada. BC BookWorld interviews Susan Boyd about HEROIN: An Illustrated History.
Recent BC coroner’s report stated 2,224 people died of suspected overdoses in the province in 2021, more than in any previous year. Toxic drug deaths were declared an emergency in 2016 by the provincial health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, yet more than 9,400 people in total have died from illicit drug overdoses between then and now.
Experts like activist and researcher Susan Boyd say our drug laws and social prejudices have much to do with these deaths.
Her eleventh book, Heroin: An Illustrated History examines the history of heroin and the harm done by criminalizing heroin users (and other drug users), leading to the overdose epidemic still underway.
BC BookWorld: How did you get involved in helping addicts?
Susan Boyd: I don’t use the term “addict” because it’s meaning is not clear and it’s often linked to negative stereotypes and discrimination. I prefer to say: people who use heroin, or people who use criminalized drugs. Because not everyone who uses a criminalized drug has a “habit”; many are casual users.
I first started thinking about drug policy when I was a teenager in the 1960s and 70s. Like many youths in the counter culture, I experimented with criminalized drugs. I could not figure out why certain drugs and the people who used them were seen as criminals and deviants. Especially since drugs like tobacco and alcohol (legal drugs) were more harmful. I continue to be curious about the purpose of drug prohibition or the war on drugs. Who does it serve?
As an adult I helped to found and work in one of the first harm reduction services for mothers and their children in Vancouver in the early 1990s. I saw the impact of our drug laws played out in a devastating way in the lives of the women I knew.
Later, I chose to study the history of drug prohibition more deeply. Why did prohibition emerge? What are the consequences of drug prohibition?
BCBW: You argue that our drug laws do more harm than good. Please explain.
SB: Drug prohibitionist laws negatively contribute to the very factors that they claim they will reduce. For example, criminalizing heroin and not providing a safe supply for those most affected can lead to a poisoned, unregulated, illegal heroin market and fatal drug overdoses.
Many of the harms we attribute to heroin use since criminalization (such as a higher risk of overdose and disease infection) actually stem from prohibition [which means heroin has to be bought on the illegal market and people don’t know when they are getting toxic heroin that can lead to an overdose].
Drug prohibition as a whole is not driven by evidence of its efficacy in dealing with drug use nor “addiction” but rather by violence, a growing global illegal and sometimes violent market and a poisoned drug supply.
Since their inception, harsh drug laws have been touted as a way to stop drug trafficking and importation of illegal drugs; yet, the focus of law enforcement is on people who use drugs. And the majority of drug offences in Canada have been for personal possession, not drug trafficking or importing drugs.
BCBW: Give an example of how our past ideas about heroin and drug users led to “bad” laws?
SB: In Heroin, I challenge ideas about addiction and “addicts.” What do we associate with these labels? How do these labels create discrimination and stigma?
Not all people who use heroin or other criminalized drugs use regularly, nor are they habitual users. In fact, most people who use criminalized drugs are occasional users.
However, in Canada, following criminalization in 1908, abstinence from criminalized drugs was advocated as the solution to drug use, and if that failed, prison was seen as the solution. Canada did not set up narcotic clinics where doctors can prescribe legal drugs for people who use narcotics regularly—i.e., a legal safe supply. Nor were publicly funded drug treatment services set up.
Those people labelled criminal addicts were seen as criminals first and foremost, and their use of heroin (or other drugs) was considered secondary. Prison time, not drug treatment, was considered the appropriate penalty for personal possession of an illegal drug such as heroin.
Since the 1960s, the majority of the drug services and treatments set up in Canada draw from the disease model of addiction (where addiction is seen as a biological, life-long condition)—sobriety is required or seen as the end goal of treatment.
I argue in Heroin that repeated and regular drug use does not need to be understood as criminal, or a fixed pathological identity or a “neurobiological condition.” Alternatively, addiction could be understood instead as a habit. Researchers Suzanne Fraser, David Moore and Helen Keane examine the concept of habit. They define it as: “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up ... [such as,] he has an annoying habit of interrupting me [and/or] good eating habits.” So, they say, “habit is neither good nor bad.” Yet, people who use illegal drugs such as heroin continue to be seen and treated as abnormal, disordered and criminal.
BCBW: Why do you find better solutions in harm reduction policies?
SB: Harm reduction is a response to punitive drug laws, to save lives. Harm reduction is not a rejection of abstinence, but it is not the sole objective of services or drug treatment. Harm reduction advocates assert that non-judgmental and practical services can reduce harms.
Harm reduction advocates also see drug use and services on a continuum: for some people, abstinence-based drug treatment or twelve-step programs work best; for others, alternative options provide essential support, such as education, drug substitution programs and overdose prevention sites. These services save lives.
I argue that ending drug prohibition, ending punitive policies and laws and providing a safe legal supply supports life rather than destroying lives.
978-1773635163
(BCBW 2022)
"I also write about alternative films and stoner flicks," she says, "and I include a chapter on women and maternal drug use. I also include films from 1980 to the 2006. My perspective is quite different due to my focus on drug prohibition which emerged at the same time as the discovery of film. Their histories intersect in interesting ways. I am less interested in the portrayal of each drug, rather my focus in on war on drugs narratives (and ruptures) and how cinematic representations of illegal drug use and trafficking (regardless of drug type) are associated and linked to discourses about the Other, nation building, law and order, and punishment."
Boyd says some of the most significant Canadian drug films are: High (1967) directed by Larry Kent; Curtis's Charm (1995) directed by L'Ecuyer; The Barbarian Invasions (2003) directed by D. Arcand; (2006); On the Corner (2003) directed by N. Geary; and Trailer Park Boys (2006) directed by M. Clattenburg. Her favorites are The Barbarian Invasions (2003) and Trailer Park Boys (2006) -- and their 2004 Showcase episode titled Trailer Park Boys X-Mas Special (2004). Favourite joint productions are Atlantic City (1980) directed by L. Malle; and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) directed by D. Leiner.
Chinese Opium Den, produced in 1894 is considered to be the first drug film. It was a half-minute long silent film (Kinetograph) featured at penny arcades. The film was made for Thomas Edison's film studio Black Maria. Its popularity sparked a host of other "opium" films but unfortunately only stills of Chinese Opium Den now exist. "Getting permission to include film stills was an education and it took months to figure out the copyright issue," she says. "I was able to include films stills from the joint Canadian film, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."
Some of the films stills included in her book are from Broken Blossoms, 1919; Narcotic, 1934; The Pace that Kills, 1936; Assassin of Youth, 1935; The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955; The Trip, 1967 Easy Rider, 1969; The Panic in Needle Park, 1971; Trainspotting, 1996; Gridlock'd, 1997; Cleopatra Jones, 1973; The French Connection, 1971; New Jack City, 1991; Maria Full of Grace, 2004; Reefer Madness, 1936; Valley of the Dolls, 1967; Postcard from the Edge, 1990; Blow, 2001; Marihuana, The Weed with Roots from Hell; Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, 2004; Layer Cake, 2004; and Drugstore Cowboy, 1989.
As a long-time community activist and resident of B.C., living in Vancouver's east end, Susan Boyd was an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and the Department of Women's Studies at SFU before becoming an Associate Professor of Sociology/Criminology at Saint Mary's University. She subsequently became a professor in the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria.
Susan Boyd has an M.A. in clinical psychology from Antioch University and a Ph.D. in criminology from Simon Fraser University. Boyd has worked with harm reduction and anti-drug war groups. From 1992 to 1999 she was an outreach worker with Drug and Alcohol Support for Women (DAMS) and Keano Women's Healing Circle. For the last three years she has been working with SNAP (SALOME/NAOMI Association of Patients), who meet at VANDU (Vancouver Network of Drug Users) every week. Her academic interests are focused mainly on drug policy and law, maternal drug use, reproductive autonomy, and media representations. She was Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia, University of Victoria when she co-edited With Child with Lenora Marcellus. Susan Boyd was an Associate Professor in Studies in Policy and Practice at the University of Victoria when she published From Witches to Crack Moms, her feminist analysis of the impact drug law and policy have on women in the U.S. compared with women in Britain and Canada. The drug war's impact on women and indigenous peoples of Colombia is also considered. Since then Boyd worked with Bud Osborn and Donald MacPherson to chronicle the history of resistance in the Downtown Eastside for harm reduction and a supervised injection site. More recently she has been examining media representations of criminalized drugs and the people who use them. Boyd was awarded the Distinguished Professor Award at the University of Victoria in 2014 for her research, teaching, community service, and publications on drug policy.
Co-written with Connie Carter, a senior policy analyst for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice (University of Toronto Press, 2014) documents fifteen years of scare tactics about marijuana growing fueled by a few vocal spokespeople, the RCMP and media. After wide-reaching analysis, Boyd and Carter conclude in the final chapter such scare tactics have little merit. They cite the findings of the federal government's justice department's own study on marijuana grow ops that challenges claims made by the RCMP and media regarding organized crime, violence and public safety. That justice department report is corroborated by scholarly research--but the justice department study was never released. Boyd and Carter obtained a copy of the unreleased study from a reporter who received it following a Freedom of Information request.
"The second important finding," says Boyd, " concerns civil initiatives and by-laws, municipal multi-partner initiatives that have sprung up all over B.C. and elsewhere since 2004. There is little oversight of these initiatives as they are outside criminal justice. BC Hydro, the city government, police, RCMP, firefighters and electrical inspectors all work to identify high electrical usage, and then enter homes without a warrant, and there is an assumption of guilt rather than innocence. These homeowners are fined regardless of whether or not evidence of marijuana growing is found."
Specifically, on page 146, Killer Weed discusses the so-called "smart meters" that have been forced upon BC Hydro customers.
According to the authors of Killer Weed, a fifteen-year drug scare about marijuana grow ops has helped to facilitate changes in federal law (mandatory minimum sentencing for some drug offences, including growing more than five plants (resulting in six-month jail sentences), as well as changes in the medical marijuana program (eliminating personal growing and designated growers), provincial legislation, and civil by-laws and multi-partner initiatives.
"We question these changes," says Boyd, "and the turn to law and order responses, many that contravene charter rights, and the impact on vulnerable populations such as youth, aboriginal people and the poor."
Up until the early 1950s, heroin was a legal prescription medicine in Canada, used since its discovery in 1898 for pain relief and as a cough suppressant. Then it became an illegal substance and users faced punishment and disrepute. Criminalizing drug users has been a failure says Boyd in Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood $30). In this history of Canadian heroin regulation over the last two centuries, Boyd shows that flawed ideas about heroin and drug users have shaped drug laws. She turns instead to documentary evidence, the experiences of people who have actually used heroin, and harm-reduction advocates to shine a light on the violence of drug policy that uses prohibition and criminalization as the main response to drug use. Instead, Boyd recommends following the ideas and movements headed by drug users themselves, which is more likely to lead to collective good health and well-being.
DATE OF BIRTH: 11/14/53
EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: professor at University of Victoria
BOOKS:
Mothers and Illicit Drugs: Transcending the Myths (1999, University of Toronto Press)
(Ab)Using Power: The Canadian Experience (2001, Fernwood)
Toxic Criminology: Environment, Law, and the State (2002, Fernwood)
From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law, and Policy (2004, Carolina Academic Press)
With Child. Substance Use During Pregnancy: A Woman-Centred Approach (Fernwood, 2007). Edited by Susan C. Boyd and Lenora Marcellus. 136pp ISBN: 978-1-55266-218-2 $17.95
Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the United States (Routledge, 2008)
Raise Shit! Social Action Saving Lives (Fernwood, 2009 $26.95). With Bud Osborn and Donald MacPherson.
Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice (University of Toronto Press, 2014) $28.95 9781442612143. Co-author with Connie Carter, a senior policy analyst for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition
More Harm Than Good (Fernwood, 2016) co-authored with Donald MacPherson and Connie Carter
Busted: An Illustrated History of Drug Prohibition in Canada (Fernwood, 2017)
Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood, 2022) $30 978-1773635163
[BCBW 2022] "Drugs"
INTERVIEW
Heroin: An Illustrated History
by Susan Boyd (Fernwood $30)
Heroin, discovered in 1898, was heralded as a pain reliever and up to the early 1950s was prescribed for therapeutic use in Canada. BC BookWorld interviews Susan Boyd about HEROIN: An Illustrated History.
Recent BC coroner’s report stated 2,224 people died of suspected overdoses in the province in 2021, more than in any previous year. Toxic drug deaths were declared an emergency in 2016 by the provincial health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, yet more than 9,400 people in total have died from illicit drug overdoses between then and now.
Experts like activist and researcher Susan Boyd say our drug laws and social prejudices have much to do with these deaths.
Her eleventh book, Heroin: An Illustrated History examines the history of heroin and the harm done by criminalizing heroin users (and other drug users), leading to the overdose epidemic still underway.
BC BookWorld: How did you get involved in helping addicts?
Susan Boyd: I don’t use the term “addict” because it’s meaning is not clear and it’s often linked to negative stereotypes and discrimination. I prefer to say: people who use heroin, or people who use criminalized drugs. Because not everyone who uses a criminalized drug has a “habit”; many are casual users.
I first started thinking about drug policy when I was a teenager in the 1960s and 70s. Like many youths in the counter culture, I experimented with criminalized drugs. I could not figure out why certain drugs and the people who used them were seen as criminals and deviants. Especially since drugs like tobacco and alcohol (legal drugs) were more harmful. I continue to be curious about the purpose of drug prohibition or the war on drugs. Who does it serve?
As an adult I helped to found and work in one of the first harm reduction services for mothers and their children in Vancouver in the early 1990s. I saw the impact of our drug laws played out in a devastating way in the lives of the women I knew.
Later, I chose to study the history of drug prohibition more deeply. Why did prohibition emerge? What are the consequences of drug prohibition?
BCBW: You argue that our drug laws do more harm than good. Please explain.
SB: Drug prohibitionist laws negatively contribute to the very factors that they claim they will reduce. For example, criminalizing heroin and not providing a safe supply for those most affected can lead to a poisoned, unregulated, illegal heroin market and fatal drug overdoses.
Many of the harms we attribute to heroin use since criminalization (such as a higher risk of overdose and disease infection) actually stem from prohibition [which means heroin has to be bought on the illegal market and people don’t know when they are getting toxic heroin that can lead to an overdose].
Drug prohibition as a whole is not driven by evidence of its efficacy in dealing with drug use nor “addiction” but rather by violence, a growing global illegal and sometimes violent market and a poisoned drug supply.
Since their inception, harsh drug laws have been touted as a way to stop drug trafficking and importation of illegal drugs; yet, the focus of law enforcement is on people who use drugs. And the majority of drug offences in Canada have been for personal possession, not drug trafficking or importing drugs.
BCBW: Give an example of how our past ideas about heroin and drug users led to “bad” laws?
SB: In Heroin, I challenge ideas about addiction and “addicts.” What do we associate with these labels? How do these labels create discrimination and stigma?
Not all people who use heroin or other criminalized drugs use regularly, nor are they habitual users. In fact, most people who use criminalized drugs are occasional users.
However, in Canada, following criminalization in 1908, abstinence from criminalized drugs was advocated as the solution to drug use, and if that failed, prison was seen as the solution. Canada did not set up narcotic clinics where doctors can prescribe legal drugs for people who use narcotics regularly—i.e., a legal safe supply. Nor were publicly funded drug treatment services set up.
Those people labelled criminal addicts were seen as criminals first and foremost, and their use of heroin (or other drugs) was considered secondary. Prison time, not drug treatment, was considered the appropriate penalty for personal possession of an illegal drug such as heroin.
Since the 1960s, the majority of the drug services and treatments set up in Canada draw from the disease model of addiction (where addiction is seen as a biological, life-long condition)—sobriety is required or seen as the end goal of treatment.
I argue in Heroin that repeated and regular drug use does not need to be understood as criminal, or a fixed pathological identity or a “neurobiological condition.” Alternatively, addiction could be understood instead as a habit. Researchers Suzanne Fraser, David Moore and Helen Keane examine the concept of habit. They define it as: “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up ... [such as,] he has an annoying habit of interrupting me [and/or] good eating habits.” So, they say, “habit is neither good nor bad.” Yet, people who use illegal drugs such as heroin continue to be seen and treated as abnormal, disordered and criminal.
BCBW: Why do you find better solutions in harm reduction policies?
SB: Harm reduction is a response to punitive drug laws, to save lives. Harm reduction is not a rejection of abstinence, but it is not the sole objective of services or drug treatment. Harm reduction advocates assert that non-judgmental and practical services can reduce harms.
Harm reduction advocates also see drug use and services on a continuum: for some people, abstinence-based drug treatment or twelve-step programs work best; for others, alternative options provide essential support, such as education, drug substitution programs and overdose prevention sites. These services save lives.
I argue that ending drug prohibition, ending punitive policies and laws and providing a safe legal supply supports life rather than destroying lives.
978-1773635163
(BCBW 2022)
Articles: 5 Articles for this author
From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law and Policy
Publicity synopsis (2004)
Susan Boyd examines how the regulation of altered states of consciousness and women's bodies is not new. Like the witches of old, women suspected of using illegal drugs today are persecuted and punished. From Witches to Crack Moms offers a critique of drug law and policy and its impact on women in the United States and illuminates similarities and differences in Britain and Canada.
Informed by a feminist sociological perspective, Boyd discusses how drug law and policy is racialized, class-biased, and gendered. She highlights how punitive drug laws inform and shape social service and medical policy and practice. Boyd also provides insight into how the war on drugs and the regulation of reproduction intersect, culminating in a volatile mix. Also examined are legal and illegal drug use, maternal drug use, and neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), against the backdrop of the regulation of all women. In addition, Boyd examines how prisons, social services, medical treatment, maternity care, drug treatment, and drug court policy and practice have been restructured as a result of the war on drugs.
Although the focus of this book is on women's experience of the war on drugs, it also examines how law and policy affect women and men in similar and different ways, and how the regulation of male drug users affects women, families, and communities. Boyd also discusses domestic and international drug policy, exploring how Western imperialism and colonization were accompanied by the condemnation of plants used in spiritual healing by indigenous peoples of North and South America. The impact of the war on drugs on women and indigenous peoples in Colombia is also discussed in order to reveal the connections between the regulation of drug use in Western liberal states and non-Western states. Boyd examines the "Americanization" of drug policy and how the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, and the war on crime are law enforcement initiatives that have that have become global in their reach.
Boyd concludes that today, as the war on drugs advances, women have plenty to fear. This fear should not necessarily be from alleged drug users and dealers, but from moral regulation in all its guises, and from state, military, criminal justice, and corporate attempts to erode democracy to further their interests in Western and Third World nations. Boyd closes by stating that social justice, rather than criminal justice, is the goal to work toward. She proposes that ending the war on drugs is one strategy on the road to achieving social justice.
-- Carolina Academic Press
With Child
Press Release (2007)
Although drug use occurs throughout the social spectrum, problematic use is associated with poverty and social deprivation. In spite of this link to poverty and social deprivation, women are blamed for the outcomes of their pregnancies and it is argued that drug-using women should not be allowed to have custody of their children. The contributors of this volume propose that those who provide services for pregnant drug using women must recognize that women with social problems that affect pregnancy outcomes should be approached in the same way as care for women with medical problems that have obstetric consequences. Drugs are one factor amongst many that shape pregnancy and although drug use is a risk, it is a manageable one. This book is unique and timely. It provides practitioners and researchers with valuable information about maternal drug use, harm reduction, best practices and policy. It will provide a groundbreaking critical and feminist template for organizations in a wide range of fields such as nursing, social work, medicine, public health, health, child development, and addictions.
Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the United States
Article
The first film about drugs, chinese Opium Den, was made in 1894 as a half-minute-long silent film (Kinetograph). Featured at penny arcades, and produced by Thomas Edison's film studio called Black Maria, it sparked a host of other "opium"; movies. Today only stills of Chinese Opium Den exist.
Despite the plethora of films since 1894, only three books on drugs and cinema have been published prior to Susan Boyd's Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the United States (Routledge $95), a survey that includes Canadian "drug"; films, as well as British and U.S. productions, from 1912 to the present.
Boyd is keenly aware that widespread drug prohibition emerged at the same time as the discovery of film. "Their histories intersect in interesting ways,"; says Boyd, who focuses on war-on-drugs narratives and how cinematic representations of illegal drug use and trafficking (regardless of drug type) are linked to discourses about fears of 'the Other,' nation building, law and order, and punishment.
"I also write about alternative films and stoner flicks,"; she says, "and I include a chapter on women and maternal drug use."; According to Boyd, some of the most significant Canadian drug films are: High (1967) directed by L. Kent; The Barbarian Invasions (2003) directed by D. Arcand; On the Corner (2003) directed by N. Geary; and Trailer Park Boys (2006) directed by M. Clattenburg. Her favorites are The Barbarian Invasions and Trailer Park Boys (and their Showcase episode titled Trailer Park Boys Xmas Special (2004).
Some of the stills included in her book are from Broken Blossoms (1919); Narcotic (1933); Reefer Madness (1936); Valley of the Dolls (1967); Drugstore Cowboy (1989); Postcards from the Edge (1990) and Trainspotting (1996).
978-0-415 95706-9
[BCBW 2008] "Drugs" "Film"
Raise Shit! Social Action Saving Lives (Fernwood $26.95)
Article
For almost twenty years Bud Osborn has been the unofficial archivist of Canada's poorest neighbourhood.
"We have become a community of prophets,"; writes the Downtown Eastside poet, "rebuking the system and speaking hope and possibility into situations of apparent impossibility.";
Along with City of Vancouver's Drug Policy Coordinator Donald MacPherson and UVic academic Susan Boyd-who lost her sister Diana to a drug overdose-Osborn has documented the social justice movement that culminated in the opening of North America's first supervised drug injection site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES).
As a landmark celebration of collective activism and resistance, the trio's impolitely-titled Raise Shit! Social Action Saving Lives (Fernwood $26.95) is a sophisticated history of despair and courage, commitment and change.
It is also an important contribution to the serious literature on drug prohibition and an inspiring story of how marginalized citizens have refused to let their friends' deaths be rendered invisible.
"Our story is unique,"; say the trio. "It is told from the vantage point of drug users, those most affected by drug policy.";
At its outset, this montage of photos, news stories, poems by Osborn, MP Libby Davies' letters and journal entries does not fail to note: "From the early 1980s, poor women, many Aboriginal, associated with the DTES, went missing. Twenty years passed before one man was charged with the murders of 26 of the missing women; however, later he was convicted of six counts of second degree murder. The investigation is ongoing, and poor women remain vulnerable to male violence.";
The DTES made headlines around the world in 1977 when a public health emergency was declared in response to the growing rates of HIV, hepatitis C and overdose deaths among drug users in the area.
The last time we checked, raising hell was not an official Olympic event, so as 2010 draws nearer, it will be interesting to watch how critical DTES voices will be raised.
Earlier this year anti-Olympics author Chris Shaw was hassled by the RCMP, requesting information of protest plans. 978-1-5526-6327-1
[BCBW 2009]
Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice
Article (2014)
Ten years ago, canada's public safety minister Anne McLellan announced that the federal government was committed to eradi-cating marijuana growing operations and that people who smoke marijuana are stupid.
"I see grow-ops as one of the single biggest problems we face in our communities,"; Anne McLellan declared.
That's hogwash, says Susan Boyd, a UVic academic, one of two researchers who have collected and analysed more than 2500 newspaper articles related to marijuana published in national, provincial and local newspapers in B.C. from 1995 to 2009 and she's concluded the widespread scare tactics are a government smokescreen for unwarranted invasions of civil liberties.
Co-written by Boyd and Connie Carter, a senior policy analyst for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice (University of Toronto $28.95) documents fifteen years of exaggeration and scare tactics about marijuana growing fueled by a few vocal spokespeople, the RCMP and media.
Specifically, on page 146, Killer Weed discusses the so-called smart meters that have been forced upon BC Hydro customers.
Boyd and Carter conclude in their final chapter that the public is being duped into compliance with draconian, anti-marijuana policies. They cite the findings of the federal government's justice department's own study on marijuana grow ops that challenges claims made by the RCMP and media regarding organized crime, violence and public safety. That justice department report is corroborated by scholarly research - but the justice department study was never released. Boyd and Carter obtained a copy of the unreleased study from a reporter who received it following a Freedom of Information request.
"The second important finding,"; says Boyd, "concerns civil initiatives and by-laws, municipal multi-partner initiatives that have sprung up all over B.C. and elsewhere since 2004. There is little oversight of these initiatives as they are outside criminal justice.
"BC Hydro, the city government, police, RCMP, firefighters and electrical inspectors all work to identify high electrical usage, and then enter homes without a warrant, and there is an assumption of guilt rather than innocence. These homeowners are fined regardless of whether or not evidence of marijuana growing is found.";
According to the authors of Killer Weed, a fifteen-year drug scare about marijuana grow ops has helped to facilitate changes in federal law, mandatory minimum sentencing for some drug offences, including growing more than five plants (resulting in six-month jail sentences), as well as changes in the medical marijuana program (eliminating personal growing and designated growers), and changes to provincial legislation.
"We question these changes,"; says Boyd, "and the turn to law and order responses, many that contravene charter rights, and the impact on vulnerable populations such as youth, aboriginal people and the poor."; 9781442612143
BCBW 2014
