Research

Locked-in Language: Discourses of Drug Use in the Canadian House of Commons, 1908-2018

This dissertation offers a history of the current toxic drug crisis, or opioid crisis, in Canada, from the origins of opium prohibition in 1908 to the first take-note debate on the opioid crisis in 2018. Over 50,000 deaths have been attributed to the drug crisis between January 2016 and September 2024, according to Government of Canada monitoring. Despite this, this thesis argues that the federal government has taken negligible action to address what has been called a national public health crisis. Thus, this thesis considers the long history of drug use discourses from the vantage point of the House of Commons to better explain this phenomenon. More specifically, I examine Parliamentary Debates from 1908 to 2018. My analysis of Parliamentary Debate suggests that old ways of understanding drug use, as expressed by Parliamentarians, have become institutionalized and hegemonic, essentially becoming locked-in language.

            The dissertation tracks the development of drug crisis as a national problem through shifting, yet layered, discursive constructions of drug use over the past century. These include the construction of opium users as internal foreigners in turn-of-the-century discourses that linked prohibition and racialized immigration policies targeting Chinese immigrants, and the construction of the criminal addict in the 1950s and 1960s, as a morally untrustworthy threat to the social fabric of the nation. In the 1960s and 1970s drugs themselves were transformed into a threatening or destabilizing force endangering both social reproduction – by threatening children – and production – by producing a class of unproductive addicts. Finally, after the emergence of a drug crisis throughout the 1990s and 2000s, addiction was constructed as a health crisis, a construction that seems to lend itself to a more proactive, harm-reduction oriented rather than punitive policy, but which in practice enabled a delegation of responsibility for the opioid crisis to provinces. Key to this historical trajectory is that the languages of addiction – foreign, criminal, and anomie – become locked-in, continuing to structure contemporary discourses on drug prohibition and addiction.

            Ultimately, this thesis argues that these ossified, locked-in languages of drug use have severely limited what is seen as possible or realistic policy change. They have produced a hegemonic construction of the criminal or threatening addict, one that legitimates a framework of surveillance and punishment, on the one hand, and a neoliberal attempt to delegate responsibility to the provinces, on another.