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1 Book review: Illness or Deviance? Drug Courts, Drug Treatment, and the Ambiguity of Addiction, by Jenifer Murphy Name University Due date

2 Book review: Illness or Deviance? Drug Courts, Drug Treatment, and the Ambiguity of Addiction, by Jenifer Murphy Is addiction to drugs a treatable disease or a punishable crime? In her book, Illness or Deviance? Jennifer investigates different perspectives on addiction. She juxtaposes the perspective of drug courts and outpatient treatment programs on labeling drug addicts. Jenifer shows that both perspectives are inseparable by effectively reviewing the history of the tension between criminalization and medicalization in the United States. The most proactive aspect of Jenifer's book is the comparison of medicalization programs and the courts. The question Jenifer addresses is one of the basic questions of the sociological definition of illness. This book review explores the text's suggestion about boundaries and social norms, underlying political and social agendas, Jenifer's audience persuasion, and the relationship between the text and the course reserve readings. What does the text suggest about social norms and boundaries? The texts depict the current social norms and approach of the matter as ironic. While drug addicts have been stigmatized as immoral criminals, making drug addiction a disease that needs to be punished, society does not try to persuade other means to curb the issue, or at least try. The stigmatization the drug addiction produced a hybrid of moral and medical diseases. However, the drug courts' judges and the treatment programs' staff are educated middle-class white, often charging uneducated low-income black Americans. Although both stakeholders understand that the issue's root cause is a social-structural factor like unemployment and low-income opportunities, they impose solutions that only focus on the individual responsibility of the addicts. Therefore, it is ironic to punish an individual for a social issue. Jenifer notes how this skewness is only one-directional. She claims, "…addiction becomes the source of other problems

3 rather than the result of it…" (Murphy, 2015). Even when society tries to medicalize drug addiction, it justifies the need for coercive punishment or treatment. Furthermore, methadone maintenance and consumption as the most effective treatment for opium addiction is also viewed as an addiction. What are they trying to persuade their readers of? Jenifer dissuades readers from agreeing on integrating corporal punishment into treating drug addiction. She claims that drug addiction is manageable in a clinical setting and hence not worth punishing the addicts. Contrary to the drug court's justification that stands on the premise that to reduce recidivism, there is a need for treating drug addiction- a factor that underlies much of the crime- and the need for therapeutic punishment since voluntary treatment is often powerless. She suggests that since drug addiction can be defined as a disease, there is a need for treatment that does not depend on punishment. The current system where people arrested for drug abuse offenses must waive their right to a trial to be tried in a drug court. Their defense team must play a role on the part of the drug court team, like judges, prosecutors, and probation officers, to determine the demand for therapeutic punishment treatment is not enough. Jenifer dissuades the readers from establishing drug addiction as a crime and claims that medicalization efforts of drug addiction often remain partial, justifying drug court punishments as a more value-adding approach are inadequate. She also dissuades the claims that the omnipresent threat of drug addiction relative to other diseases, like cardiac disease, arouses the need for drug court punishments of drug addicts. Jenifer supports treatments but remains skeptical about the approach of drug courts of merely locking up offenders or coercing therapy- a process that stigmatizes drug addicts. She persuades the readers to find other methods other than the two. Murphy states, "…Drug courts are better than merely locking up offenders. But why are

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4 these our only two options?" (Murphy, 2015). She calls for diversion, harm reduction, and decriminalization approaches. The political agenda of the text is to expose the settings of drug addiction in both the medical and legal systems in a form that benefits the two. The ambiguity surrounding the medicalization and criminalization of drug addiction only results in punitive and therapeutic measures that handle the individual's drug addiction at the expense of the addicts. Therefore, in both settings, the two stakeholders often stand to benefit from drug addiction. The text claims that the stakeholders are not moving towards a pure approach that is only useful to the addicts but rather move within the two methods creating a hybrid of a criminal and medical issue. Therefore, the case may be a more stagnant social problem. How does the text relate to the course reserve readings, lectures, and other materials? The text contributes to the definition of different ethnographies of drug addiction management in medical and legal systems. The medicalization theory analysis explores addiction treatment, while many of Jenifer's observations and commentary explore the legal area, forming a bridge between the two concepts. It also provides a history of the ambiguity between medicalization and criminalization. The texts concerned with institutional negotiation of drug addiction rather than individual level promote the concept of institutional ethnography. It is a supplementary reading to the course overview that enhances the lecture notes with dramaturgical-quality material sources.

5 References Murphy, J. (2015). Illness or deviance?: Drug Courts, drug treatment, and the ambiguity of addiction . Temple University Press.

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