Complex Events: Drug effects and emergent causality

Complex events: Drug effectsand emergent causality

BY KANE RACE

This article works with Connolly’s (2004) concept of “emergentcausality” to counter the insistence on linear expressions of causeand effect in dominant strands of drug prevention evaluation. Ielaborate this concept with reference to recent controversiesconcerning the policing of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian MardiGras. The use of sniffer dogs to furnish the reasonable suspicionrequired to authorize police “stop and search” procedures has beena key part of this controversy. Substantiated in terms of its universalapplicability, high visibility and purported deterrent effect, thispractice actually forms part of the complex and evolvingenvironment in which new and more dangerous forms of sex-relateddrug consumption have emerged. Emergent causality makes itpossible to see how any element in a given assemblage can acquirecontingent agentic capacities. Grasping these developments asevents, or processes of eventuation, sets out an active, engaged andagonistic role for research practice.

KEY WORDS: Drug policing, experiments, sniffer dogs, events, harmreduction, chemsex.

Contemporary Drug Problems 41/Fall 2014 301

AUTHOR’S NOTE: For additional information about this article e-mail:[email protected].

© 2014 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.

This article situates drug harm-reduction scholarship within animmanent tradition that emphasizes how nature and culture aredifferently mixed into each other depending on the “actualoccasions” in which drug practices take shape and the mannerin which their constituent elements come together (Whitehead,1978).1 It argues that harm reduction involves a particular wayof attending to events-in-process, or processes of eventuation,in which events and their effects—informed by the pasts andtrajectories of the objects drawn into them—are nonetheless notknowable in precise detail prior to their emergence. Thisunknowability summons a particular mode of attentiveness thatseeks out unexpected offshoots, emergent tendencies—thecorollaries, connections, contortions and transformationsassociated with interventions into drug scenes. I contrast thisapproach with the commanding simplicity of the transcendentmoralism that animates normative approaches to drug use andthe appeal these often make to linear and delimited notions ofcausation. This appeal can be seen in the apparentlyunassailable conviction that drug use is wrong and that themainstay of policy must be to deter drug use by sending amessage about danger and illegality. Such a stance does notautomatically invoke notions of linear causation, to be sure. Butwhen it assumes the power to trump all other considerations ofa given operation’s effects—lateral, downstream, unintended,or otherwise—you can be sure that what is being claimed isthe right to extract the intervention from its sphere ofoperation; to transcend the material world in which drugpractices take shape in its bid to make an overriding statementof right and wrong. In such instances, an effect is typicallyclaimed for police crackdowns and demonstrations ofenforcement and that effect is deterrence. What is also beingclaimed here is the power to bracket certain effects that mayfollow from the operation, including effects that negativelyimpact people’s health or put them in danger. Hence my claimabout the model of causation that is typically invoked by theseabsolutist positions: It is linear and it is delimited. It is linearbecause it positions deterrence as a direct and unidirectionaleffect, and it is delimited because this is the only effect

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deemed relevant. Instead I promote a topological approach toharm reduction in which drug enforcement practices are cast asimmanent to their sphere of operation and understood toparticipate in processes of what William Connolly has termedemergent causality (2004).2 As we shall see, this requires aneye, a nose, a feeling for complexity.

My domain of concern is the changing materialization ofurban gay life in Sydney, Australia over the last decade, and inparticular how to understand the changing patterns of drug usethat have been associated with this transforming scene andthat constitute it in part. This period has been marked by col-lectively voiced disaffection that has recurred in communitymedia and everyday discourse concerning the changing natureof gay space, in particular the perceived decline of some of thetraditional venues, sites and institutions of gay socialization.My analysis emerges from a project on “Changing Spaces ofHIV Prevention,” a cultural analysis of transformations in sex-ual sociability among gay and homosexually-active men sup-ported by an ARC Discovery Grant awarded in 2012. Theresearch is motivated by my own immersion in the urban gayculture of inner Sydney as well as my participation since 1996in the HIV policy field as a researcher and cultural producer.Informed by insights gained through personal participation inurban gay scenes and institutions in Australia, my researchprocess aims to test these perceptions, situate them, and makethem available for transformation through considered encoun-ters with multiple sources of data including historical, textual,qualitative and quantitative material, specialized literature, aswell as conceptual labor.3 In empirical terms, I have collectedaccounts of the experiences of urban gay spaces and eventsfrom gay community media since 2000. Letters to the editorand online readers’ comments have served as a particularlyrich source of information on how key events and spaces havebeen variously experienced and contested by participants.Qualitative interviews have been conducted with participantsin the urban gay scenes of Sydney and Melbourne for thisproject since 2012. Interviews focus on participant’s sexual

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and social arrangements and how their experiences of thesehave changed over time. Within these parameters, interviewsare open-ended and designed to be responsive to participants’experiences and what they make available for conversation aswell as matters of concern that bear on the research questionsand have emerged as topical in gay community discourse overthe period of research. Twenty-five interviews with individu-als from a diverse range of backgrounds have been conductedthus far.4 The research has also encompassed analysis of thescientific, policy and governmental practices that attempt tograsp the field in question including consideration of howthese participate in the field’s ongoing materialization.5 I haveobserved police drug detection operations, both formally andinformally, as a patron of gay venues in Sydney and a trainedvolunteer for LGBTI interagency initiatives designed to mon-itor police activities at the Mardi Gras dance party and providesupport to partygoers (“Project Blue” in 2010, 2011 and “FairPlay” in 2014). Analysis of the interviews and other materialcollected for this project has focused on how spaces of gaysexual sociability have been grasped and experienced by par-ticipants (whether agencies or persons) with particular atten-tion to manners of apprehension and how these are distributedamong participants, producing subject positions.6

Sniffer dogs

A matter of significant concern for the collective I am engag-ing has been the emergence of a particular style of “high-pro-file” policing involving the use of sniffer dogs for purposes ofdrug enforcement. Dog squads began to appear on Sydneystreets after the 2000 Olympics when the surplus animals usedfor event-policing operations were retrained for drug detectionpurposes and deployed as part of police cohorts assigned toprecincts identified as drug hotspots. One of the first opera-tions involved 300 police officers and the media units of allthe major newspapers raiding a straight nightclub on OxfordStreet (the epicenter of the urban gay scene in Sydney), lead-


ing to the arrest of two people.7 More typically sniffer dogsstarted to appear spearheading cohorts of 4 to 10 police offi-cers roving up and down the streets of key recreationalprecincts. Sometimes led through licenses premises, night-clubs, or else stationed at train stations or the entrance ofmusic festivals and dance events, they are used to search mem-bers of the public and incoming and outgoing patrons withouta warrant. After a court ruling challenged their legality, theiruse was formalized in the Police Powers (Drug Detection) Act(2001). The act mobilizes a spatial logic to justify their useand limit it to particular premises and events as well as desig-nated public transport routes on the basis that these spacesconstitute “well-known drug dealing areas.”8 The conspicuouspresence of large numbers of uniformed police using snifferdogs to conduct searches outside dance parties and in keyrecreational precincts, and the perceived aggression this strat-egy appears to embody, has been a source of bitter complaintand community unrest, including groundswells of concern ingay community media in 2007, 2009, and most recently 2013(see Race, 2011). In 2013, police activities surrounding MardiGras provoked a collective uprising, the likes of which hadn’tbeen seen since 1978 (the clash with police from which MardiGras itself emerged). Community members took to the streetsen masse to protest the brutality and aggression associatedwith policing of the event.

It is interesting to consider the practices and logics that informthese policing practices. As an arrest-oriented strategy, drugdogs are said to furnish the reasonable suspicion that policerequire to stop and search members of the public without awarrant. Dog behaviors, such as sitting in front of an individ-ual, are said to authorize a search since they are taken as anindication of likely drug possession. But in other police repre-sentations, drug indications do not require a specified behav-ior and are said to be uniquely discernible by the handler onthe basis of the special relationship between handler and dog.9

So while dog indications are supposed to objectify the ques-tion of reasonable suspicion, dog handlers are uniquely posi-

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tioned as the authorized spokespeople or interpreters of thesenonhuman indications. This gives police considerable leeway inthe allegation of reasonable suspicion, lowering the threshold—or tipping the balance—between innocence and suspicion thatprotects members of the public from being randomly stoppedby police and subject to invasive and unwarranted searching.

The capacity of the dogs to reliably detect drugs has beenrepeatedly questioned in independent investigations, and theoccurrence of false positives is typical. In a review of the strat-egy required by the Act conducted by the NSW Ombudsmanand published in 2006 (NSW Ombudsman, 2006), three out offour searches failed to yield any illicit substances at all, whiletrafficable quantities of drugs were uncovered in a tiny 1.4%of indicated searches. As well as casting doubt on themethod’s capacity to detect drugs reliably, these figuresdemonstrate that it is grossly ineffective for detecting drugdealers. In other words, it is oriented to drug users and inno-cent members of the public rather than the processes of drugsupply that are said to constitute the official priority of drugenforcement measures. When these points have been put toauthorities, such as the Director of the NSW Bureau of CrimeStatistics and Research as well as the police, the findings arenot taken as an indication of failure; rather, authorities point tothe deterrent effects of the strategy (though no evidence of thisis generally cited) (Simmons, 2011).

This background enables us to situate drug detection dogs asa hybrid strategy emerging from the combination of severaldifferent policing practices and objects, each with their ownrationality and logic. As an arrest-oriented strategy it gives aspecific formulation to stop and search procedures by delegat-ing certain prerequisites of the practice required by the law tononhuman actors, that is, dogs. But since drug dealing consti-tutes such a tiny proportion of arrests, it would be implausibleto hold that arrests are effectively levelled at drug supply.Instead, authorities situate this measure as preventative andclaim the effect of general deterrence. The reference to general


deterrence through increased police visibility and the legisla-tion’s deployment of a spatial logic suggests that the strategyis continuous with public order policing rather than targeteddrug enforcement (see Maher & Dixon, 1999).10 In thisrespect, criminological discourse on the policing of hot spots,rather than drug enforcement, offers some of the most signifi-cant precedents. So my next step is to examine how questionsof space and causation are framed within “hot spots” discourse.

Policing hot spots

Most of the governing enthusiasm for high-profile drugenforcement in specific locations is indebted to the notion ofhot spots that emerged in a series of experimental studies con-ducted in the mid-1990s primarily by criminologist DavidWeisburd and colleagues (Green, 1995; Sherman & Weisburd,1995; Weisburd & Green, 1995). Faced with widespread skep-ticism about the deterrent effects of police presence in urbanlocations, Weisburd initiated a series of randomized controlledtrials that set out to test whether the visible presence of uni-formed police caused any measurable reduction in crime. Thecontrolled trial method is distinctive in that it bids researchersto assemble conditions in which linear causation can beclaimed and tested. As researchers state: “Although experi-mental program evaluations are difficult to implement, theyallow researchers to define unambiguous links between causesand effects” (Weisburd & Green, 1995, p. 718). By measuringcrime calls in the experimental group compared to the controlgroup over a given period, researchers set out to assess whethera given “dosage” of police presence acts as a deterrent, andthis is understood as a linear relation between the interventionand its intended effects. We can see in this terminology howthe templates of in vivo clinical research are being extrapolatedto conduct these social experiments. What is remarkable whenrevisiting this literature from a critical perspective is howexplicitly the concept of the hot spot is depicted as an abstrac-tion required by the experimental design—that is, a solution to

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statistical problems. When larger areas such as patrol beats orneighborhoods were taken as the unit of analysis—as they hadbeen in previous studies—“the weak statistical power of suchdesigns makes it very difficult to find an effect of patrol” sinceincreased police presence amounts to a “drop in the ocean”(Sherman & Weisburd, 1995, p. 626). Focusing on hot spots—defined as “very small clusters of high-crime addresses” (p.626)—allows researchers to increase the statistical power ofthe study by constructing a large enough sample of comparablelocations to avoid the problem of bias towards the null hypoth-esis. Researchers claim this quite explicitly as the principleadvantage of the concept rather than its adequacy or degree offit for addressing specific social or criminal dynamics.

We can see here how the controlled trial acts as a “framingdevice” in which certain effects are constituted as measures ofthe success or failure of the intervention, with other effectsrendered as externalities, beyond the researchers’ field ofvision (Race, 2012). While there is some acknowledgement inthis literature of the fact that crime may be displaced to otherareas, this question is subordinated to the linear determinationof causation. Displacement is the concept used to acknowl-edge (and typically bracket) the fact that policing hot spotsmay just “push crime around.” In one of the most significantstudies, researchers handle this issue by limiting their claimsto what they call “micro-deterrence”—that is, reduction ofcrime and disorder in the designated areas (Sherman &Weisburd, 1995). In studies devoted more specifically topolicing drug markets, researchers do make some attempt tomeasure displacement (Green, 1995). Typically they monitorcrime calls and drug arrests in immediately surrounding areas,or reapply the criteria initially used to define hot spots in theperiod after the intervention to determine whether new drugmarkets have emerged in new areas (Weisburd & Green,1995). These methods reveal some limited displacement, andalso some diffusion of benefits. But they also open up thequestion of spatiality and how to conceive it in relation to drugpractices.


Hot spot studies of policing drug markets are conspicuous forthe concept of space they mobilize. In their focus on publicspaces they are uniquely concerned with the visible aspects ofstreet-based drug markets. The assumption in these studies isthat drug transactions take place in topographical locationsthat are bounded, geometric, three-dimensional and publiclyaccessible. There is no sense that space is enacted or foldedthrough the specific practices or objects that constitute drugmarkets. In later ethnographies (which I will turn to in amoment) researchers found that when confronted with policecrackdowns, street-based dealers and users made use of (whatat the time were) new technologies such as mobile phones andbeepers to conduct drug transactions (Aitken, Moore, Higgs,Kelsall, & Kerger, 2002; Maher & Dixon, 1999). This showsthat drug marketplaces are not reducible to the abstractedtopographic space of city maps—a space with linear, geomet-ric dimensions that drug markets just take place “in.” Rather,drug transactions constitute their own space and temporality,eventuated through the objects, devices, practices and envi-ronments through which they are enacted. Though experimen-tal hot spot studies of drug markets make some attempt toacknowledge and measure the potential displacement of theirobject of concern, these attempts remain wedded to geometricnotions of space while their object remains fixed. It could beargued that monitoring crime calls and drug arrests in imme-diately surrounding areas only skims the surface of a range ofpotential practices of avoidance.

There are other problems with the spatiality of hot spot studiesand their applicability to drug markets. Since their locus of con-cern is the visible aspects of streetscapes—public spaces andpublic disorder—little attention is given to the effect of policingon drug practices themselves, that is, transformations in theshape or qualities of drug practices engendered by police crack-downs and any corresponding health implications for users.Indeed, the notion of deterrence in hot spot studies makes noattempt to register or measure any health effects at all (not evenprevalence of use in a given population). This raises serious

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questions about the appropriateness of this concept or practicewithin drug policy discourse. In these studies, many of thematerial dimensions of drug practices escape from view, mostsignificantly modes of drug consumption. It is only in the con-text of ethnographic studies concerned with harm reduction thatsuch health-related activities and effects come into explicitview. So my next step is to turn to these ethnographic studiesand theorize the particular training of attention they embody.

Crackdown ethnographies

In a series of important papers published in the late 1990s andearly 2000s (Aitken et al., 2002; Maher & Dixon, 1999,2001;), drug ethnographers analyzed the impact of policecrackdowns on drug markets (specifically, heroin markets inSydney and Melbourne). What they found were various formsof displacement—not only geographic displacement, but alsosocial, temporal and practical forms—with significant publichealth implications. One of the distinctive things about thesestudies was their attention to the effect of law enforcement ondrug practices and the corresponding health implications forusers. It is not surprising that it took ethnographic studies toyield such insights, since ethnography affords close engage-ment with the experiences and “life-worlds” of users whiledirecting attention to the settings of those experiences. Itinvolves multiple forms of engagement: talking to people aswell as watching them doing things (Maher & Dixon, 1999;Stimson, 1995). When compared with methods that use prede-termined measures of effects and causation (such as controlledtrials), this provides a wider opening on the circumstances andrelations through which various events and practices are con-stituted. Ethnography affords the capacity to notice and keeptrack of a wider range of happenings and circumstancesincluding unexpected incidents and lateral developments.

What is also noteworthy is ethnography’s capacity to attend toaffective climates and not just meanings: how particular cir-


cumstances give rise to particular states of apprehension thatinform subsequent actions and developments. Hence the mainfinding of Maher and Dixon’s (1999) article:

The impact of a highly visible uniformed police presence in Cabra-matta has substantially increased the risk that those who participatein drug use and distribution will come to police attention. This hascreated a climate of fear and uncertainty which has resulted in anumber of unforeseen negative consequences. (1999, p. 496,emphasis added)

The attention to affect here and its production and circulationpermits a multiform account that encompasses processes ofdownwards and backwards causation: that is, not just whetherevent A causes event B, but also how event A is experiencedby the various actors who are party to it, affecting the capaci-ties and actions that constitute their responses to it (conceivedas multiple) and the processes in which these responses par-ticipate, so as to give rise not just to event B but also events C,D, and so forth, that in turn may get folded into still otherprocesses of eventuation which may alter the eventual importand material character of event A (or indeed any other event inthe series). For example, Maher and Dixon (1999) found thatthe police crackdown in Cabramatta was leading dealers andusers to store caps of heroin inside their mouths and otherbodily cavities, increasing the risk of transmission of bacteri-al and bloodborne infections as well as overdose since peoplewould swallow the heroin if they felt themselves to be at riskof detection. Moreover, as police became aware of this tactic,some would force open suspects’ mouths or hold them violent-ly in chokeholds for extended periods. In such encounters,participants (both human and nonhuman) aggravate, affect,and potentially infect each other in unforseen and unintendedways, becoming subject to spiralling relays in which eventsescalate, dangers multiply, and affects intensify to the point ofstrangulation. A linear account might attempt to attributeintention or causation to a single actor here, but clearly suchevents are much more complex and co-emergent in nature.

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Among the effects of police crackdowns Maher and Dixon(1999) identified were a reluctance on the part of users tocarry injecting equipment; consequent increases in injection-related risk-taking; displacement of drug injection to moredangerous locations; user disconnection from establishedhealth services; changes in the practice and nature of drugtransactions; the entry of fraudulent dealers into the marketwhich in turn increased volatility and violence; changes in thetypes of substances used and modes of administration (fromsmoking to injecting); and a deterioration of relations betweenpolice and the Indo-Chinese community. In their ethnographyof a police crackdown in Footscray in Melbourne, Aitken andcolleagues (2002) documented some similar effects alongsidethe reduced availability of drugs in the targeted area, includ-ing: more rapid turnovers of drug sales on the part of individ-ual dealers; the adoption of new methods and locations toenable drug transactions; spatial displacement of the drugmarket to an entirely different neighborhood causing ablowout in local services and complaints by residents; increas-es in injection-related risk-taking and careless syringe dispos-al engendered by people’s fear of being found with needles;and a greater propensity in the location for stand-overs, fraudand violence.

Topology and emergent causality

To understand the above effects as displacement is to invoke atopological imagination in which space and causation are mul-tiform and emergent (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012). If thestandard perspective on displacement can be caricatured as a“fixed supply of criminals … seeking outlet for a fixed num-ber of crimes they are predestined to commit” (Sherman &Weisburd, 1995, p. 629), the attention in these ethnographicstudies to how crackdowns effect permutations in the veryform of practices, circumstances, events, and relations sug-gests a radically different perspective on causality and on whatis entailed in being dispersed from one place to another (the


ordinary meaning of displacement). The object of concerndoes not remain fixed but bears the possibility of changingshape or form in its very movement and dispersal. Topology isthe study of the continuities and connections that are associat-ed with deformations in spaces and shapes (such as stretchingand bending). The GIF file that appears on the Wikipedia entryfor “topology” is a helpful illustration but also a little mislead-ing because the sequence it depicts is simple and predictable.11

Moreover, in the topological approach to drug research I ampromoting the researcher is not external to the field of trans-formation—as though hovering above or standing outside it—but is implicated and involved in the object-process they findthemselves trying to grasp constructively; an involvementwith specific but as-yet-undetermined impacts on the object-process itself which in this sense may be understood as active.(This, at least, is my sense of drug ethnographers’ relation totheir field of praxis). A topological perspective is hinted atwhen Dorn and Murji (as cited by Maher & Dixon, 1999)compare drug markets to:

…a squishy balloon: apply pressure to them in one place and therewill be some diminution of the problem, yet it is likely that the mar-ket will balloon out in another place or on an adjacent site, involv-ing new and possibly more cautious or sophisticated dealers andperhaps a different range of drugs. (p. 501)

But admittedly, Dorn and Murji do not consider that the bal-loon could become something else entirely, like a viral path-way. To propose a topological approach to harm reduction isto promote attention to the “taking shape” of drug effects; tofigure how various objects, practices, and forces enter intorelations and emerge out of them. It is to understand causalityas emergent and dependent on the manner in which theseobjects (which may also be conceived as affected entities)come together on a given occasion. For William Connolly,

[e]mergent causality, when it occurs, is causal […] in that a move-ment at the immanent level has effects on another level. But it isemergent in that, first, the character of the immanent activity is notknowable in precise detail prior to the effects that emerge at the sec-

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ond level, second, the new effects become infused into the very beingor organisation of the second level in such a way that the cause can-not be said to be fully different from the effect engendered and third,a series of loops and feedback loops operate between the first andsecond levels to generate the stabilized result […] Such relays resultin the emergence of the new. Emergent causation issues in real effectswithout being susceptible to full explanation or precise prediction inadvance, partly because what is produced could not be adequatelyconceptualized before its production. (2004, p. 342-3)

Connolly locates this perspective as part of an approach hecalls immanent naturalism, which refuses the modernist splitbetween nature and culture and some of its traditional inheri-tances. Nature is no longer cast as the realm of pure determi-nation, governed entirely by mathematical and physical laws,nor is culture viewed as the exclusive realm of transformationand freedom that expresses the power and sovereignty ofhumans. In the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead (whichI take to be consonant with Connolly’s Deleuzian approach)what matters is the manner in which various entities—humanand nonhuman—experience each other and come together, ina process he terms a “concresence of prehensions” (Whitehead,1978). For Whitehead, it is through actual occasions of com-ing together that new realities emerge, a process that MikeMichael has dubbed “eventuation” (Michael, 2012). Here,objects are “enacted in practice,” as Annemarie Mol has pro-posed (2002), but they are also “embroiled in processes ofeventuation”—processes which change the properties of theseobjects (Michael, in press). This formula musters specificattention to processes of emergence.

If causality is understood as emergent, those concerned withdrug effects might develop a sharper and more active grasp onhow certain harms and pleasures take shape and change theirform—that is, on how different objects, practices, and effectsemerge through specific processes of eventuation with a rangeof concrete impacts. This would entail an openness to thesense which specific instantiations of force give rise to varie-gated effects, the materialization of which depends on therelations its constituent parts enter into; that is, how they are


experienced, the impacts they have on each other, and whatthey come up against. Such instantiations may be grasped asparticipating in “second-order” effects that cause problems tochange their shape and redefine their properties. Though thecharacterization is my own, I believe important precedents forthis manner of grasping drug effects are discernable in theethnographic studies of police crackdowns I discussed above,where the ethnographic orientation attunes us to the emer-gence of new conditions, practices, activities and objects, andthe sense in which this is contingent on the manner in whichpolice presence is apprehended and experienced, setting offrelays, permutations, extensions of force and intensificationsof affect that engender new drug effects and material realities.

Such a perspective on causality raises certain problems withrespect to identifying the precise mechanisms of de- or trans-formation required by many of the disciplines of public health(i.e., linear causation). But in this article, I challenge thisrequirement and position this indeterminacy as the lure for amore expansive series of engagements with the experiences ofvarious parties; how, in their coming together, these encountersproduce realities that acquire specific shape and character. Suchengagements would give a more adequate sense of the relevantmechanisms of causation as contingently enacted, as well asproducing a more expansive perspective on potential sites ofconstructive intervention. As Michael (in press) states, “we can-not hope to be exhaustive in accounting for all the elements—both ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ as Stengers puts it—that make upsuch events [or processes of eventuation], but we can at leastbegin to trace some of the complexities entailed in them.” It iswith this modest aim in mind that I assemble my account ofchanges in the materialization of gay spaces and practices.

A topology of gay partying

In previous work I have shown how drugs have played a con-stituent part in the emergence and materialization of modern

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urban gay communities (Race, 2011). The emergence of thelarge-scale dance party in the 1980s and the transposition iteffectuated from disco to dance culture had a marked impacton the cultural geography and affective climate of the inner-cityspaces of cities such as Sydney. The concrescence of interde-pendent elements such as dance music, drugs such as ecstasy,and the practices of celebration and gender experimentationenacted in the parties, spaces, venues and events of gay danceculture formed a constellation of practice and experience thatdifferentiated itself explicitly from the drinking culture of thehetero-masculine pub rock scene. With the onset of the AIDScrisis, and in the context of maximum stigma, the staging of theMardi Gras parade and dance party became a central mecha-nism through which a communal sense of identity, belonging,defiant survival, presence, pleasure, care, and support wasembodied and enacted among Sydney’s sexual subcultures andaffected publics. This environment also gave rise to innovativepublic health responses: The diffuse eroticism of the dance floorand the shared experience of communal venues enabled theemergence of safe sex pedagogies that sought to multiply pleas-ure rather than attempting to eradicate it (Race, 2009, 2011).

These subcultures made a particular use of urban space, inhab-iting inner-city suburbs and urban streetscapes in ways thattransformed these settings significantly (or, to borrow a termfrom cultural economy, “revitalized” them). Paradoxically,this set in motion processes of gentrification that have had theeffect of excluding sections of these communities fromaccessing or residing in the neighborhoods and urban loca-tions that once helped constitute their collective identity. Oversubsequent decades, the “enterprising up” of urban space andthe municipal investment in recreational zones orientedaround night-time leisure and liminal consumption attractedincreased numbers of recreational consumers into areas suchas Oxford Street on weekend nights, bringing many of theproblems associated with the emergence of urban nighttimeeconomies generally around the world (Hobbs, Hafield, Lister,& Winslow, 2003), including violence and disorder, conges-


tion, accident and injury, public drunkenness, territorial ten-sions between demographic subgroups, and—most notably inthis instance—increases in homophobic violence.12 Thesedevelopments have resulted in a degraded experience of thesespaces for many gay men, lesbians and trans people and agrowing sense of alienation from the spaces, scenes, and ven-ues historically and symbolically associated with the elabora-tion of sexual community. Simon (age 43), a gay man I inter-viewed, summed up a common sentiment when explaining hiscurrent preference for using online hook-up devices to meetsexual partners:

Like, I find Oxford Street is just vile. It, you know, coming to Syd-ney in, like I said, in the early nineties, it was really exciting. I justfind it aggressive and, and frightening, actually. I don’t like goingthere at all.

However great the challenges of policing this context—andthere is no doubt these challenges are considerable—a reviewof the discourse on this issue in community media over the lastdecade reveals that police have addressed the concerns ofLGBTI community regarding their experience of this settingvery selectively. Complaints of police failure to respond suffi-ciently to homophobic violence are legion in this archive andthe subject of ongoing disputes between implicated agencies.These complaints are coupled with allegations of unfair vic-timization and misdirected operations in which the practicalarrangement of policing activities feature prominently.Community frustration with this situation is encapsulated, forexample, in an annual wrap-up of significant events publishedat the end of 2007 in SX News:

The presence of NSW police has been similar to that of Sydneytaxis: there’s none when you need one but plenty when you don’t.And so it was that, despite the numerous calls for more regularpatrols on Oxford St to address homophobic violence, the policeturned up at Azure Harbour party in sheer numbers flanked by snif-fer dogs […] The incidents had people crying foul with manyclaiming it was excessive and a misplaced use of resources. (SXNews, 2007)

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The police feature as a paradoxical object of desire in this dis-course. Calls for greater numbers of local area police are asnumerous in these pages as complaints about their visibilityand overbearing presence. But the police are not a singularobject here and what is really at stake is the qualitative objectthat policing operations materialize as in a given instance.From this perspective, we can begin to appreciate how theconstitution of sexual minorities as objects of suspicion orrightful recipients of state care (i.e., citizens) hinges on howspecific practices (e.g., the use of sniffer dogs) enacts theobject of policing.

This paradox can be approached, following Whitehead (1978),in terms of how the relevant parties grasp and abstract fromthe world they are immersed in. Community-police exchangesfrom this period suggest the police largely experienced theproblems of the nighttime economy through the prism of“antisocial behavior.” This abstraction is closely linked withanother abstraction in criminological discourse, namely “drugand alcohol-related violence” (Race, 2011). These abstrac-tions form part of the infrastructure through which police have“learned to be affected” by the object that confronts them(Latour, 2004; Race, in press). But such abstractions are notnecessarily well attuned to the specificities that constitute theobject of police experience and intervention in this instance,that is, nighttime violence and consumption patterns in thisparticular location. Thus when police seek to maintain publicorder and prevent violence in the undifferentiated hot spot ofthe nighttime economy, they see the use of drugs dogs as acompletely appropriate component of the increased visibilitythey have been given to believe will be one among a numberof strategies that will effectively deter violence and disorder.But to members of the public who have been formed throughparticipation in gay cultures in which party drugs have beencommon, the experience of these policing operations material-izes as hostile and threatening. Indeed, these operations arefrequently perceived by this group to be prejudicial in theirtargeting. Given the historical differentiation of gay dance cul-


ture from the hetero-masculine drinking culture with which alarge proportion of nighttime violence is associated, this par-ticular enactment of police powers comes across as especiallyunfair, contradictory and counterproductive. Sniffer dogs aretrained to target just one element of drug and alcohol-relatedviolence, but on the basis of this abstraction can be posed asone of the possible solutions to this problem. But drug andalcohol-related violence must be regarded as a complexhybrid, the constituent elements of which are differentiallyenacted in different configurations. Gender and its relationalforms might be considered worthy of investigation as a keyvariable in the emergence of these affective intensities, theirtrajectories and patterning as violence. But at the level of pol-icy discourse and intervention, it tends to feature as a shadowreality, backgrounded by other easier targets, that is the pos-session of illicit substances.

This example shows how abstractions from experimentalcriminology like increased police presence, hot spot, drugmarket, antisocial behavior, and drug and alcohol-related vio-lence participate in contradictory, unforseen and absurd even-tualities when they come into contact with the actual relationsthat constitute specific spaces of nighttime activity. Theseabstractions are not generalizable things that can be extractedfrom the multiple, heterogeneous relations and entities thatconstitute them and confer their specificity. In other words,they do not possess some transcendental substance that pre-exists their specifically instantiated qualities. An increasedpolice presence is a different thing—“homophobic,” “gay-friendly,” “deterrent,” “threatening,” “reassuring,” “effective”—depending on the relations in which it is situated and thepractices through which it is enacted. This is also a questionof how the entities that are party to an occasion grasp and aregrasped by it: “the hand of the settled past in the formation ofthe present” (Whitehead, 1978). Indeed, to the extent that suchpolicing practices emerge from these criminological abstrac-tions at the expense of other forms of engagement with localcommunities in their enacted specificity and historical forma-

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tion, we might adapt a phrase of Whitehead’s in this instanceto consider “the fallacy of misplaced policing.”13

Such a phrase would seem particularly appropriate in relationto the use of hot spot logics to justify the high-profile policepresence surrounding community events such as Mardi Grasdance parties. The deployment of the dog squad and largenumbers of uniformed police outside such events has been asignificant source of community disaffection and featured as aprominent theme in the community rally which saw thousandsof people take to the streets a week after Mardi Gras 2013.This uprising was sparked when footage of a uniformedpoliceman brutally assaulting a young gay man was capturedon the smartphone of a parade spectator and circulated onYouTube. The event formed the occasion for the articulationand development of a wider and more expansive critique ofpolicing practices, serving as lightening rod for disaffectionand anger about the policing of LGBTI community events andvenues over the preceding decade. The 2013 protests regard-ing policing practices were heterogeneous, conflictive, andcertainly not uniform; a broader analysis is beyond the scopeof this article.14 To focus on the issue of drug dogs specifically,there are significant questions about how well adapted a strat-egy formed through a specific objection to (and objectificationof) street-based drug markets could be to this context, sincethe vast majority of patrons attending these events customari-ly organize their drugs in advance (along with their tickets,outfits, haircuts, bodies, and suntans) prior to arriving at theparty. Like the dispersed space of police crackdown ethnogra-phies, the market in question is enacted through certaindevices and off-site practices. But in this instance it is veryunlikely that this bears any relation to police presence: Thesepractices have long formed part of the routines of preparationthrough which participants make themselves available tobeing affected by the occasion (Gomart & Hennion, 1999) —that is, the ritualized practices through which the pleasurableexperience is customarily assembled. While a limited numberof drug sales may take place on site, it is questionable whether


it is appropriate to characterize this space as a drug market.Drug users and general partygoers bear the brunt of theseoperations, not drug suppliers. In this context two questionsemerge as critical: How is drug consumption enacted (or not)in response to these interventions, and how should we under-stand deterrence and displacement if space is grasped as com-plex and causality emergent?

Partygoers respond to the presence of drug dogs at dance par-ties in a number of ways. Some people take their drugs to theparty as usual, “running the gauntlet” in the hope of dodgingdetection, but if officers with dogs approach they are liable topanic — either taking all their drugs at once (putting them-selves at substantial risk) or else discarding them. Some peo-ple take additional measures to conceal their drugs, storingthem in condoms in bodily cavities such as the rectum or vagi-na. Some people preload prior to travelling to the party, takinga much larger quantity of stimulants in one dose at home inorder to see themselves through several hours of partying. Aswell as pre-loading with stimulants, some people resort to pur-chasing the highly caffeinated alcoholic beverages on sale atthe party which the beverage industry produces in response tothe established demand for psychoactive consumption (seeMeasham & Brain, 2005). To ensure their enjoyment of theparty, some people switch to other drugs they believe the dogscannot detect. Replacing ecstasy with GHB—a depressantwith sensory effects and the drug most commonly associatedwith critical incidents, ambulance calls, hospitalizations, andoverdoses—is commonly mentioned. (Incidentally, theseharmful incidents are more likely to take place when GHB ismixed with alcohol, the only intoxicant that is legally avail-able at the party). Arguably, each of these practices is riskierthan its precedents, giving rise to dangers that police general-ly deflect or externalize responsibility for by saying they arejust enforcing the law and that taking drugs is illegal. In gen-eral, avoiding the dogs is communally experienced as a vexingissue, one of the elements that is dissuading many people frombothering with dance parties altogether.

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But this declining interest in the dance party form is part of amore general trend in the embodiment of gay community thatis itself complexly emergent and multilinear in its sources.Alongside the perceived degradation of urban spaces and com-munal events discussed above, a significant element has beenthe growing popularity of online hook-up devices and mobileapps as a mechanism for finding sexual partners (see Race,2010, in press). If we understand the emergence of gay com-munities in urban centers over the 20th Century as an effect inpart of material practices of finding and meeting sexual part-ners, as I would argue we should, we can begin to appreciatehow actively these devices are also participating in the chang-ing ontology of gay spaces. As we can see from trends in theSydney gay periodic survey (Figure 1), a significant increasein the use of these devices since 2000 has occurred alongsidedecreasing participation in some of the traditional venues ofgay sexual socialization.15

These changes are reflected in patterns of drug use that char-acterize these community samples (Figure 2). If we look at thefigures for ecstasy use (the drug most commonly associatedwith dance culture) we see a significant and noticeable declineover the last decade (the period in which both the dog squadand online hook-up devices have been in operation). Althoughno causal relation can be established from these data, somemight point to these reductions as a sign of police success,until we turn to rates of use of other drugs in this sample,where we can see that the reductions in ecstasy use arematched by an increase in the use of GHB in the order of 10%and a general rise in the use of crystal meth within a variablerange of 5–10%.16 The materiality of these changes is con-firmed in discussions with service providers in communityorganizations, who report that most presentations for drug andalcohol services currently come from two primary sources:Younger individuals seeking help in addressing their excessiveuse of alcopops, and older individuals who have sufferedwide-ranging social impacts associated with crystal methdependence (relationship breakdowns, social isolation, loss of


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FIGURE 1Where men looked for sexual partners in the last 6 months(% of participants)

FIGURE 2Drugs consumed in the last 6 months (% of participants)

Findings taken from the Sydney Gay Community Periodic Survey (Zablotska etal. 2008).

Findings taken from the Sydney Gay Community Periodic Survey (Hull et al.2013; Zablotska et al. 2008).

employment, financial hardship, eviction from housing, andsignificant deterioration of physical and mental health) (Race,fieldnotes, 2013).

Drugs like GHB and crystal meth are occasionally used innightclubs and at dance parties. But they are also constituentelements in entirely new drug practices and modes of sexualencounter that have been made possible through the availabil-ity and widespread use of online hook-up devices (see Race,in press). The term “PNP,” or “party and play,” (also known as“wired play” or “chem sex”) refers to the use of certain drugsto engage in sexual activity, generally in the home of a givenparticipant. Some of the key accoutrements of this practice aredepicted in this moralizing campaign image (Figure 3): thecomputer screen, the online profile, the crystal pipe, and soforth, all situated within the domestic space of the user.Crystal functions as a baseline drug in this context, where it isoften smoked alone through a glass pipe prior to any sexualencounter. It is typically used to effectuate certain capacities:it enhances sexual sensation, but also keeps users awake andalert, enabling them to maintain the sort of focus and fixationassociated with browsing profiles and watching porn forextended periods. The drug has emerged as one element in theconstruction of “extended sessions,” wired play, chem sex, or“group play,”—terms that refer to sex with more than one part-ner or a sequence of partners, over several hours or even days,generally at the homes of given participants (at least inSydney). On these occasions the drug is smoked (or some-times injected) with sexual partners during “time out” fromsexual activities. Because crystal affects erectile capacity, erec-tile dysfunction drugs are another constituent element in themaking of this scene and their use is increasing rapidly in thispopulation. Meanwhile, the drug GHB (the effects of whichgenerally last about an hour) is used in this setting to initiateor reinitiate sexual activities, such that an extended or groupsession typically goes through various temporal phases—sex,chilling, chatting, smoking crystal, watching porn, browsingprofiles, locating new participants, taking G, having sex.


Should a GHB overdose occur, participants respond in a vari-ety of ways, but one thing is certain: They do not have easyaccess to the medical tents and services specifically tailored toattend to these situations in dance party contexts.

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FIGURE 3Anti-crystal meth campaign poster

The stigmatized status of crystal in some gay circles can leadto practices of self-isolation as articulated by Dan (age 32):

With crystal, particularly, it doesn’t really matter what I’m doing, Ijust get really focused on it. [Laughs] So, so if I’m on Scruff [a gaygeo-locative app] or, and there would generally be porn in the back-ground as well, like I’d generally be watching porn and being onScruff at the same time, [At home? Or] at home, yeah, yeah. And, Is’pose there’s a bit of shame for me around using crystal so I don’treally wanna use it with other people. Again which is why I tend tospend a lot of time chatting before I actually hook up.

If online browsing does not generate the desired sexual andintimate encounters (and often it does not) the result can bedisappointment, loneliness, and frustration—affects intensi-fied by the highs and lows of the drug. The presence and stor-ing of crystal meth in domestic locations (and its conducive-ness to online activity) means that it can be integrated relative-ly easily into everyday personal, domestic and even labor rou-tines; it is not self-limiting like ecstasy. Regular use leadssome people to develop levels of tolerance that may prompt atransition to injecting. The entry of injecting into group ses-sions is associated with a burgeoning Hepatitis C epidemic inurban gay centers around the world within an environment inwhich it becomes difficult to distinguish between sex and drugequipment (Kirby & Thornbur-Dunwell, 2013). More general-ly, the pleasures and intensities of online hook-ups come topunctuate what is experienced by at least some (though notall) participants in this scene as increasingly confined and des-perate terms of everyday life. As one drug and alcohol thera-pist informed me, “there are a lot of severely isolated peopleout there who are too scared to participate in communalspaces that were previously sustaining” (Race, fieldnotes,November, 2012).

Yet for all its dangers, this sexual infrastructure is also gener-ating new spaces and practices of sociability that may beacknowledged and nudged in more inhabitable directions (seeRace, in press). After all, if the party is approached as an eventin which heterogeneous elements come together such that


something new emerges, then trying to attend to what isemerging in all its complexity offers the best hope of respond-ing actively and effectively to present circumstances.

Conclusion: towards a materiology of drug effects

What I’ve tried to articulate in this article is a manner ofengaging with events-in-process that attends to the experienceand activity of the multitude of elements—both human andnonhuman—that go into their shaping. I have argued thatmaterial practices and spaces are topological, and causalityemergent, in ways that some of the key knowledge/powerpractices that shape policy interventions in this field are in thehabit of ignoring. Through grounded analysis, I have identi-fied some of the key vectors of this process and demonstratedhow some of these failures in attention participate in the mak-ing of unforeseen eventualities. I find the precedents for thisapproach to drug effects in drug ethnographies, and the keenawareness that exists in the critical drugs field more generallyregarding the potential for unforeseen consequences. Suchconsequences are material (and not just social) and trackingthem provides a basis for sharpened reflexivity about givenknowledge practices. I take this attention to knowledge prac-tices and their effectuations to be an important aspect of topo-logical approaches, which lend themselves to careful experi-mentality in the manners we devise for engaging our objects.

In this respect, I am encouraged by the fact that debates about“what is causing what here”—that is, experimental judg-ment—often constitute the very fabric of popular culture andcommunity exchange. In community discourse, the questionof what has been causing the degradation of gay space (drugdogs? the Internet? crystal meth? real-estate prices? thechanging demography of Oxford Street?) is a topic of constantspeculation and (often colorful) debate.17 For Latour (1999),the experiment is a process through which the experimenterlearns to attribute certain agencies to the world by assembling,

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comparing and contrasting specific relations within it. If thisstands as an apt analysis of scientific practice, it also resonateswith the practices of those who are being formed through thismatter of concern; not least those who experiment with drugsthemselves. The immanence of experimentality as part of thevery fabric of popular culture (particularly cultures in whichdrug use features prominently) brims with potential for com-munity engagement. What might be promoted here, in otherwords, is a certain democratization of attention to experimen-tal processes. From this perspective, to be engaged with com-munity is to participate critically in such processes of attribu-tion, while taking time to elaborate the situatedness and spe-cific arrangements of every process of experimentation.

By way of conclusion, I want to comment on the relationbetween “the medical” and “the social” that has come to hauntpublic health conferences in many domains in recent times.Over the course of the conference for which this article waswritten, I kept pondering a question that Nancy Campbellraised in her opening keynote concerning the disciplinary pro-cedures through which scientific practices give themselves thelicense to speak with certainty. As she demonstrated, complex-ity is often acknowledged in scientific circles, but at the policyinterface it operates rather like a bucket of slimy worms thatsomeone—some discipline—must end up carrying. Gettinglumped with the bucket tends to diminish any claims on rele-vance, credibility or authority on the part of the unlucky disci-pline. This is evident in the public health field in the way inwhich the social sciences are typically held to account for anydeviation between the policy predictions of the “hard sciences”and what actually happens (see Race, 2012). For this reason Ifeel that we need to maintain attention on the procedures viawhich complexity is covered over, bracketed, externalized ordisavowed by the hard sciences—the ways in which complexi-ty gets siphoned off to the social and the “unscientific.” Thebucket may be grasped while rejecting the sense in which thelabel of “sociology” confines our insights to only one side ofthe modernist settlement. Informed by William Connolly’s


characterization of immanent naturalism, in this article I haveargued that emergent causality cuts across—or mutually impli-cates—the realms of nature and culture, and that attending tothe indeterminacy that is implicit in processes of eventuation isboth critical and important for all health researchers. Whatmight we become in refusing these bifurcating gestures of pub-lic health policy? Perhaps we are becoming materiologists:Investigators of how things come to matter, or, that is, how spe-cific realities materialize.

1, I refer to the strand of anti-juridical philosophy that situates all beingon a plane of immanence and is characterized by its rejection ofappeals to transcendence and teleology as an unquestioned basis forethical action. Key thinkers in this tradition include Spinoza, Niet-zsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Latour and Gatens among others.

2. I explain what this approach entails in more detail in the discussionthat follows, but briefly, the term topology specifies a relationalunderstanding of the construction and permutation of space, time,objects and events (see Lury et al., 2012).

3. On insider ethnographies in drug research see Measham and Moore(2006). For a more detailed discussion of my methodological forma-tion and orientation see Race (2009, 2014). On “interesting science”and the need for researchers to put their research categories at risk,see Latour (2004). For a more detailed historical discussion of gayparty culture in Sydney see Race (2011). Periodic surveys of sex anddrug practices among gay men conducted annually in most Aus-tralian cities since 2000 form an important source of information.See https://csrh.arts.unsw.edu.au/research/publications/hiv-sexual-health for an indicative list. On the history of gay sexual sociabilityin Australia and its connection to health and politics, I have beenparticularly informed by the following sources: Faro (2000), Marshand Galbraith (1995), Wotherspoon (1991), Dowsett (1996), Altman(1994) and the essays collected in Johnston and Van Reyk (2001).

4. I conducted the Sydney interviews myself; Melbourne interviewswere conducted by Dr Dion Kagan, employed as a research assistanton the project. Among the qualitative data, the present analysis drawsonly on the Sydney interviews (n = 20). The qualitative componentsof the project were submitted for institutional ethics review andapproved by the University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Com-mittee (Approval #14718).

5. Accounts of these practices are derived from media reporting, directobservation, and the specialized literature discussed in this article.

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Notes

Recent deployments of materialization as a critical concept in drugresearch include Rosengarten (2009), Race (2009), Fraser and Moore(2011), Michael and Rosengarten (2013).

6. This analytic approach derives from conceptual engagements that Iset out and elaborate in the body of the article. Key sources includeWhitehead (1978), Latour (1999, 2004) and Foucault’s later work onproblematization (for a discussion of the latter see Race, 2009).

7. Police Powers (Drug Detection Dogs) Bill, Second Reading, Legisla-tive Assembly, NSW Parliament, 6 December 2001. Hansard & Papers.

8. NSW Parliamentary Debates, 6 December 2001, p. 19745.

9. Statement made by the manager of the dog squad, Surry Hills Local Com-mand, at the Sydney Mardi Gras Policing Community Forum, March2013. Referenced also in Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby et al. (2013).

10. Maher and Dixon argue “Drug policing has to be located in a longhistory of public order policing … street-level practices are deter-mined by this mandate and its history as much as by policing strate-gies directed at the drug market” (Maher & Dixon, 1999, p. 491).

11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology, retrieved September 30, 2013.

12. These increases in homophobic violence may be specific to Sydney’ssocial geography given Oxford Street’s historical coding as a centerof gay community. Quilley (1997) observed a similar link betweenthe expansion of Manchester’s nighttime economy and increases inhomophobic violence in the gay village precinct in the 1990s.

13. Whitehead (1978) uses the phrase “the fallacy of misplaced concrete-ness” to caution against the tendency to take the abstractions of sci-entific practice as universally applicable.

14. The community rally led to a community forum that channelled pop-ular anger into advocacy formats. Key criticisms are summarized inthe interagency report that documented this discussion. Police use ofdrug-detection dogs features prominently (Gay & Lesbian RightsLobby et al., 2013).

15. These figures are cross-sectional, taken from a convenience sampleproduced at gay community venues and events, and thus should beread as indicative only. Data from 2009–2013 is not included heredue to changes in the wording of the question from 2009 onwards(from “looked for sexual partners” to “found sexual partners”) whichproduce disparities in the figures. A significant decrease is alsorecorded for dance parties, nightclubs and bars over this later period.

16. See Endnote 15 above. My ethnographic work suggests that figureson rates of use of methamphetamine and GHB are likely to be an


underestimate since users of these drugs are increasingly likely toavoid the community events and venues from which these conven-ience samples are assembled.

17. At one point in 2004-2005, crystal meth was being attributed suchwide-ranging causal power in gay community discourse that a run-ning joke emerged in certain circles that “crystal caused the tsunami.”

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Documents

Complex Events: Drug effects and emergent causality