The construction of social problems as a process of representational naturalization. The case of the social representation of drugs

Drug addiction takes tens of thousands of lives every year and costs communities millions of dollars in both prevention and treatment. In fact, the fentanyl crisis and opioid overdoses of recent years are said to be responsible for the first decline in life expectancy in the United States in decades (McLaughlin, 2017). Drug dependence is also associated with many other issues such as job insecurity, crime, the transmission of serious diseases (especially in the case of drugs that are injected), behaviour problems, mood disorders, mental health problems. Thus, problems relating to drugs, and their use or trafficking, are the focus of significant attention, as evidenced by the number of scientific studies that dwell on them each year. This problem is also the subject of much debate and controversy, affecting political spheres and social, moral and cultural norms, to name but a few. Nevertheless, what we now consider and refer to as drugs, as well as the problems associated with them, is the result of a continuous process of collective appropriation and definition. A process in which the object itself has been transformed and recalibrated, so to speak, integrating a social reality and a repertoire of social representations. This article examines more specifically the process through which the notion of drugs in its modern sense has been naturalized. We argue that the problem of drugs in the contemporary society is the result of a collective process of social constructing, the main mechanism of which has been representational naturalization. We will argue that naturalization can be understood as a four-phase process: recognition, decoupling, instrumental use and validation through experience. We will use empirical studies by Seddon (2016), Musto (1996; 1999), Parascandola (1995) and other authors as well as our own research (Negura and Maranda, 2008; Negura, Maranda and Deslauriers, 2016) to illustrate our arguments