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Article Excerpt
Ever since Parker and his colleagues in Manchester (UK) developed the normalization thesis (Parker, Aldridge & Measham, 1998; Parker, Williams, & Aldridge 2002) there has been a debate among social scientists regarding drug normalization. In sum, the debate is concerned with how we may best understand, conceptualize and theorize drug use in post-modern society. In their work, Parker and colleagues lay down their account of what they see as a "cultural accommodation" of drug use, meaning that the British youth they study, drug users as well as non-drug users, do not see drugs as closely associated with deviancy. It is instead part of everyday normal life, and drug users are seemingly normal kids going about their daily tasks. In general terms normalization can be defined as a process in which a phenomenon that was previously considered as extraordinary (unknown, large, small, good, bad, threatening or enriching) loses this status and becomes a part of the world of familiar and customary perception and action (Rosenbrock, Dubois-Arber, Moers, Pinell, Scheaffer, & Setbon, 2000).
The drug normalization thesis was originally based firmly within the British context, and it is also in the United Kingdom (UK) that the normalization thesis has received most attention. Nevertheless, drug normalization has been associated with Western post-modern societies in general (South, 1999), and researchers outside the UK have taken part in the normalization debate (see for instance Duff, 2005, 2003; Pape & Rossow, 2004; Calafat, Fernandez, Juan, Bellis, Bohrn, Hakkareinen, 2001; Lenton, Boys, & Norcross, 1997). Researchers have most commonly seen the relevance of the normalization concept where drug prevalence rates are high, which may explain why drug normalization has rarely been on the political and public debate agenda in a low drug prevalence country like Sweden. This does, however, not necessarily imply that the normalization concept is irrelevant to low prevalence countries.
This article will investigate the normalization concept and further explore to what extent normalization may be a useful concept to reach an improved understanding of the drug situation in Sweden. Certainly, the normalization thesis is not a well-defined theory; rather, it is a loose concept that includes various interconnected parts (Rodner Sznitman, 2007b), and as the debate goes on these concepts have evolved. Furthermore, the concept of normalization has a long history, as it has been applied in different fields and with different connotations. In order to reach a better understanding of the concept "normalization" it is thus not sufficient to lean only on relevant drug research. In setting forth an examination of the history of the normalization concept in the social sciences, this article aims to inform both the immediate discussion of drug normalization in the Swedish context and the continued drug normalization debate in general.
Analytic approach
What follows immediately is an elaboration of the different usages and meanings of normalization. By exploring past connotations in the drug literature as well as other areas, a comprehensive understanding of the term will be established. The analysis will then explore the relevance of the normalization concept to the Swedish drug situation. This will be done, firstly, by examining the parameters set out by Parker and colleagues (2002) in relation to relevant Swedish studies on drug use in the general population. Secondly, the article will draw upon the empirical results of two projects the author has been involved in, one based solely on drug users in Stockholm, Sweden and the other based on a national Swedish and a Swiss school sample.
Normalization as adjustment
The normalization concept was originally developed in the 1950s in Denmark, where it was used in terms of people with learning difficulties becoming included in as many features of conventional everyday normal life as possible (Emerson, 1998). Inspired by the dominant labeling perspective in American sociology in the '60s and '70s, Wolfensberger reformulated the normalization concept into a scientific social theory. Wolfensberger viewed the fundamental aim of normalization in terms of changing the status of devalued social groups (Wolfensberger & Thomas, 1983).
Although Wolfensberger recognized that society's views on disabled people must be challenged, his focus was more on how to change disabled people so that they would conform to what is regarded as "normal". Without a doubt, when Wolfensberger (1983) adopted the term social role valorization to replace normalization and stated that "the creation of valued roles is the highest normalization goal," it looked as though he intended that society should replace its negative conception of disability with a positive one which valued difference, rather than conformity to rules. Yet, Wolfensberg's writings never fulfilled this promise (Szivos, 1998). Wolfensberger never spoke about disability as something which could be accepted in its own right. Valorization did not mean the creation of something new, but instead it was about enhancing people's skills and images to bring them in line with valued social norms.
The manner in which Wolfensberger developed the normalization concept has strong links to Goffman's work, as both are preoccupied with disabled people passing as normal. In his writings, Goffman (1963) argues that individuals at risk of a deviant stigma are either "the discredited" or "the discreditable". The discredited's stigma is known to others either because the individual in question revealed his or her deviance or because the deviance was not concealable. The discreditables. on the other hand, are able to hide their stigma. The majority of the discreditables "pass" as nondeviants by avoiding stigma symbols, meaning anything that would link them to their deviance, and by using "disidentifiers" which are actions that would lead others to believe that they have a nondeviant status. In this manner, Goffman describes how deviance and stigma are interesting to study as they are bound up in processes of passing as normal.
Very much influenced by the labeling perspective and Goffman's ideas, it was clear that Wolfensberger's conceptualization of normalization had a limited revolutionary position in that it incorporated a sort of "let's pretend I'm normal" activity. As Susman (1994) has noted, normalization defined in this way is an attempt to adjust to society, and as such it is linked to the internalization of socially devalued personal identities. Interestingly enough, this limitation is similar to the voiced criticisms of aspects of Goffman's work. Critics have argued that a major problem in Goffman's work is that deviants are presented as passive, and that Goffman's subjects are thus forever doomed to the feelings of discredited people, because ultimately they adopt the dominant norms and therefore the view of themselves as failures (Gussow & Tracey, 1968; Fine & Asch, 1988). Indeed, and although Goffman acknowledged the possibility of stigmatized people organizing and gaining recognition as a legitimate political group (Goffman, 1963, pp. 112-114), his focal interest in stigma management led him to give little attention to how stigma may be resisted. In fact. Goffman observed that stigmatized persons are often unable to usefully challenge imputation of negative difference, in part because they themselves accept the premises and values which underlie their discredited social identities. Undeniably, studies on substance use have been closely affiliated with this line of research (e.g. McCaghy, 1968).
Normalization as transformation
Despite the early emphasis on personal strategies to achieve stigma disavowal, researchers have noted that "passing" is only one of the available options for stigmatized groups. An alternative involves creating a separate group identity and to seek thereby a re-evaluation of the group's hitherto negative perceived characteristics. Empirical sociological research has noted that, in the face of stigmatization, deviants are not necessarily passive recipients of stigma. Instead they attempt to reject prevalent constructions, and also seek to influence the "normal" to do so as well. An example is, for instance, how former mental patients use political activism to change prevailing negative societal beliefs about them. As Jones and colleagues (1984) have noted, change of stigma perception may take the form of redefining an attribute of the self that was considered negative to be positive.
This and similar research presents a different definition of normalization from the original version developed by Wolfensberger. As discussed in the next section, this new version is a corollary of minority group consciousness-raising (Susman, 1994), which became particularly forceful in the United States (U.S.) in the 1960s. In regards to disability, normalization has been transformed into a way for disabled people to gain social success without denying their handicaps (Phillips. 1985). According to this new definition, normalization is seen as a way of interacting with normals which does not entail an internalization of devalued personal identities.
Normalization through social movements
Although the idea of deviants challenging the dominant values was present in sociological theory as early as the 1930s in the forms of one of Merton's (1938) five modes of adjustment to incompatibility between goals and means of success and of Lemert's (1951) work on secondary deviance, the idea became much more prevalent in the wake of the U.S. black civil rights movements of the 1960s. The civil rights movements in the U.S. fought for the recognition of dignity and pride within difference. This is a path which various other social movements, such as the gay and the feminist movements, have followed since. As Shakespeare has argued, these social movements are about the "subversion of stigma: taking a negative appellation and converting it into a badge of pride" (Shakespeare, 1993, p. 253).
The struggles have, however, taken different forms over time, and celebration of difference has not always been central. Just as was true in the disability normalization movement, other identity-based social movements have found expanding mainstream conceptions of normality a source of internal disagreement (Edelman, 2001). There were, for instance, two distinct tendencies in the black civil rights movement. The theme in the early 1960s was "integration", not celebration...
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