Thinking with pleasure: Experimenting with drugs and drug research

Pleasure in drug and alcohol research should be treated as a constitutive part of the research relations, not as something kept at an arm’s length while researchers remain “detached” observers. The paper frames drug use and drug research as mutually implicated events. It draws on Foucault and concepts from Science and Technology Studies to argue that thinking with pleasure can shift research practice from merely researching pleasure or about pleasure toward generating new forms of inquiry. Rather than recommending that researchers take drugs, it proposes a symmetry of attention: researchers can let what participants do and say affect the research process. The goal is to better understand how pleasures complicate, motivate, and modulate both drug consumption and the production of knowledge, with implications for how drug and alcohol studies handle stigma, harm reduction, and the ethics of scientific practice.