Feeling Good: the Ethopolitics of Pleasure, Psychoactive Substance Use and Public Health and Criminal Justice System Governance: Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Drug Courts in the United States of America

The drug courts in the United States exemplify how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are mediated by complex cultural constructions of ways in which we may 'feel good' rather than mad, bad, sad or sick. I argue that such mechanisms, and public health initiatives which seek to persuade us to choose specific means to enhance our health while eschewing others, are engaging an ethopolitics of moralized pleasures associated with the trope of addiction. Technologies of pleasure associated with current public health initiatives encouraging us to manage our risky neurochemical selves are, in some senses, homologous with the practices of the drug courts in the United States. In both, normalization is anchored in the management of pleasures, while notions of addiction support neo-liberal governance strategies. The rhetoric of salvationary narratives is drawn upon as a device of purification which decontextualizes debate, marginalizing counter-theories