Introduction

Poverty, drug use and stigma are often connected. Poverty involves stigmatising labels. Drug use attracts stigmatising labels and drug use in impoverished communities compounds that stigma. The empirical reality, that intersecting stigmas increase marginalisation (Deacon et al., 2013), has shaped the focus of criminological research with people from disadvantaged communities (Deakin et al., 2022). While there is some degree of universal stigma associated with illicit substance use (Room, 2005), substances that are more commonly injected (i.e. heroin and methamphetamines) tend to be associated with socio-economic deprivation and harsher criminalisation (Seddon, 2006). Research on the stigma and criminalisation of injection drug use has understandably focussed on those more vulnerable to the harms of the labelling process: people who inject drugs in disadvantaged areas and those who belong to marginalised groups, such as ethnic minorities and diverse sexualities and genders.

While we know that stigma leads to marginalisation, its effects are mediated by the contexts in which it is produced. For instance, less is known about the way stigma impacts the structurally advantaged, or people from communities of relative affluence. This paper seeks to deepen criminological understandings of the ways in which drug-related stigma compounds harm among the marginalised, by exploring other settings where we know little about how stigma is internalised and experienced. Taking injection drug use in an affluent community as our object of study, this research provides an opportunity to generate insights into how drug-related stigma and criminalisation is impacted by social position.

Background

Foundational Concepts: Stigma and Labelling

Criminological scholarship has long grappled with the roles that stigma and labelling play in matters of crime. Irving Goffman’s classic 1963 text, Stigma: Notes on the management of a spoiled identity, conceived of stigma as occurring when an ‘attribute that is deeply discrediting’ transforms the person who holds this attribute ‘from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’ (Goffman 1963: 3). In conceptualising this, Goffman wrote that we need ‘a language of relationships, not attributes’ to indicate that stigma is not about the qualities of the people who are subject to it, but about the social relationships that stigmatise. Since Goffman, research on stigma has proliferated well beyond the conceptual framework he outlined and often implicitly informing contemporary public discourse and policy processes.

Building on the concept of stigma, labelling theory was formative in developing the sociology of deviance and the tradition of critical criminology that emerged out of it. For criminology, labelling is stigma in action. It takes stigma as its starting point and elaborates on the processes that ‘spoil’ identity, articulating how criminal legal institutions are essential in such processes. Labelling theory was also influential in shifting the epistemological and ontological frameworks utilised in criminology. In Howard Becker's (possessive) classic (1963) book, Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance, he makes the case that deviance and by extension, crime, is not a quality of the person who commits it or even of the act itself, but rather a social process in which such labels are selectively applied. This conceptualisation has had a significant impact on the field by highlighting the social construction of crime, which has no underlying ontological reality (Hillyard & Tombs, 2007). For Becker and the labelling theorists that followed, the observation that stigmatising labels are applied unevenly in society was cause for a major shift in criminological theory away from matters of criminogenesis and towards social responses to crime (Himmelstein, 1978).

This conceptual shift had a significant impact on the way social science scholarship approached drug use, with qualitative traditions of the sociology of deviance entering an ‘appreciative’ turn in drug research (Matza, 1969). Since the introduction of the labelling perspective, social science scholarship on drug use has tended to start from the position that the criminalisation of drug use is unevenly applied across racial and class lines. A classic example is the legal distinction between powder and crack cocaine in the USA. Despite being chemically similar, crack cocaine use is more prevalent in black and impoverished neighbourhoods and has historically attracted significantly harsher penalties (Musto & Korsmeyer, 2008; Shein, 1993). Infamously referred to as the 100-to-1 disparity (recently reduced to 18-to-1), the penalties for crack/powder cocaine have been criticised as ‘unsound in theory and racially discriminatory in practice’ (ACLU, 2007). Much drugs scholarship has since focussed on how the surveillance and thus concentrated labelling of disadvantaged communities produces harmful stigma (Deakin et al., 2022; Seddon, 2006).

Notes on Stigma, Labelling and Power

Given the long history of the concepts of stigma and labelling in criminology, there has been much commentary on the limitations of these concepts, which has emphasised the importance of acknowledging the role of power. For example, early stigma scholarship was challenged on the grounds that it did not include the voices of those who experienced stigma, and that the concept was deployed in a highly individualised way (Link & Phelan, 2001). The analysis of individualised adaptations to stigma has become a bedded down feature of the more instrumental version of the concept (Pescosolido et al., 2008) used in contemporary criminological literature (Stone, 2015a). Lived experience forms a growing part of qualitative traditions of drug research, but remains sidelined in mainstream and positivist accounts of stigma related to issues like mental health, disability and criminal self-concept. As Tyler and Slater (2018: 1) have observed, ‘the conceptual understanding of stigma inherited from Goffman, along with the use of micro-sociological and/or psychological research methods in stigma research often side-lines questions about where stigma is produced, by whom and for what purposes’.

In the case of drug use, criminological research has broadly conceived of stigma as deriving from the attributes of individuals and has focussed on how communities respond to stigma—but fails to address the processes that produce drug-related stigma, such as the harms of prohibition, the impacts of colonial violence and the carceral logic associated with it (Tauri & Porou, 2014). Parker and Aggleton (2003) have argued that research on stigma needs to ask social and political questions about how people are stigmatised and the uneven harms that this eventuates; or as Link and Phelan (2001: 363) have noted, ‘for stigmatisation to occur, power must be exercised’. In responding to such questions, Fraser and colleagues (2017: 192) have also argued that drug-related stigma is ‘a contingent biopolitically performative process rather than as a stable marker of some kind of anterior difference’.

Though labelling theory is appreciative of the position of those deemed deviant, it rarely challenges the category of the ‘deviant’ per se.​ The theory questions the way institutions construct people as deviant, but has not engaged in a robust assessment of whether that construction is ethical or justifiable.​ In terms of people who inject drugs, the labelling process has clearly demonstrated impacts in both marginalising people from mainstream society (Tindal et al., 2010; Simmonds & Coomber, 2009) and in making them vulnerable to being targeted by the criminal legal system (DeBeck et al., 2017). What this literature has not done is challenge the framing of the criminalisation of people who inject drugs as a legitimate response to drug-related harm (Maher & Dixon, 2017). In short, labelling theory tends not to articulate the ways in which the labelling process and the stigma it attracts can be violent and harm generating in-and-of itself. Nor does it provide a robust account of how political and power structures are implicated in the harms caused by social responses that construct drug use as crime.

Research on Stigma and Labelling

Stigma and labelling have been influential in the development of a contemporary research agenda in criminology that has focussed on the impact of the degradation of the self-concept of people on the margins (Seddon, 2006). This is especially so in drug research, with the stigma and labelling of people who use drugs informing large bodies of research with implications for policing and criminal justice, as well as relevant research in psychology, public health and public policy. For example, health-oriented research on drug use has found that forms of shaming and associated internalised stigma, social rejection and discrimination contribute to the compromised health status of people who inject drugs (Rhodes et al., 2005) and impede the uptake of health and social services (Djordjevic et al., 2021). Fears about blood-borne virus transmission by people who inject drugs can also further the criminalisation process (Frye et al., 2009) and exacerbate stigma, which ‘feeds upon, strengthens and reproduces existing inequalities of class, race, gender and sexuality’ (Parker & Aggleton, 2003: 13). However, for the most part contemporary literature on drug use and criminal justice tends to address stigma in a more instrumental way, seeing it as a general mark of disgrace that results in forms of social rejection or stereotyping (Stardust et al., 2021).

In criminological research on drug use, stigma is often presented as a less harsh alternative than formal sanctions or punishment by the state (Funk, 2004; Grasmick & Appleton, 1977). This includes studies that assess stigma as a control factor in drug use at the neighbourhood level, and which conclude that ‘the gain of social stigma could not be marked as negative unambiguously’ (Yakovleva, 2016). In crime policy literature, stigma is assumed to act as a form of informal social control that reduces drug use and associated crime (Warner, 2014; Boyum et al., 2011). In policing scholarship, stigma remains central to the supposed deterrent effect of an increased movement towards securitisation and surveillance (O’Neill & Loftus, 2013). Although stigma tends to be treated as ‘benign’ in the literature outlined above, criminological research on drug use is consistent in finding that stigmatising already marginalised communities is unequivocally harmful (O’Neill & Loftus, 2013; Fagan & Meares, 2008). Our paper draws on observations from intersectional feminism, critical race theory and critical drugs scholarship to respond to the limitations of stigma and labelling in contemporary criminological accounts.

Methodology

Research Design

As part of this research, the first author conducted 18 interviews with people who inject drugs in the affluent, beachside suburban setting of the Northern Beaches of Sydney, known locally as ‘The Beaches’. Fieldwork began in May 2020 and lasted for 6 months, including being based one day a week at a local needle and syringe programme (NSP). Participants were recruited by responding to flyers posted on community message boards and at local transport hubs (n = 8), as well as warm approaches by NSP staff (n = 6) and snowballing from existing participants (n = 3), with one referral by a local mental health professional. Fieldwork was brought to a close once the data reached saturation and further interviews did not generate new information or insights related to the research questions (Saunders et al., 2018). Participants were remunerated AU$40. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and transcripts were analysed by thematic content through a combination of preliminary and close readings. Ethical approval for the study was provided by the UNSW Human Ethics Research Committee. Further details on the methodology are described in a previous publication (Dertadian et al., 2022).

Entering a Suburban Drug Scene

Located on the eastern coastline of Sydney, the Northern Beaches are north of the Sydney CBD, starting a short distance from the city’s iconic Harbour Bridge. The area covers approximately 30 kms of beach and coastal suburbs populated by an often insular, largely white, middle-class community. Doing research on injection drug use in this setting brought with it particular conditions that have implications for the findings. There was a tension between the reputation of the area as wealthy, and the research subject matter (injection drug use), which is often associated with inner-city and disadvantaged communities. For example, one interview took place on the beachfront of a popular night-time entertainment district, which at the time of interview was bustling from the foot-traffic of local restaurants. However during the interview, the participant pointed to a spot only a few hundred metres away where he and others frequently slept rough outside an overcrowded social housing building.

Findings and Discussion

This research involved a total of 18 participants: 11 men and 7 women, ranging between the ages of 26 and 67, with a median age of 48.5 years. The vast majority of participants indicated that they grew up in families of relative wealth, even if that did not quite translate to how they would characterise their adult life: Grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth, but it ended up the nose (Shane, 65-year-old man). Participants came from a mix of upper-middle and lower-middle-class families, some from European migrant aspirational families, as well as two participants whose families struggled with money and periodically relied on social support payments. Wealth, and the moral value that was ascribed to it, played a central role in constituting the stigma that people who inject drugs in the area experience, as well as the labels that stuck as a result.

‘I come from a good family’: stigma and injecting on The Beaches

The first interview was with ‘Darko’, a middle-aged man in his mid-fifties whose parents had migrated from the former Yugoslavia to Sydney when he was very young. Darko was mild mannered and articulate, if not a little nervous during the interview. Darko began by explaining what The Beaches was like then, saying ‘Growing up, you know, especially in the ‘80s, you know, life was quite free, you know. And, it was abundant… And as a teenager… you experiment’. He went on to explain that while experimentation with drugs was decidedly normal on The Beaches, experimentation with heroin was much less accepted: ‘But, powder [heroin] was always, I guess, looked upon as voodoo’.

In explaining his drug use, Darko drew a figurative line between The Beaches and the inner-city, which also functioned as an explanation for the lines he felt he crossed when he was using drugs in Kings Cross (an inner-city drug scene): ‘I had crossed a thin red line’. His move to Kings Cross and initiation to injection drug use were intimately intertwined: ‘It was when I started injecting, that’s when things changed, you know… I wanted to get over the bridge. I wanted to experience Kings Cross’.

Darko’s description of how he began injecting drugs was also contextualised by discussion of his family background, which he said was not consistent with the common stereotype of people who inject drugs.

I grew up, you know, in a good family. I grew up with morals and values… And [with] addiction—slowly but surely those morals and values get stripped away, you know. I’ve become morally bankrupt... addiction, it took me into the gutter.

In emphasising that he had access to the freedoms that the Northern Beaches afforded and was part of a ‘respectable’ family, Darko felt that by injecting drugs he had squandered ‘the good life’ he was born into. This is a life that his high school friends and others on The Beaches also had access to and freely indulged, in but they were able to ‘control’ it.

Darko’s story illustrates how the stigma of injection drug use was framed by participants as a kind of fall from grace. Among the sample, injection drug use was seen to undermine the respectability of the family and this was a strong source of self-doubt and blame. The events that stuck out in the minds of many participants as being associated with shame also involved family members finding out that they used drugs. For example, Pam recalled the following:

I was pulled over and I had mum in the car and the police officer didn’t know me as such. I'd never met or seen that police officer before but as soon as, as [he] said, put your name in, all these things come up and they [police officers] came back with my licence and said, ‘Taken any drugs today?’ And mum knew. (Pam, 46-year-old female)

Participants also explained that The Beaches was a wealthy area, and that the accumulation of wealth was seen as the primary way to define what a successful life looks like. This was reinforced by the middle-class status of the families that many participants grew up in: ‘Basically The Beaches are driven by success and to use [heroin] means you’re unsuccessful in most people’s eyes’ (Caroline, 28-year-old female). The high standard for financial success in The Beaches was one that participants uniformly felt unable to meet, and this became a source of stigma: ‘Definitely a lot of guilt and a lot of shame around it’ (Marianne, 24-year-old female).

Our findings extend on research about how those who live otherwise ‘conventional’ and ‘law-abiding’ lives avoid stigmatising drug-related labels by relying on structural factors (such as socio-economic advantage and geographic location) to aid in concealing stigmatising attributes and protect against status loss (Perrin et al., 2021; Askew & Salinas, 2019). Acts of injecting, visible markers or signs of injecting drug use, and the social interactions to obtain drugs and injecting equipment may be concealed through use of private settings and other impression management strategies (Simmonds & Coomber, 2009). However, our participants described neither fully conventional lives nor fully marginal lives when injecting on The Beaches. While participants experienced stigma from family members around injection drug use, they continued to receive support from family, including emotional support, and most were able to maintain financial and housing stability. Though participants could all recall instances of stigmatising treatment at local health services, this was not regarded as the norm, nor seen as a barrier to accessing health services (Dertadian et al., 2022). In short, our participants were subject to stigma, but not the kind of stigma that is totalising in its degradation of self-concept. In the terminology of the sociology of deviance, the internalised stigma that our participants experienced did not involve the kind of labels that necessitate an escalation or amplification of a criminal self-concept.

‘I’m not even a fucking junkie’: how class protects against the labelling process

As outlined above, participants did experience harmful forms of stigma; however, stigma associated with crime was actively resisted by participants, who rarely thought of themselves as ‘junkies’. In fact, most actively distanced themselves from the label. For example, Seb, a 30-year-old self-described ‘surfer dude’ whose parents used to inject drugs, fiercely contested the label of ‘junkie’.

I had some old guy just step on me… I was like, ‘Oh, help’, and he was like, ‘Fucking junkie’, and just stepped on me. And I was like, ‘I’m not even a fucking junkie’. (Seb, 30-year-old male)

Other participants were less forthright but still made efforts to distance themselves from the popular image of the ‘junkie’ in describing themselves.


I don’t look like, you know, the walking dead, you know how you see real hard-core users and they're skin and bone and they've got scabs that they pick… fucking talking to themselves in public and that, you know. Like, I'm not like that. So people that don’t know me they don’t know unless I tell them (Aaron, 42-year-old male)

I’ve never been a junkie. I've been a drug addict, but I've never been a junkie. (Moran, 43-year-old female)

Participants often made distinctions between themselves and other people who use drugs by describing practices they did not engage in as ‘junkie behaviour’. While many participants felt as though they had crossed a line by injecting drugs and this was a source of stigma, they also qualified that injecting drugs only caused harm to themselves rather than directly harming others in their family or community: ‘I'm not acting crazy or just rushing too hard’ (Aaron, 42-year-old male). Each participant drew the line differently, some saying they would not, for example, sell drugs, engage in any non-drug-related crime, would not steal (from their family), would not engage in sex work and so on.

While people who inject drugs often distance themselves from terms like ‘junkie’ (Murphy & Irwin, 1992) and draw lines that they would not cross (Perrin et al., 2021), many of the distinctions made by our participants explicitly invoked their class position. Participants described how being from ‘good’ neighbourhoods and families protected them from crossing lines that they saw as characterising the worst kind of ‘drug user’. Some participants even made explicit mention of The Beaches itself in making such distinctions, saying that the area is not seen as home to that kind of drug user: ‘Like, around here it’s not as rough as it can be out West and shit where junkies are looked at as scum and people who smoke ice are also junkie scum… The junkie places [are] out West’ (Seb, 30-year-old male). Other participants described drug use on The Beaches as more ‘civilised’.


They're more civilised here… Behaviour wise, yeah. It’s like, the further out [west] you go the more gaol mentality you get (Joel, 48-year-old male).

I guess there is a cultural [thing]—it is very different [out West]… People were desensitised, you know what I mean. They become used to it, expecting—people got bars on their windows. (Pam, 46-year-old female)

Even for the three participants who did identify as ‘junkies’ this was qualified. For example, Sean explained that he only saw himself in this way when he injected drugs: Actually I think of myself as a junkie if I'm just using a needle… every time I've ever used one I do think that word comes into my mind (52-year-old male). In another example, John made a point of showing his son that there are people who are ‘worse’ than him: ‘I’ve shown him really bad junkies’ (John, 50-year-old male). For Sean his status as ‘junkie’ was temporary and fleeting, and while John left open the question of his status as a ‘junkie’ he did so by placing the question in comparison to other people who are more ‘far gone’ than he.

As a physical location, The Beaches provides proximity to mainstream society and a respectable self-concept. In participant accounts, movement away from The Beaches was almost exclusively associated with a deterioration in self-concept—initiation to injecting in Kings Cross, police harassment in the inner-city and accessing the more visible drug markets in the outer suburbs of Sydney. However, movement towards (or back to) The Beaches was almost exclusively associated with a restoration of positive self-concept—derived from external factors such as low levels of police contact, uptake of services, more stable housing, less exposure to crime and being near family. Proximity to The Beaches informs the distance participants place between themselves and those who occupied the worst elements of the stereotypical world in which injection drug use is part of a nexus involving crime and other stigmatised behaviours.

‘I've been offered decent money to have sex’: on being a woman who injects drugs on The Beaches

Despite the way the classed status of The Beaches was used to resist stigmatising labels, and protected against the loss of family as a form of economic safety-net and housing stability, the stigma and labelling participants experienced also depended on other elements of social position. For instance, the women in our sample had to contend with a range of gendered forms of stigma, including the way women who inject drugs are viewed by people on the Northern Beaches. Pam’s story illustrates the tension between the affluence of the area and the gendered precarity of women who inject drugs. Pam was a 46-year-old former professional athlete who had a successful career travelling the world, until she experienced a back injury that derailed her participation in the sport for several years. As someone who could claim to have at one point in her life lived up to the professional and financial success that defines the cultural milieu of The Beaches, Pam was particularly conscious of how her status as a person who injects drugs was a topic of gossip on The Beaches. In discussing her experiences of stigma, Pam spoke a lot about how members of The Beaches community viewed her: ‘Things get around even without you knowing the people even sometimes’.

For women in our sample, including Pam, their class status was used to resist the compounding stigma experienced by women who inject drugs. For example, having a good credit rating from her previous career and investments meant Pam had more options than most for navigating the precarious circumstances that women who inject drugs often experience: ‘I've been offered decent money to have sex with somebody. No chance…. No, I’ll be alright. I’ll get some money from somewhere.’ Despite being decriminalised for nearly thirty years in NSW, sex work is still subject to stigma and often conflated with drug use, particularly for women (Stardust et al., 2021; Aroney & Crofts, 2019). The ability to avoid sex work and property crime had a profound impact on her sense of self: ‘I still have a little bit of respect for myself… I kind of try to keep a little bit of self-esteem and respect otherwise I can't really look in the mirror with too much respect’. This was a common refrain among women in the study.

I've never stooped that low. I've never lost my dignity. That’s the only thing I’ve got left is my dignity. (Moran, 43-year-old female)

It just takes the self-worth from you. That's very hard to get back… [Injection drug use] come at a huge cost. Huge cost. Respect from your loved ones. Respect for your local community. Respect from your children. (Sandra, 50-year-old female)

These findings are consistent with previous research on women who inject drugs and the way they emphasise personal agency in resisting drug-related stigma (Stone, 2015b). In our sample, women were conscious of the class status that accompanied living on The Beaches, and the licence it provided them to make choices that free them from narrowly ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’ self-concepts, and spoke about this as useful in resisting stigmatising ideas around drug use and femininity.

‘Its just about colour’: on not being white on The Beaches

According to the most recent census, the Northern Beaches is predominantly white, with the most common ancestries being English (29.2%), non-Indigenous Australian (22.3%), Irish (9.2%) and Scottish (7.5%) (ABS, 2016). Despite this there was very little discussion of the racial profile of the area among participants. This is consistent with classic accounts of critical whiteness studies, which articulate how whiteness is normalised to the point that it is invisible to white subjects and those who benefit from whiteness as a system of power (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Dyer, 1988). This was generally reflected in the sample, which was predominately white. There are also ways to analyse the performativity of whiteness in participant accounts (Warren, 2001). For example, a third of the participants had European migrant backgrounds, though most presented visually as white and seemed practiced at performing proximity or deference to whiteness—this included boasting about attending largely white private schools with ‘excellent’ reputations, wearing collared shirts to casual occasions such as an interview with the researcher, and so on. Participant narratives also involved ubiquitous references to being ‘Aussie’ (slang for Australian) when referencing white and European culture. References to ‘good’ families and ‘civilised’ drug use can also be read as coded references to middle-class whiteness (Johnston, 2020; Revier, 2020).

There were only two participants who did not present visually, or in their accounts, as white. The first was Darko, introduced earlier, who was clear about the whiteness of the area and the ways in which he stood out: ‘I'm a brown, non-blue-eyed non-blonde-haired, you know, they look at me as though I'm ethnic sort of thing. And they are probably thinking, why isn't he out west with the rest of the brownies, you know what I mean?’ Indeed, the two non-white participants in our study tended to find themselves using the protective elements of the Northern Beaches bubble to contend with the compounding stigma associated with the outsider status that comes with not being white in an area of white affluence. As outlined below, the non-white participants used the status of The Beaches as a ‘good’ (white and wealthy) place, to develop strategies to ‘blend in’. However, it was the ways in which gender, race and class intersected that provided the most significant examples of stigma in our sample.

The other participant who identified as non-white was a 43-year-old woman named Moran, the only Koori or Aboriginal woman in the study. Moran was a warm and welcoming person with a curious, analytical mind and a subdued laugh. Unlike the vast majority of participants, Moran had been arrested many times over while living on The Beaches: ‘Contact I’ve had with them [cops] on The Beaches. Whenever I get out of prison, they are straight on to me. They want me off the street’. This involved many known tactics of police that target Aboriginal people (Tauri & Porou, 2014). For example, the overzealous policing of petty offences like ‘offensive language’ is notorious among Aboriginal communities (Porter & Cunneen, 2020). This often produces confrontations about the legitimacy of the charge, resulting in further charges such as ‘resisting arrest’ and ‘assaulting police’, referred to as trifecta charges and charge stacking (Porter, 2016).

I think they do it [lay charges] knowing that the judge will look at it like [I'm Koori], and that I will get locked up. And they know that. I think that's why when I get one charge, they throw 10, like backup charges and just—really, there’s no need, but there is a need because they know they’ll get me off the street, and that’s what they want.

Moran went on to observe that the capacity for her to be visually identified as an Indigenous woman was what most targeted her: ‘It’s just about colour. They don't have that many Kooris over here to deal with. We’re still treated as second class citizens to a point’.

Other than being targeted by police, the greatest source of stigma for Moran came from when her children were removed by the state. Child removal is a key marker of ongoing colonial violence in Australia (Davis, 2019) and a common source of stigma among women who inject drugs (Boyd et al., 2022; Stone, 2015a). In recalling her history of drug use, Moran reflected:

I stopped for 12 years. I was still on methadone, but I stopped all illicit drugs, and had my family, had my kids. And then, yes, after they were taken, I just couldn't deal with it, and I got into ice and that was daily.

She also went on to articulate the removal of her children as something that she experienced as compromising her femininity.

I have four children, but I don't have access to them. They’re with DOCS [family services department]. And that's extremely punishing because they're my children. And being a woman, that's what you're supposed to do in life, procreate, and have your own children. And having that taken from you is definitely a hit below the belt. So that's where a lot of my drug use has stemmed from.

Here is it worth noting that child removal involves overlapping and compounding forms of stigma. For Moran, having her children taken away was experienced as a mark of shame on her credentials as a mother (and a woman), but also on her capacity to control her drug use, the criminalisation of her blakness (Aboriginal people in Australia commonly use the spelling ‘blak’), and a continuation of intergenerational trauma, emblematic of colonial violence from historical child removal policies (the stolen generation) to contemporary issues in the out-of-home-care system (Davis, 2019).

Importantly, Moran noted that moving to The Beaches was one way she attempted to control her drug use and to therefore place herself in a better position to get access to her children again: ‘And then I moved away from Mount Druitt, back over to my mum's on the Northern Beaches’. Sensing that the topics of being targeted by police and having her children taken away are emotionally taxing to discuss, at this point the first author suggested pausing the interview. But Moran insisted there was no need, reflecting: ‘That’s ok… Unfortunately, I’ve had the privilege of talking about my life story over and over and over and over, only because of going into custody. Every time you go, they want to know your life story’. For Moran, explaining her move to The Beaches to state authorities as a conscious and active choice to move away from stigmatised categories such as being a ‘Westie’ and being Aboriginal was a survival mechanism. She sought to perform proximity to the white middle-class culture of The Beaches as a way to appear redeemed in the eyes of institutions that continue to exact intersecting forms of violence on her Indigeneity and her status as a mother and a drug user. In fact, she was so used to rehearsing her story as someone who had ‘escaped’ Western Sydney and apparent Indigenous dysfunction that she is ‘numb’ to it: ‘I’ve become very numb to that now, to my story. It doesn't even feel like mine sometimes'.

Moran’s example is illustrative of sociological stigma work which has articulated how ‘race and ethnicity are not just individual attributes but cultural categories that shape the distribution of stigma and the institutional consequences that flow from it’ (Harris et al., 2013: 234). As Boyd and colleagues (2020) note, ‘gendered, classed and racialized stratifications… influence and are influenced by drug policies and practices that subject women to formal and informal regulation’ (see also Maher, 1997). Our analysis here articulates how injecting-related stigma is constituted in intersectional ways, even in the context of people who ostensibly occupy at least one element of structural advantage.

‘He was a nice bloke that cop’: how white masculinity protects against the labelling process

Unlike the way in which women and non-white participants tended to use the protective elements of the Northern Beaches culture to contend with compounding stigma, for white male participants, middle-class masculinity acted as protective. Many of their accounts were inflected by a blokey sense of being ‘well connected’ among other white males, with the clearest example of this in descriptions of their interactions with police. It is well established that the stigma associated with the criminalisation of people who inject drugs can damage positive self-concept (Simmonds & Coomber, 2009), act as a barrier to accessing health services (Harris & Rhodes, 2013) and result in violence by police (Dertadian & Tomsen, 2021). Yet, in detailed conversations about police interactions with male participants it was clear that they were often able to leverage notions of white and middle-class masculinity to appear ‘familiar’ and less ‘threatening’ to police on The Beaches.

In one instance, Shane, a 65-year-old participant, recalled negotiating his way out of being charged and arrested for stalking and harassing his ex-girlfriend by striking up an impromptu connection with a young male police officer. After Shane heard that his ex-partner had started a new relationship he went to her apartment to find out if this was true, explaining that ‘I hadn’t spoken to her for about 20 days or something. And that silent treatment was killing me, it was sending me nuts’. As the situation escalated the police were called. On arrival a young male officer struck up a friendly exchange with Shane: ‘[He] pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, mate’ he said, ‘What the fuck are you taking?’ He said, ‘We all like to party a bit mate… You look like you’ve overdone it a wee bit. How many days have you been awake?’. They went on to have conversations about mutual friends and even bonded over the perceived plight of having girlfriends not speak to them: ‘He’s just gone ‘Mate, I can understand’. He said, ‘It’s the silent treatment… I [know people] doing life because of the silent treatment’. The officer then took the step of advocating that Shane not be charged by attempting to convince his ex-partner to not make a statement: ‘He went to bat, he was great… went in there and said… ‘Look, if you make a statement he’s going to get arrested. If you don’t make a statement he’ll get medical care like, I'll Sect. 20 [him] and take him up to the hospital’. Rather than being arrested Shane was sent ‘up to the hospital and just blood tests and what have you’.

Despite a generally combative relationship with police, white male participants also recalled instances when they have found common ground with officers: ‘He’s a pretty good bloke actually’ (Slone, 50-year-old male). These accounts of fleeting but friendly bonding with officers often involved some degree of redemption of the police in the minds of male participants. Having been mistreated by police when living in the inner-city, several white male participants indicated that the police on The Beaches were ‘different’: ‘Here all the cops know you so they know what kind of nature you are and stuff… While maybe elsewhere they might be more threatened by you’ (Joel, 48-year-old male). In another example, Devon noted that ‘I used to have some cops [that] really had it in for me’, but went on to explain that he had been able to re-negotiate his relationship with police by bonding over the music he played as a busker at a popular beachside wharf, recalling ‘I think they actually like the music… I sort of rely on them [now], you know, to keep people away from me when I’m trying to busk’. In these examples we see how the ‘small world’ or ‘bubble’ of The Beaches was amplified by moments of masculine bonding, in ways that often transcended the harsh edges of stigma and, in particular, the labelling process. While women and non-white participants in our study were able to leverage the status on the Northern Beaches for better relations with the police, this was especially so in interactions between white male participants and male police officers in the area.

Conclusion

Our paper has demonstrated how structural advantage in one element of social positionality (class) interacts with, and augments, the production of stigma and the forms of power that constitute labels applied to people who inject drugs. Our findings indicate that class status is constitutive of injecting stigma in affluent communities. The sense of guilt and shame that participants associated with injecting drugs was largely based on the perception that injecting brought the ‘good’ family name into question and that they were not living up to familial and cultural expectations of financial success. Yet, for our participants, the class status of The Beaches is both the benchmark by which stigma was enacted and a possible source of redemption. Participants positioned their drug use as ‘civilised’, expressed pride in not relying on crime, including theft from their families, to manage their drug use, and pointed to the western suburbs of Sydney as exemplars of the link between drug use and crime.

Our findings extend criminological research about how the capacity to resist criminal labels among people who use drugs is structured by intersections between gender, race and class (Askew & Salinas, 2019). Critical criminology has always engaged with the way race structures processes of criminalisation (Hall et al., 1978), and in Australia the discipline has only recently begun to conceptualise the role of the settler colonial state in the criminalisation process (Tauri & Porou, 2014). The accounts presented here extend these arguments by demonstrating how injecting-related stigma and labelling compounds harm when it is applied, for example, to women of colour in affluent—as well as in economically disadvantaged, communities (Boyd et al., 2020).

Lastly, our research found that intersectional positionality can act as cumulative in the protective status it provides to the structurally advantaged. Our study found that white male participants experienced their status, and that of the area they lived in, as protective of stigmatising labels related to crime. For participants in our sample, forms of masculine bonding between white men and police were used to limit the labels they are subject to, and to explicitly interrupt the criminalisation process. Of course, the way structural advantage displaces criminal labels is not straightforward. For example, white male participants had experienced significant police violence when living in or attending disadvantaged inner-city and outer suburban communities, yet their status as white and male became protective in the context of the affluence of The Beaches. In this way, our findings call for a deeper understanding of the way affluence (rather than social disadvantage), masculinity (rather than femininity) and whiteness and coloniality (rather than racialized ‘others’) shape the application or otherwise of criminal labels. This requires that the field engages with the ways that affluence, masculinity and whiteness interact with one another, how they can be protective, and how they attach to place in the production of stigma and the criminal labels associated with injection drug use.