Making ‘Safety’ for Children and Young People in Drug Policy: A Critical Analysis of Governing Logics

Across youth and drug policies, ‘safety’ is invoked as a self-evident good, yet its meaning and effects are rarely interrogated. Using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? approach, we critically analyse an Australian policy document — the NSW Strategic Plan for Children and Young People 2016–2019 — and examine how ‘safety’, ‘children and young people’, and ‘drugs’ are co-constituted, with effects on how they are governed through drug prohibition. The importance of ‘safety’ draws legitimacy from child protection and human rights discourses, but is also broadened to a diffuse set of spaces, behaviours and risks. Children and young people are positioned as developing and at-risk, and therefore in need of protection. Together, these enactments of ‘safety’, ‘children and young people’ and ‘drugs’ stabilise prohibition as a policy approach to creating safety. We argue that ‘safety’, as enacted in this strategic plan, stabilises paternalistic modes of governance, reproduces power asymmetries and moral valuations, and constrains alternative imaginations for ‘safer’ drug policies. Destabilising such taken-for-granted assumptions can open up possibilities for drugs to co-exist with children and young people more safely, beyond prohibitionist approaches.