What can feminist relational discourse analysis offer the field of drug policy?

Prohibitionary drug policy continues to be used as a tool for facilitating colonial power and the social regulation of people who use drugs, especially racialized and Indigenous peoples, women and gender diverse peoples, and those of lower socio-economic status. Some drug policy research aims to illuminate the experiences of people who use drugs with hopes of eliciting change; however, there is a history of research that has had negative effects on people who use drugs. Researchers must consider what paradigms and onto-epistemological assumptions frame their research and analyses, as these are important to consider for health equity and social change. However, most qualitative drug policy researchers utilize thematic analysis and to a lesser extent, content and discourse analysis. While these may be beneficial in understanding broader social and structural issues in the drug policy field, they may limit our understanding of individualized experiences. In this paper, we describe feminist relational discourse analysis as a promising analytic technique for drug policy research. Feminist relational discourse analysis captures individualized experience and discourse simultaneously in a complementary way, with a focus on counternarratives to magnify the voices that can be lost in the structures of power and privilege. Accordingly, we aim to examine feminist relational discourse analysis and advocate for its inclusion in drug policy research, by showcasing the step-by-step process of feminist relational discourse analysis as applied to the context of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who use drugs in rural and remote communities of British Columbia, Canada, and their experience with opioid agonist treatment. We demonstrate the ability of feminist relational discourse analysis to enlighten the voices of people who use drugs prescribed opioid agonist treatment and un-silence their individual voices. Feminist relational discourse analysis should be explored in future drug policy research that seeks to put the personal in the political.