Questioning the Categories
Professor of Anthropology Winifred Tate is challenging people to reconsider how they think about different types of drugs
Winifred Tate doesn’t care for easy answers to complex questions.
As a political anthropologist who began her career examining the struggle for democracy, citizenship, and social change in the often-volatile nation of Colombia, the professor of anthropology is used to turning issues over to look at them from many angles.
That may be why she has a different perspective than many about drugs that are often treated as two separate categories. Most people don’t see a lot of commonalities in pharmaceuticals—such as opioids—and environmental contaminants, such as lead or PFAS. But Tate, who also serves as director of the Maine Drug Policy Lab at the College, has a different view.
She has been looking at the intersection of pharmaceutical intoxication and environmental toxicity, finding that in the real world, they are not as distinct as one might think. Things that are environmental contaminants can have intoxicating properties, and things that are used pharmaceutically to change the body are becoming environmental contaminants.
“I started asking why are these two situations treated so differently, politically and collectively,” Tate wondered.
As she did so, she brought together a group of scholars who are collectively at the forefront of a new way of thinking about these drugs, called the Toxicity and (In)toxication Working Group. Seven social scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists from the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, Columbia University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of California at San Francisco. The working group came to Colby’s Island Campus this past summer to take part in a workshop.
This interview has been edited.
Q: How did you get interested in this field?
I started thinking about drugs when I was working as a human rights researcher in Washington, D.C., during a break from graduate school. I was focused on political violence in Colombia, where I had lived in the late 1980s as a volunteer with an exchange program, but people in Washington were concerned about drugs, so I started doing research in southern Colombia where communities grow coca for the cocaine trade. My second book focused on U.S. drug policy and the Colombian communities targeted by those policies.
“One of the things I love about anthropology is that it’s open, so you can expand and refine your questions as you go.”
Winifred Tate, Professor of Anthropology
When I got tenure at Colby, I wanted to start doing research closer to home. Drug policy seemed to be a logical place to start, and so I started learning about the challenges faced by people who use drugs and the opioid overdose death crisis in Maine. Just like in Colombia, a lot of dedicated advocates are trying to make policy respond to the needs of people suffering the effects of bad policy. I started doing research to better understand why people use drugs, what happens to them, and what happens when they want to stop.
One of the things I love about anthropology is that it’s open, so you can expand and refine your questions as you go. Thinking about the drug trade in Colombia as it’s evolved over the last 30 years has kept me from thinking that it’s always been this one way. It’s allowed me to see the ways in which it’s a business where people work, the range of different environmental impacts and health impacts, and the community activists who try to deal with the aftermath. Seeing it not as just this black box, but as something that can be understood and studied. And, anthropology allows you to follow old questions into new arenas.
Q: Why is it important to go beyond the superficial concept of pharmaceutical intoxicants and environmental toxins?
If we just think about things in one dimension, then we miss the ways that people who live with them experience and manage these situations. Living in Waterville, doing research on opioid use, I was also reading the local paper and talking to people, and I noticed the growing concern about environmental contaminants like PFAS. I started to wonder about the very different ways that PFAS and opioids are treated in public debates.
Drug use is understood to be an individual situation, a result of moral failings and criminal behavior, with a lot of public certainty about how bad drug use is. With PFAS and other environmental pollutants, there seems to be a lot of public uncertainty, with a lot of questions about how to respond, who is responsible, and what the impacts might be in the long term.
So, I got very interested in how certainty is produced about the effects of some chemicals, and uncertainty is produced about others, about how some chemical exposure is seen as an individual choice while others exposures are collective problems.
Q: What is the background of the members of the Toxicity and (In)toxication Working Group?
People who came to the workshop on Allen Island research a range of different kinds of substances, including arsenic, which is both naturally occurring and artificial, lead, fentanyl, and MDMA. Together, we are trying to think through and make an argument that the separation of pharmaceuticals and intoxicants in one category, and environmental pollutants in the other, doesn’t help us understand what the current environmental challenges are, and the way that pharmaceuticals are becoming environmental contaminants.
The best example was recent coverage of giant balls found on the beaches of Sydney, Australia, that had all kinds of chemicals and products, including meth, petroleum, and all of these different kinds of substances that had congealed together in the ocean. When you separate out how you think about these things, you’re missing how they’re coming together, what people are exposed to, what people are consuming, and what is ending up in the land, water, and air around us.
Q: What was it like for scholars in this field to come together on the Island Campus?
The really fun part of it was the time, expansiveness, and deepness of our conversations. I love teaching at Colby, and I love breaking down really complex ideas with Colby students. But this was an opportunity to develop complex concepts and really do deep thinking with other people and learn from them. I learned so much, and I’m already bringing that back into the classroom.
We had organized work sessions, with giant poster boards to brainstorm our ideas, and a lot of unstructured conversations when we made dinner together or on our daily hikes. It was really fun to be able to learn with people who are asking the same questions and thinking about the same issues in different contexts and with different substances. It was amazing, just to have that space, and in such a beautiful place. You’re not thinking about other things. Nobody’s watching TV there.
Now, we’re working to turn the expansiveness of our conversations from the summer into a jointly authored academic article that will hopefully prompt new scholarship and get people to think together with us in new ways about substances, substance use, and environmental pollution.
Q: What’s one thing you would like people to take away from your work with pharmaceutical intoxication and environmental toxicity?
I would say, question the categories you use to separate things into good and bad substances.
