Insiders, Smart Drugs and Pharmaceuticalization: Elements for a Typology of the New Conformist Deviance
The increasing number of users of smart drugs on university campus, go-pills in the army or coast-to-coast meds in long-distance truckers is a invitation to revisit the growing legitimacy of the «adaptive use » of psychostimulants through a reinterpretation of the traditional categories through which functionalists and interactionists tried to understand the legitimate modes of adaptation and social inadaptation. Could we envisage new categories of deviance «by excess » of integration such as the over-obedience or hyper-responsibility ? Should we encourage the use of mid-ethical and mid-sociological oxymorons to characterize practices increasingly common but whose legitimacy is problematic such as “conformist innovation,” or the practice of “appropriate doping” ? Through the case study of smart drugs, we mobilize the concepts of pharmaceuticalization and biosociality to identify some of the sociological features of the ideal-typical figure of the insider (both avant-garde consumer, hypersocialized individual, responsible innovator, etc.) which is, in principle, the reverse image of the famous Howard Becker’s outsider.