With new Australian drug laws in some jurisdictions now required to comply with human rights frameworks, this four-year research project is being undertaken in order to learn more about:

• How human rights have informed Australian drug policy in the past
• What ideas about drugs and the human have shaped these approaches
• Whether such ideas are problematic or outmoded
• Whether human rights provide the best framework for guiding legal and policy reform in relation to alcohol and other drugs – and if not, what alternatives, such as a ‘post–human rights’ framework, might look like.

One possibility that has yet to be explored by drugs scholars is that human rights are less reliable for those that society considers ‘less than human’. This is based on a ‘post-human’ approach to rights: one in which human rights are not ‘neutral’ and ‘universal’, as is often claimed, but where they instead reflect distinctly Western, humanist, masculine ideals. This ‘post-human’ approach suggests that human rights have not always protected the interests of those groups who fail to fit normative ideals of the ‘human’. People who use drugs are one such group – as they are often viewed as compulsive, irrational and chaotic, they have long been thought of as less than fully human. For these reasons, people who use drugs might be seen as less entitled to (human) rights and protections. They may even seem to be more deserving of punishment.