PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Throughout Europe, drug tests are deployed in evermore contexts of everyday life to examine individuals and check if they have used illegal substances. Drawing on ideas from science and technology studies, we challenge the idea that on-site drug tests, as technical devices, are per se able to generate evidentiary results. Rather, we argue that such devices are genuinely sociotechnical instruments. On the one hand, they are shaped by material preconditions and biochemical principles that are independent from the social world, but on the other hand, they are also deeply rooted in their societal contexts and therefore directly related to social bodies of knowledge and interests. We pay special attention to the specific mode of visual knowledge production, which is an inherent feature of on-site drug tests and has specific effects on the common appreciation of drug tests as evidence producing instruments. We conclude that on-site drug tests do not produce objective data as such, that they are not evidentiary instruments per se, and that their results have to be dealt with by taking account of context-sensitive and case-related material at the least.