Designing Better Drug Regulation: Lessons from Policy Design Methods

Abstract

Drug policy design is often a process of comparison between options, consideration of evidence and politics, and working within values pluralism and the constraints of imagination. As a result, drug policy change is characterized by fits and starts, incremental change, and limited by perceptions of what is politically and socially possible. This paper explores policy design methods that might be employed to address the challenges of policy design for drug regulation. We aim to identify methods from general public policy that may be usefully deployed to expand existing approaches in drug regulation scholarship while also opening up potential to design alternative drug regulation models. We first outline contextual elements for good drug regulation design: attending to new, unexplored options; balancing goals, interests, and outcomes; and expanding engagement. The literature on ‘policy labs,’ policy prototyping, and finally experiential futures is then explored with reference to the potential to attend to these key elements. Drug regulation examples taking up elements of these approaches are highlighted to identify promising sites for expansion, and more robust utilization and evaluation. We suggest that inter-sectoral engagement strategies that mobilize creative methods and experimentation; the materialization of policy options; and immersive experience in socially-anchored, future scenarios are areas of significant promise for better drug regulation design.

Introduction

How should we design drug regulation? If current settings do more harm than good, where should we look for alternatives? Should we look to other jurisdictions and follow their lead? Should we ask people what they want and go from there? What about other options – the ones that don’t have examples we can point to, or even the ones that we haven’t even thought of? When it comes to different regulatory models for currently illicit drugs, these are real challenges; there are no examples of a commercially regulated market for ecstasy; there are no examples of a restricted, regulated for-profit supply model for cocaine; and only one example of a time-limited not-for-profit supply model for cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine (the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) experience in Canada (Nyx & Kalicum, 2024)). Of course, we can look to how we approach other substances: If taking our Australian context as an example, do we apply our current alcohol settings to ecstasy? Do we apply the current prescription only vapes access to cocaine? Do we look to other nations or jurisdictions, and apply not-for-profit models, either government-run or community-based, to methamphetamine or heroin? Similar limitations exist, we do not know what these will look or feel like in practice.

These regulatory policy design issues are not unique to drug policy. There is a burgeoning literature around policy design methods. The aim of this paper is to explore literature on policy design and distil lessons for the design of drug regulation regimes. We commence with identifying what we see as some of the important contextual elements for good drug regulation design.

Good Drug Regulation Design

In classic public policy design literature (Bardach & Patashnik, 2023; Bridgman & Davis, 2003) the ingredients of good public policy design include establishing the policy goals, identifying the problem, conducting scenario analysis, and selecting the appropriate solution. Much has been written about the flaws associated with this classic policy design cycle (Colebatch, 2006), including its applicability to drug policy (Ritter & Bammer, 2010; Stevens & Ritter, 2013).

There are a number of important contextual elements when it comes to drug regulation policy design and debate. The first is consideration of possible options. In the context of drug regulation policy, the availability and uptake of evidence is a key issue that limits the options included in debate. In their seminal textbook Drug Policy and the Public Good, Babor et al. (2018) see scientific evidence as a primary policy input. At the same time, they recognise that drug policy ‘often does not take into account the scientific evidence’ when it comes to decision-making (Babor et al., 2018, p. 7). This is particularly the case where scientific evidence is lacking, as occurs with reference to different drug regulation regimes and their impacts. There are multiple models of regulation that mobilize policy levers, such as policing, price, and access restrictions, in various configurations (Caulkins & Kilmer, 2016; Haden, 2004; Kilmer, 2019; Rolles, 2009) yet not a strong scientific evidence-base. While we have a growing knowledge on the impacts of for-profit commercial supply of cannabis (Doggett et al., 2025; Farrelly et al., 2023; McCarthy et al., 2025) other regulatory models, notably many options between prohibition and commercial legalization, lack any evidence. How we might consider all options for drug regulation, including those that are untested, unpalatable, or even those that might not have been explored or configured yet, is a particular policy design gap needing to be filled.

A second important contextual element when considering drug regulation options is the policy goal and associated objectives and outcomes (Ritter, 2022). Drug regulation goals vary depending on the perspective of the stakeholder, with dividing lines occurring in relation to supply reduction versus demand reduction goals, and whether the objective should be to reduce the population consumption of a substance or whether it should focus on reducing the harms consequent to possession or consumption (MacCoun & Reuter, 2001; Ritter, 2022). The outcomes of most importance differ by stakeholder. Under current regulatory arrangements, it may be the prevalence of drug use (an estimated 271 million people have used an illicit drug in the previous year (UNODC, 2024)); or drug related harms (in the latest available data for Australia there were five drug overdose deaths per day in 2022 (Chrzanowska et al., 2023)); or the number of people arrested for using drugs (in Australia in 2020/21 there were 140,624 arrests for drug-related offences (ACIC, 2023)); or costs to government (Australian governments spent $5.45 billion in 2021/22 on proactive responses to illicit drugs, of which $3.5 billion or 64% was on law enforcement responses (Ritter et al., 2024)). These data speak to different metrics and represent differing goals and objectives for drug policy. Weighing up these different metrics (use, deaths, arrests, and cost) against alternative regulatory regimes requires us to think about how benefits and harms are distributed and who bears them (MacCoun & Reuter, 2001). How benefit and harm are even conceptualised is also not straightforward, nor disconnected from socio-cultural and political context (Fraser & Moore, 2011). If there is no agreed metric to balance benefits and harms, other considerations assume greater importance and relevance for decision-making. Values, for instance, could be a helpful focus, where what is important to people is foregrounded in dialogue and discussion of potentially conflicting goals to help orient ways forward and through points of disagreement.

In light of the above, a third, essential element is the engagement of a broad range of stakeholders and publics. This has been widely acknowledged in the public policy literature (Chilvers & Kearnes, 2016; Kelty, 2020; Young, 2000) and in drug policy more particularly (Jürgens, 2005; Lancaster et al., 2018; Ritter et al., 2018). For example, a core element of the Australian Federal Government's policy design approach is that the public service and policy processes be well informed, which includes collaborative development with end users, broad stakeholder engagement, and understanding the wider context (Australian Government, n.d.). Critical accounts of policymaking and participation in drug policy processes, however, have shown that the languages and logics of policy make this difficult in practice and impede broad participation (Lancaster et al., 2018; Madden et al., 2021). Participation in processes of policymaking (whether broadly conceived as political representation, or more narrowly conceived as direct community engagement in policy development) has the expected benefits of more effective and acceptable policies (Ritter et al., 2018). Any attempt at widening participation, however, must also account for heterogeneity within ‘affected communities’ (Lancaster et al., 2013; Young, 2000) and this can often result in different perspectives on appropriate drug policies and forms of regulation (Dertadian & Sentas, 2025; Greer & Ritter, 2020). What this means is that even when outcomes or values are agreed, and stakeholders are involved, processes must be designed to both make space for and address what may be conflicting perspectives.

These three elements – imagining new, unconsidered options in ‘real’ ways; balancing outcomes and interests; and engaging diverse publics – require new tools capable of addressing and managing these conditions while surfacing new regulatory designs. We turn now to three methods employed in other areas of public policy.

‘Policy Labs’

Policy labs are known by many names (e.g., public service innovation labs) and have no set definition. In general, labs claim an ‘inter-sectoral bridging capacity’ (Olejniczak et al., 2023, p. 110) that operates by bringing together various actors, such as policymakers, researchers, and stakeholder groups, to address a policy problem or solution (Bason, 2018; Bason & Schneider, 2014). They are seen to represent new approaches to policy development and service design, deal with complex issues, and bring innovative methods, approaches, or experiments to areas of public policy (McGann et al., 2018), providing ‘open forum[s] for new ideas and solutions to social problems’ (Olejniczak et al., 2023, p. 105). While there are many different versions – in government, in community/NGO spaces, and in partnership (McGann et al., 2018), and across nations and levels of government (Olejniczak et al., 2023) – policy labs are seen to offer new ways into policy issues because they sit outside entrenched bureaucratic structures and bring different perspectives and skills to bear on their areas of focus (McGann et al., 2018; Olejniczak et al., 2023).

Despite the range of forms of labs, Olejniczak et al. (2023, p. 112) have identified a generic, iterative engagement process in policy labs. The process (1) redefines a policy issue and includes target groups, (2) explores the nature of the problem and changes sought, (3) considers barriers and enablers to that change, (4) builds processes (e.g., creative sessions) to construct solutions to problems, and (5) experimentation, where prototypes are tested. While the definitional ambiguity of policy labs can result in a wide net, the creative sessions and experimentation beyond established bureaucratic (and, we might add, academic) structures is a useful point of distinction.

Additionally, the centrality of ‘design thinking’ is what is seen to differentiate labs (McGann et al., 2018) and provide their core tools of engagement (Olejniczak et al., 2023). The core of design thinking as it informs policy labs is directly related to expanding participation (McGann et al., 2018), where solutions become ‘more nuanced’ (Mintrom & Luetjens, 2016) and decisions should be informed and/or driven by those most affected (Lewis et al., 2023). In this sense, policy labs are usefully thought of in relation to democratizing processes of policymaking that seek to expand what is considered a legitimate way to inform and develop policy by broadening who is involved in its design (Kimbell, 2015; Kimbell & Bailey, 2017).

Policy labs either have a general scope or are targeted toward specific policy domains, such as housing, welfare, and education (Kimbell, 2015; McGann et al., 2018; Olejniczak et al., 2023). Examples of the policy lab idea relevant to drug regulation is work undertaken by the Organization of American States (OAS) or the Office of Science and Technology, UK commissioned Foresight programme. The OAS produced an ‘analytical report’ which included ‘scenarios’ developed by a team including civil society, government, Indigenous community members, the justice system, and others (Organization of American States, 2012). The ‘scenarios’ are four stories about what could happen in the future, geared to aid decision-making regarding the effects of different approaches on a large scale ‘hemispheric drug ‘system’’ (Organization of American States, 2012). The impact of the report was not in establishing new policy, but was said to have ‘a huge, immediate impact’ and ‘open up a discussion’ (Insulza quoted in Kahane, 2017, p. 73), and the creation of ‘new working relationships’ (Kahane, 2017, p. 74). In the case of the UK Foresight project, future scenarios were developed by consultants and academics, and a series of interactive workshops were set up to consider ‘challenging visions of the future’ (Office of Science and Technology, 2005b). The Foresight programme was an ‘independent review based on a thorough review of the science’ (Office of Science and Technology, 2005a). The impacts and effects of the Foresight work have not been documented, suggesting that where drug policy does appear to take up the ‘policy lab’ method, evaluation should be built in. These examples do not frame themselves as labs, but utilize central tenets such as inter-sectoral stakeholder engagement in various capacities. The role for those most affected, as core to the design thinking of policy labs, however, is variable, and may relate to the inclusion of, in the OAS example, Indigenous people or civil society in large scale processes at the international level or, in the Foresight programme, late-stage workshops with the public.

The promise of policy labs has been largely about enhancing processes of design and decision-making, and bringing insights about why a mechanism may or may not work, rather than direct translation into policy (Kimbell, 2015; Olejniczak et al., 2023). In her study of Policy Lab in the UK Government, Kimbell (2015) describes how the lab worked across policy areas, including on projects with people who have long-term health conditions and on more generic areas such as regional development, to foreground elements such as collective learning, provisional solutions, user experience, and networks in and outside government. Kimbell (2015, p. 7) summarizes that Policy Lab's ‘contribution lies in how it combines practical support for policy officials as they mediate between politics, evidence and delivery alongside raising questions about the nature of policy work.’ One challenge noted in the policy labs literature is the lack of specification of what impacts might be expected of labs (Olejniczak et al., 2023). Given the co-design and participatory ethos of policy labs, the focus on processes is perhaps not unsurprising. At the same time, the emancipatory potential of this approach should not be taken for granted, particularly if decision-making and the design of labs and their processes remain top down (Lewis et al., 2023). McGann et al. (2018, p. 264 emphasis in original), citing Voorberg et al. (2015), note that while citizen involvement is a ‘normative ideal’, ‘there is little evidence that demonstrates whether this produces better policies.’

Despite this, we see potential for a policy labs approach in the context of drug regulation design because of the long-standing recognition that it is a dialogue around values, norms, alongside scientific evidence and other ‘inputs’ that can be achieved with a policy labs approach. In areas of public policy where traditional forms of evidence run up hard against values and politics, this holds promise. Given that drug policies as enacted often sit in friction with scientific evidence (Ritter, 2011; Stevens, 2024; Stevens & Ritter, 2013), the ‘reorientation’ of policymaking ‘away from the terra firma of scientific rigour and independence and towards a model that incorporates a more diversified range of values, norms and sources of evidence’ (McGann et al., 2018, p. 264) seems not only promising, but indeed required.

Policy Prototyping

We now turn to another approach, a standalone design tool often incorporated into the work of policy labs (Kimbell, 2015): prototyping. Tironi (2020, p. 504) defines prototyping as,

an effort to materialize and verify an idea through an object, event, or experience. While prototypes can take on many forms (models, sketches, drawings, interventions, storytelling, etc.), a common characteristic is materialization— the principle of making tangible ideas (hypotheses, suppositions, intentions, concepts, etc.) through the crafting of provisional objects which enable experiential and empirical verification.

Prototyping has been described as being ‘at the core of design’ (Hillgren et al., 2011, p. 170) and as ‘mediat[ing] existing knowledge and anticipat[ing] possible futures’ (Kimbell & Bailey, 2017, p. 217), with prototypes functioning as ‘understanding tools’ (Hagan, 2021, p. 13). While rationales underpinning prototypes are multiple, one is to ‘materialis[e] designs to assess them before committing further investment’ (Kimbell & Bailey, 2017, p. 217). In sum, prototypes sit between what is known and what is unknown, and represent a key way in which design is seen to engage and inform policy.

Prototypes and prototyping are underpinned by the premise that they can help generate, test, reconfigure, and iterate ideas (Hagan, 2021, p. 14). Hillgren et al. (2011, p. 170) suggest that prototypes can reveal ‘both opportunities and dilemmas’ in policy formations. Different methods exist for incorporating prototypes into policy process, such as through co-design (explored in labs, above), iterative testing rounds (e.g., time or scope limited roll outs that allow for ‘user testing and refinement loops’ (Hagan, 2021, p. 21), changes to be made quickly, and ‘refinement of the evaluation and success metrics of the policy’ (Hagan, 2021, p. 18)), and speculative sessions (e.g., ‘pre-mortems’ where participants are told a policy either succeeded or failed and to work backward to identify reasons why, to then inform improvements to the prototype to ensure/avoid the outcome (Hagan, 2021, p. 22; Hébert, 2019)). Hagan (2021, p. 22) describes that speculative sessions and prototyping ‘focuses in on creating and examining prototypes primarily for seeing how these broad-scope policies might result in harm, risks, and other unwanted dynamics.’ The characteristic of prototypes to manifest real-world dynamics holds much promise for thinking through particularly contested areas such as drug regulation. As a tool for materializing regulatory alternatives, some of which may be speculative, prototyping can give texture and scope to the first element of regulatory design: imagining alternatives, and in particular, new, unexplored options.

While for some, prototypes are seen to offer ‘more thoughtful, realistic plan-making’ and help to ‘tighten the line between policy-setting and policy delivery’ (Hagan, 2021, p. 14) at the same time another literature on prototyping suggests that a much more provocative usage is possible. Hagan (2021, p. 22) gives an example of ‘speculative prototypes’: ‘One model of the speculative method is to make a prototype that is deliberately extreme or provocative (to some, called a ‘provotype’) that is meant to get stakeholders to think through what might happen if such a proposal were to be enacted.’ Boer and Donovan (2012, pp. 395–396) describe use of a provotype in a project on indoor climate that illustrates how tensions are surfaced; the role of facilitation in prompting reflection; and that ‘provocation’ occurs when ideas are first introduced, in testing, and upon reflection. For example, testing objects to control indoor air quality designed and implemented by academics and industry turned on how the objects were experienced by end users where clashes were identified in how the object did its work, and how this was then perceived (e.g., through the feelings of dis/comfort in a space versus measurable outcome variables) (Boer & Donovan, 2012, p. 395). This usage emphasizes how prototypes are seen to offer space for conflicting perspectives, voices, and experiences (Hillgren et al., 2011, p. 174), with provotypes in particular seen to be ‘embodying tensions’ (Boer & Donovan, 2012, pp. 396–397) and expand consideration of different perspectives (Casnati et al., 2024). An expected benefit of this approach is that it can lead to more realistic appraisals of perspectives and preferences for different policy options, and more nuanced assessments of policy delivery (Kimbell & Bailey, 2017, p. 221). For drug regulatory design, this materializes the first contextual element (thinking outside the box) while using the potential that arises for conflicting opinions to enhance the balancing of differing goals and outcomes while engaging diverse publics.

Policy prototyping has been used in the design of legal system reform (Hagan, 2021), smart city programs (Tironi, 2020), and government services (Kimbell, 2015; Kimbell & Bailey, 2017). Prototypes have resulted in expanding consideration of possibilities as well as informing policy recommendations (Hagan, 2021). In the drugs area, the ‘scenarios’ of the OAS and Foresight programmes could be considered prototypes. Regarding more standalone prototyping, we consider independent UK drug policy thinktank Transform Drug Policy Foundation's Blueprint for Regulation (Rolles, 2009) as an example of drug regulation prototypes. Despite not using the language of ‘prototypes,’ the blueprint sets out five models for regulating drug supply and has subsequently been expanded to elaborate the models for specific drugs or classes of drugs (e.g., stimulants (Rolles et al., 2020)). ¹ The text-based prototypes elaborate different regulatory models using present-day policy mechanisms, such as price and advertising controls. These kinds of text-based prototypes are innovative elaborations of the models that are common in drug regulation debate (Caulkins & Kilmer, 2016), and often take the form of a spectrum or range of regulatory options (Rolles et al., 2020, p. 23) (based on classic representations of the relationship between prohibition and consumption (Marks, 1990) and between harm and availability (O'Malley & Mugford, 1991)).

Similar to policy labs, there are limitations in how prototypes can be incorporated into the policy-making apparatus, both in terms of political acceptability and limited capacity to intervene in structural power relations (Kimbell & Bailey, 2017). The promise offered by prototypes relates to both policy selection and policy implementation. Kimbell and Bailey (2017, p. 222) summarize the benefits of prototyping as

enabl[ing] organisational learning by anticipating responses to public policy issues through making models of, and materialising, aspects of provisional solutions, enabling assessment of their delivery, acceptability and legitimacy. …. It can co-constitute a situated understanding of issues and how future policies might play out, foregrounding people's experiences of a policy intervention via their material engagement with devices, objects and sites of action, making the practical and political implications of a policy graspable and meaningful.

These ideas chime with a third method worthy of consideration: experiential futures, which brings to the fore the notion of futuring and a focus on experience.

Experiential Futures

The third literature we explore is ‘experiential futures’ (XF). As with policy labs and prototyping, it brings attention to the contextual elements of relevance for drug regulation design (new ideas, balancing outcomes and interests, diverse public engagement) but focuses more explicitly on unexplored futures and the role of experience.

Design focused on futures (‘futures methods’) informing policy (Braga et al., 2024; Tsekleves et al., 2020) allows for extrapolations to previous unexplored future policy scenarios that are particularly promising for drug regulation. Experiential futures (Candy, 2010; Candy & Kornet, 2019) are future scenarios foregrounding ‘experience’ and created through the method of speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), a creative research method focused on storytelling and world-building (Coulton et al., 2017). By extrapolating from the present and attending to alternatives to the status quo—scenarios, technologies, cultures that may not yet exist—physical environments are created that allow for textured, embodied engagement with seemingly impossible, or improbable futures. The situated experience of future physical environments (Davies, 2013; Superflux, 2017; Time's Up, 2017) is, in essence, a prototyped future. Using specific objects (such as vending machines (Extrapolation Factory, 2014), furniture (Dunne & Raby, 2013), or games (Situation Lab, 2014)) allows for specific policy settings —not just specific programs or objects—to be elaborated, explored, and felt.

XF ‘prototypes’ offer a particular focus on expanding conditions of consideration and experience that allow for choice between options that are conveyed in storied, physical worlds. Candy and Kornet (2019, p. 4) position XF scenarios as ‘open[ing] promising new avenues for attempting complex collective acts of empathy, conversation, and deliberation in the public sphere.’ A key component of XF approaches is the multiplicity of futures (Candy & Kornet, 2019), which is suited to policy inasmuch as options are never singular. Physical narratives are one approach drawing on XF that focus on immersion to materialize expansive, what we might call, ‘social prototypes.’ Physical narratives incorporate ‘playful exploration, multisensory experience and social interaction’ (Kuzmanovic et al., 2019, p. 106). One example is installation The Very Near Future (Davies, 2013) by artist Alex Davies, which embeds participants in a rich storyworld that evolves in response to a fictional external environmental catastrophe. Using physical elements (e.g., film sets, bespoke architectures) and light and sound illusions, this kind of physical narrative creates ‘a disturbing, uncanny effect’ (Frost, 2014) that prompts reflections on time and perception. The unique affordances of future-focused immersive experiences are also demonstrated in Davies’ ‘mixed reality’ project Edge of the Present, which combined the construction of physical architecture and objects with a VR experience as a potential tool in depression and suicide prevention (Habak et al., 2021). Another example is the Experiencing the Future Mundane project (Crabtree et al., 2025), which addressed concerns related to data privacy, technology, and regulation. The interactive installation space explored a future world where the mundane setting of a living room was used to stage common concerns around privacy and trust driven by an array of ‘smart’ AI technologies. The immersive experience acts as a ‘breaching experiment’ to surface user expectations that must be addressed to improve the acceptability of future-focused technologies (Crabtree et al., 2025). Of particular relevance for policy, these kinds of immersive experiences (Crabtree et al., 2025; Lindley et al., 2019) can also reveal how people understand and engage with laws (e.g., the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (Sailaja et al., 2019)), and alternative responses to user perspectives around specific issues (e.g., preferences for moral localised approaches to data privacy (Sailaja et al., 2019)). By materializing experiences in layered, physical spaces, an XF approach shows promise as a way to elucidate how policies can saturate and shape future experiences, focusing on the policy setting in total and the mechanisms that shape the experience. In this way, experience can be foregrounded as the empirical metric used to evaluate a policy.

In making things visible, material, tangible, XF has direct resonance with drug regulation models where things that are or might be are either constrained by politics and values pluralism or kept in abeyance as beyond imagination or thought (consider, for instance, a legalized free-market for heroin, how this might be experienced strains against politics, imagination, and thought). In terms of drug regulation, one example that implicitly uses the ethos of XF if not directly engaging it as method is the ‘XTC store’ (a collaboration between Poppi Drugs Museum Amsterdam and Utrecht University) (de Quadros Rigoni et al., 2023). The ‘XTC store’ was set up to consider ‘societal responses’ to three scenarios of regulated MDMA sales. These three scenarios were regulated access through a pharmacy, commercial sales, and club sales. The first two were represented as interactive shopfronts, with the club point of sale represented using a vending machine. Notably, Transform's regulatory models (Rolles et al., 2020) informed the design of this XTC shop (de Quadros Rigoni et al., 2023). The XTC shop participants included the general public, students, drug policy researchers, health professionals and, importantly, policymakers including public servants and local and national politicians (de Quadros Rigoni et al., 2023). The shop included a survey of participants, exit interviews, and subsequent focus groups. The XTC shop is an innovative elaboration of text-based prototypes into physical models. An initial report on the XTC shop identified a number of conclusions that have direct relevance to drug regulation policy, including being able to prompt and capture nuanced perspectives on the benefits/limitations of different models; general agreement for some form of controlled regulated supply, and; different preferences between groups (e.g., general public versus drug experts) (de Quadros Rigoni et al., 2023, p. 33). The XTC shop sets a promising precedent for materializing regulatory models in the world, and highlighting certain elements (e.g., public response, or political complexity (de Quadros Rigoni et al., 2023)), while giving scope for future studies evaluating experiences and policy effects.

While XF is often engaged in co-design informed approaches (e.g., interviewing leading to design etc.), it is also flexible enough to respond to the specifically situated ways of thinking that animate drug policy and shut down alternatives. Candy and Kornet (2019, p. 15) note that ‘the key underlying question, often the case in futures practice, is which future stories need to be told, regardless of how they are arrived at or framed –– ‘surfaced’ from prior thought, co-created from scratch, or something else.’ The use of ‘provocative’ futures can reveal underlying values and priorities (Nilsson et al., 2022) and expand which perspectives are considered (Casnati et al., 2024). By materializing futures and anchoring them in social interaction and experience, XF and physical narrative approaches are more flexible tools for considering balances of, in the case of drug regulation, benefits and harms in a dialogic engagement with publics and stakeholders. Experiential futures of drug regulation can engage with the invisible and unspeakable, to expand the terms of consideration and imagination as legitimate (possible) policy options.

A Note on ‘Experience’

While a seemingly self-evident term, ‘experience’ should itself be opened to critical thought (Scott, 1991) in any approach that foregrounds experience as a central part of policy design. In drug policy, experience carries significant social, political, and affective weight. Experience is not neutral and operates in specific ways (Scott, 1991); it is a way of narrating what has happened, what is important, and insulates against critique (Scott, 1991). Experience is felt in personal, embodied ways, and is also articulated, shaped, and given meaning socially and politically (Heyes, 2020). Experience may be seen as a vital input representing ‘lay knowledge’ that must be included to generate effective policies and effect social change (Freeman & Sturdy, 2014), or as demonstrative, isolated from context to serve standard ways of developing and communicating policy (valentine et al., 2020). Understanding experience in any lab, prototype, or XF approach must (a) engage with and locate experience in socio-cultural context as a corrective to common uses in policy of experience detached from context (valentine et al., 2020), and (b) explore the conditions that shape experience and inform perspectives within each future narrative or regulatory model. We can look to other fields of critical inquiry to explore how this might become relevant for policy. Ann Cvetkovich (2021) elaborates the concept ‘sovereignty of the senses’ to locate a sensory, political valence to lived experience. Based on embodied sensation, the concept allows for policy lessons that sit between evidence and values to be articulated through the rubric of ‘it feels right to me’ (Lorde, 1984). ‘Sovereignty of the senses’ focuses in on experience as able to surface ‘feelings’ (highlighting their twinned cognitive and embodied elements) that are inherently social. There is distinct political valence to experience in drug policy. By shifting the way this is materialized out of standard forms of consultation, into a physical environment slowing down engagement and facilitating reflection, considerations of the affective experience of a future policy scenario foregrounds the influence of embodiment, sensation, and personal and socio-cultural frames on the acceptability and feasibility of policy options. A critical engagement with ‘experience’ allows for the potential of design methods to be explored as an alternative to the flattening of public attitudes in forms of engagement such as opinion surveys, while not replacing them with an equally flat valorization of experience as a simple, accessible, static ‘truth.’

Conclusions

An underlying premise orienting the three elements of good drug regulation design is that failures of consideration and failures of imagination may lead to failures of policy. Policy labs, prototyping and experiential futures all have the capacity to attend to the emergence of new, underexplored ideas and design solutions, ensuring diverse participation, and require balancing differing outcomes and interests. We have identified different drug examples: OAS's and Foresight's future scenarios, Transform's Blueprint, and Poppi Drugs Museum's XTC shop – each has had its own unique design approach informing how models are chosen and configured, and how they are mobilized to prompt debate and/or seek policy influence. The key features of policy labs (inter-sectoral creative workshopping), prototypes (elaborating options), and experiential futures (materializing immersive experiences) are present in these examples. These demonstrate appetite for thinking concretely about new regulatory models in different contexts. They also demonstrate that there is scope for considering government, thinktank, and advocacy-led approaches in labs, prototypes, and experiential futures relevant to drug regulation. These approaches do not emerge out of nor into a vacuum; drug policy researchers regularly discuss, evidence, defend, rebut, and speculate about different regulatory options with more or less implicit relevance for publics and governments as calls to action or prompts for debate. By formalizing connections between drug regulation design and public policy design methods, there is scope to strengthen the former by addressing and managing the three contextual elements while opening up to new regulatory designs, and the latter by considering policy-specific adaptations for the often intractable, flattened, value-laden territory of drug regulation. In addition, we recognize that these policy design approaches could be applied to areas of drug policy other than regulation, including harm reduction, treatment, and supply reduction.

Despite much promise, there is also a risk in overplaying the potential of these methods, notably with regard to seeing them as democratizing. Corsín Jiménez (2014, p. 383) cautions that ‘The technological promises of the prototype seem to have instated a new illusion of democracy.’ Tironi (2020, p. 505) suggests that the degree to which prototypes can achieve their ‘democratizing’ promise depends on what he calls ‘curatorial interventions and narrative options.’ Another limitation is the acceptability and impact of the evidence generated in these methods in traditional policy-making paradigms (McGann et al., 2018), and by particular actors (e.g., the use of design-informed policy approaches have been shown to be more readily accepted by civil servants than politicians (Darby et al., 2015)). This reminds us that fresh policy design occurs within existing social and power relations, and application of these methods is in themselves a political process. As Tironi (2020) makes clear, prototyping, for example, is ‘a political process … (a) as material and narrative technology for demonstrating and justifying certain options, and (b) as a mechanism of explicitation that can make visible the unexpected friction.’ How design approaches are included in policy design processes are active, political- and power-laden decisions. We can take inspiration from the critical approach to prototyping elaborated by Tironi, by ensuring that decision-making around these elements is explicit, and remaining open to the policy directions and learnings that unfold, to realize the potential of these design methods for drug regulation design.

In conclusion, a key challenge for designing new drug regulatory options is the abstract, intangible nature of the range of options. Policy lab methods demonstrate a model of public, NGO, private, and partnership engagement that foreground inter-sectoral engagement and co-design to ideate and test options. Prototyping represents a way to materialize policy elements. Prototypes can texture what policy looks and feels like in the world, and can prompt debate and surface conflict with the option of more provocative design choices. Experiential futures and physical narratives allow for immersive, textured, socially-anchored experiences as they may unfold in the future. Policy labs, prototyping, and experiential futures show much promise as methods to enhance the design of future approaches to drug regulation that are just, effective, and democratic.