This article examines the use of e-cigarettes, or vaping, as a social practice. It builds on recent work which argues that theories of social practice can provide effective new ways of conceptualising and responding to public health challenges such as smoking and sedentariness by shifting the focus from individual behaviour. Instead these theories attend to the development and persistence of practices which are enacted across time and space. The article draws on data from a 2014 online survey of Australian vapers, specifically responses to open-ended questions about vaping and its place in daily life. It highlights the way vaping has been established as a practice through a range of factors including the increasing burdens of smoking and the online availability of e-cigarettes and vaping information and advice. Most survey respondents were positive about vaping and constituted it as the opposite of smoking in its ability to improve well-being and transform life for the better. In contrast to smoking, vaping was presented as a practice which opened up space and time, for example as inside the home became a location where nicotine could be consumed. The article also examines the way vaping enables nicotine addiction to be experienced differently, as a form of habitual consumption in which elements of control and choice remain present. The article is limited by its reliance on written responses and the non-representative nature of the survey sample, however it suggests the benefits of naturalistic research on vaping as a social practice.

This article contrasts two understandings of intoxication. The first, found in public health discourse, constructs intoxication as a harm produced by risky alcohol consumption and highlights its many negative consequences for individual and social well-being. The model of intoxication as a harm dominates the new Australian National Alcohol Strategy, which includes the reduction of intoxication as one of four priority areas. The second understanding, based on the everyday experiences of drinkers as well as popular discourse, approaches intoxication as a positive and enhanced state: a form of bodily pleasure. The article argues that while the understanding of intoxication as a harm is epidemiologically incontrovertible, the gap between the public health and everyday understandings of intoxication is a problem for campaigns that aim to alter drinking practices. This is particularly the case when, as recent research suggests, young people's drinking is part of a wide-ranging culture of hedonistic consumption. A clearer picture of the varied uses of alcohol and cultures of drinking, including controlled intoxication among young people, would enhance public health understandings of alcohol consumption and its risks and pleasures.

As steroid use has gained prominence as a dangerous form of substance abuse, two main sets of discourses have been deployed to investigate and ameliorate this emerging public health threat. This article examines these two discursive frameworks and their constitution of the male steroid user as psychologically disordered, drawing on a range of medical and psychological literature. The first framework understands steroid use as a form of illicit drug use, and constitutes the steroid user as an antisocial and excessively masculine subject. The second locates steroid use within the field of body image disorder, producing the steroid user as a damaged and feminized male, a vivid example of masculinity in crisis. Both of these approaches tend to elide the specificity of steroid use and its associated bodily practices in their eagerness to form it into an easily comprehended entity which can be targeted by medical and legal governance.