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Geography
Language of Resource
Full Text Available
Open Access / OK to Reproduce
Peer Reviewed
Objective
Within the context of a public health programme called ‘safer injection education', this article explores how the materialises of drug use (such as paraphernalia and space) intersect with habitual behaviours and expectations. The article compares the diverse accounts of people who inject drugs with the biomedical knowledge of professionals to argue that people experience different forms of pleasure which challenge clinical understandings of addiction as driven by a desire to alleviate the pain of withdrawal symptoms.
Findings/Key points
The analysis critiques the assumption that people who use drugs are enslaved or unaware of their behaviours, showing instead that they are well aware of their patterns of psychoactive substance use and actively manage them in order to increase pleasure, and produce expertise and agency. During safer injection education sessions, people who inject drugs challenge normative assumptions and prescriptions on drug-related risks, and deploy practices and accounts that resonate with narcofeminist approaches, which produces solidarity between peers, social transformation and new forms of resistance to prohibitionist drug policy regimes and the pathologisation of drug use.
Design/methods
The methodology used in this research combined ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews. A total of 95 injection sessions were observed as well as everyday activities in the structures, group-work sessions, and supervision meetings about safer injection education. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with clients and 34 with supervisors (including harm reduction workers and volunteers).
