Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the ways in which mutually-implicating notions of ruination and repair are embedded in contemporary understandings of substance addiction, and how recovery is in turn rendered a continual process of loss, renewal, and restoration.

Paper long abstract:

Prevailing biomedical discourses overwhelmingly parse notions of substance addiction as a chronic condition, marked by the certainty of continual relapse and increasingly impaired neurological reward systems, which in turn cement the impossibility of repair. Systems of care, however, remain premised on the possibility of recovery, a paradigm that at times instils hope and optimism and, at others, entrenches despair, grief, and entrapment in ever-recurring cycles of repetition. This paper draws on long-term fieldwork with people who use drugs in Southeast Scotland, to interrogate concepts of repair and ruination in both active addiction and attempts to recover. It seeks to explore how recovery and substance use become dynamically entwined, negotiated, and lived, wherein heroin is rendered both a source of irreparable damage and ruin, and intimate solace. The present, in this rendering, is composed in its relation to the dual inevitability and uncertainty of the future, forming a heuristic of temporal instability. The paper also asks, however, how this fragile, iterative dynamic of loss, renewal and restoration, becomes threaded with different potentialities for care and repair through its very repetition. It does so in part by examining the relationship of two sisters, as they attempt to reckon with their ongoing substance use, tensions with kin, and complex structural forces; and the ways in which this sororal bond is composed in processes of making, unmaking and mending.