Short abstract:

This paper rethinks how constructs of ‘harm’ generate harm themselves, yet remain imperative for policy work involved in directly serving drug user needs for health and human dignity. When we make ‘harm’ a central actor, do we—in effect—do harm?

Long abstract:

Where is the locus of harm, and do we as STS scholars have no path but to produce and reproduce it even as we document it? Community-engaged STS invites us to cultivate reflexivity, yet this very reflexivity can deflect critique from larger structural currents and consume us ‘from below’. As we engage with the consequences of pharmaceutical and racial capitalisms, we note production of visual and text-based art that counters the ‘rhetoric of contempt’ historically directed at drug users (especially when pregnant or parenting). This paper explores lively practices through which drug use is integrated into everyday life for the purpose of ‘reworlding’ what Murphy calls an ‘alterbiopolitics’ (2017), a decolonial ‘alterlife’ that calls forth new life forms and new materializations of bodies in the presence of the constitutive ambivalence that pervades drug-using social worlds due to unsafe and harmful practices of policing and surveillance within them.

Historical work on representations of WWUDs, including my own first book, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy and Social Justice (2000), repeatedly shows how mind-numbingly public health campaigns, drug policy discourse, and cultural fictions re-enact sexualized and racialized tropes in congealed and essentializing ways. The persistent damage done by the misleading constructs, figures, confabulations, and tropes of dominant and dehumanizing discourse haunt discourse on drugs. These phantasmatic figures are real in their effects. Let’s depart from such damaging constructs and evolve our field in ways that can provide robust counters to the hegemonic project of documenting harm, trauma, and the damage done.