Paper short abstract:

This paper will use my PhD project on injecting drug use and Harm Reduction to argue in favour of posthumanism as a productive perspective. That is, by focusing on the injecting ‘event’ rather than the individual ‘drug user’ a more complex and ethical approach can be forged.

Paper long abstract:

The Public Health response to injecting drug use (IDU) in the UK has focused on a rationalisation of drug use, in which it is argued that people, given the right information and tools, will make rational decisions to reduce the harms associated with their drug use. This Harm Reduction approach can be seen to be based on a neoliberal understanding of 'self-control', which is in ideological contrast to dominant discourses of addiction based on a 'lack of self-control'. Although this approach has had huge benefits in reducing harms associated with IDU, along with challenging pathologising models of addiction, I do not feel that it goes far enough to address the often un-thought, non-cognitive aspects of drug use.

Therefore, in my research based on 'creative' interviews and participant observation at drug services in London, rather than focusing on the decisions/feelings/experiences of 'drug users' as the primary unit of analysis, I focused on the injecting event. This allowed for an understanding of the complexities of IDU and the drug-body-world entanglements in which a notion of 'self-control' made little sense. Instead, I will show how in the drug assemblage, that brings about the injecting event and enacts certain modalities of feeling, there is a shared control, which is pre-individually relational. In this sense, the 'drug user' is made in the event, which may contribute to a more ethical and productive harm reduction - easing participants' agonies over being both 'in control and out of control' and taking every'thing' in the event seriously.