Narcoticulations: Harm Reduction, Safer Drug Use Education, and Technologies of Care

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 12: Health Disparities

Abstract

Harm reduction is a movement and ideology aimed at reducing the harms associated with the use of drugs. Within harm reduction drug use is viewed ambivalently. People may develop positive or negative relationships with different substances, but the substances themselves are not understood to be intrinsically destructive. In fact, much of the labor within harm reduction organizations involves talking with program participants about the various ways one can maximize positive encounters with their drug(s) of choice. Enacted through the distribution of safer use materials (e.g. syringes, pipes); overdose prevention supplies (e.g. naloxone, fentanyl test strips); and relational webs of care and support, harm reduction divests from pathological understandings of drug use. This divestment is a historical accomplishment that allows us to explore different ways of being ‘healthy’ through the appropriation of biomedical techniques and technologies. These activists challenged public health conventions and state laws by clandestinely distributing sterile syringes to prevent HIV transmission among injection drug users. Starting in the late 1980s early harm reductionists were also publicizing safer use education strategies in comic books, zines, and newsletters – before any official public health recommendations were extant. In these safer use documents harm reductionists disarticulated the relationship between sustained drug use and pathology and offered didactic tools to keep drug users safe and alive. Drawing from a corpus of texts written by drug users and harm reduction activists from the 1980s to today, this paper documents the changing discursive and material formations of safer drug use practices. By documenting the amelioration of drug-related harms by actors through time, this paper examines how drug users have engaged reworlding practices which multiply their agencies while achieving important public health goals.

Author

• Jason Louis Contino, University of California-Los Angeles