Take-home naloxone and the ontopolitics of care

• In Event: Investigating drug transformations through an ontopolitical lens

Abstract

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist used to reverse the life-threatening effects of an opioid overdose. The term ‘take-home naloxone’ refers to naloxone that is administered by non-medically trained people during an overdose. The little sociological research on take-home naloxone available emphasises the importance of local social relations, noting, that unless naloxone is administered with care it can cause distress and be experienced as a punishment. However, researchers are yet to analyse the social dynamics that shape how the technology is taken up, administered and, ultimately, how it ‘works’. I draw on interviews collected for a new Australian project on take-home naloxone to consider these issues. Using Bruno Latour’s work, I argue that technologies such as take-home naloxone are co-produced within social relations and, therefore, ‘afford’ rather than determine certain outcomes. Adopting a case-study method I identify an interpersonal ‘politics of care’ in which the affordances of take-home naloxone take shape within interpersonal caring relations. Importantly, this politics of care calls upon particular people to respond to overdose, and thus to take part in an ontological politics of care that exceeds standard understandings of naloxone as simply an ‘emergency medicine’. First, I identify a regime of care within an intimate partnership that allows a participant to care for her terminally ill partner. Second, I identify a political process in which a participant takes care of opioid consumers, ‘gently’ administering it with a sensitivity for care beyond revival. I conclude by exploring the ontopolitical affordances of a politics of care approach for the dissemination and uptake of take-home naloxone.

Author

• Adrian Farrugia, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University