Reducing risk, producing selves: Drug use and identity in needle exchange
Item
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Title
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Reducing risk, producing selves: Drug use and identity in needle exchange
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:feaf7f179778:11756
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identifier
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12371
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Creator
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McLean, Katherine,
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Contributor
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VIctoria Pitts-Taylor
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology | Public health | Foucault | Harm Reduction | Needle Exchange | Substance Use
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Abstract
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"Harm reduction" refers to a drug policy paradigm that promotes measures intended to reduce the negative consequences of illicit substance use within the context of legal prohibition. Citing values such as pragmatism, flexibility, and humanism, harm reduction "technologies" include needle exchange, methadone maintenance, and supervised injection -- programs that defer the long-term goal of abstinence in favor of short-term measures aiming at the amelioration of risk. Discourses of risk pervade harm reduction programming, and indeed, the dangers of overdose, infection, and arrest faced by injection drug users are real, and further, exacerbated by a national drug strategy that emphasizes criminalization. However, this dissertation is less interested in the objective nature of the risk(s) surrounding injection drug use, and instead focuses on the construction of risk and risk subjects within harm reduction practice. By documenting the "techniques of subjectivation" employed at one community-based needle exchange, Bronx Harm Reduction, this project ultimately seeks to characterize harm reduction as both a technology of domination, and a technology of the self, while describing the identities forged therein (Foucault 1988). Drawing upon one year of participant observation and in-depth interviews with program participants and staff, this study contributes to an emerging body of critical social science research into harm reduction. Where previous study have focused upon more "spectacular" methods of harm reduction, like methadone maintenance, this research aims to explore a less controversial structural intervention, needle exchange, which works upon users' bodies by first molding their sense of self. It further endeavors to move beyond a binary of empowerment and control, in problematizing the forms of agency that are generated within needle exchange. Where harm reduction theory rests upon a construction of "clients" as autonomous and rational subjects, Bronx Harm Reduction's rules, staff actions, and client experiences betrayed a more complex reality. Ultimately, this dissertation asks: how empowering is an identity that posits the individual as potentially dangerous to him or herself and others?
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
