Pleasure, drugs, materiality and tensions in harm reduction in practice: The case of safer injection programmes
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on ethnographies of a public health programme called ‘safer injection education’ (where people inject drugs under the supervision of harm reduction providers), this article explores how the materialities of drug use (such as paraphernalia and space) intersect with habitual behaviours and expectations. The article compares the diverse accounts of people who inject drugs with the biomedical knowledge of professionals to argue that people experience different forms of pleasure which challenge clinical understandings of addiction as driven by a desire to alleviate the pain of withdrawal symptoms. The analysis also critiques the assumption that people who use drugs are enslaved or unaware of their behaviours, showing instead that they are well aware of their patterns of psychoactive substance use and actively manage them in order to increase pleasure, and produce expertise and agency. During safer injection education sessions, people who inject drugs challenge normative assumptions and prescriptions on drug-related risks, and deploy practices and accounts that resonate with narcofeminist approaches, which produces solidarity between peers, social transformation and new forms of resistance to prohibitionist drug policy regimes and the pathologisation of drug use.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it