Pleasure, drugs, materiality and tensions in harm reduction in practice: The case of safer injection programmes
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".