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Over the last few decades feminists, science and technology studies scholars and others have grappled with how to take materiality into account in understanding social practices, subjectivity and events. One key area for these debates has been drug use and addiction. At the same time, neuroscientific accounts of drug use and addiction have also arisen. This development has attracted criticism as simplistically reinstating material determinism. In this article we draw on 80 interviews with health professionals directly involved in drug-related public policy and service provision in three countries to identify the main ways the neuroscience of addiction (and thus the agency of the brain) is understood. We analyse these understandings using contemporary posthumanist theory to develop new options for conceptualizing matter in public responses to addiction. We close by calling for a new approach to addiction and the brain based on a process model of materiality and public debate.

The alcohol and other drug field is characterized by great diversity in kinds of treatment and treatmentphilosophies. Even the kinds of problems treatment is expected to address vary significantly, althoughagreement seems to exist that the general purpose is to help people “get better.” This article considersthis diversity, drawing on a qualitative project conducted in three countries: Australia, Canada, andSweden. Inspired by the project’s multisite approach and the questions it raises about comparativeresearch, the article critically engages with the notion of “comparison” to think through what is atstake in making comparisons. Analyzing 80 interviews conducted with policy makers, service provi-ders, and peer advocates, the article maps key ways treatment is conceptualized, identifying in them acentral role for comparison. Participants in all sites invoked the need to consider addiction a multi-faceted problem requiring a mix of responses tailored to individual differences. Related notions of“holism” were also commonly invoked, as was the need to concentrate on overall improvements inwell-being rather than narrow changes in consumption patterns. In conducting this analysis, this articleposes a series of critical questions. What kinds of comparisons about quality of life, the self, and well-being do treatments for addiction put into play? What categories and criteria of comparison arenaturalized in these processes? What kinds of insights might these categories and criteria authorize,and what might they rule out? In short, what does it mean to understand alcohol and other drug useand our responses to it as intimately intertwined with the need to “get better,” and what happenswhen we scrutinize the politics of comparison at work in getting better through addiction treatment?We conclude by arguing for the need to find new, fairer, ways of constituting the problems we pre-sently ascribe to drugs and addiction.

‘New recovery’ has become an increasingly prominent feature of alcohol and other drug policy and treatment responses. Research has been an important site in the emergence of new recovery but its assumptions, politics and productive role in constituting the realities of new recovery have received little critical scrutiny. In this article, we draw on John Law’s typology of ‘simplification practices’ to analyse the reality-making practices operating in two recent and influential developments in research on new recovery: the Assessment of Recovery Capital (ARC) scale and the Social Identity Model of Recovery (SIMOR). Despite their purported novelty, the ARC scale and the SIMOR enact a familiar divide between the individual subject and the social environment. The sociality and material conditions of people who use drugs are constituted as manageable problems that can and should be carefully monitored, controlled and ultimately changed in order to recover. This particular enactment of the ‘social’ underpins and reinforces a hierarchical logic in which individual subjects are obliged to recover by controlling and changing their social environments through enterprise and activity. Despite their good intentions, both the ARC scale and the SIMOR erase the political, economic, legal and cultural relations that shape the lives of people who uses drugs. We consider new recovery’s claims to ‘newness’ and question what kinds of transformations are made possible, as well as foreclosed, by its focus on the improvable self. We conclude by suggesting an alternative focus that prioritises the resources and relations conducive to ‘living well’.

'Take-home naloxone' refers to a life-saving intervention in which a drug (naloxone) is made available to nonmedically trained people for administration to other people experiencing an opioid overdose. In Australia, it has not been taken up as widely as would be expected, given its life-saving potential. We consider the actions of take-home naloxone, focusing on how care relations shape its uses and effects. Mobilising Science and Technology Studies insights, we suggest that the uses and effects of naloxone are co-produced within social relations and, therefore, this initiative 'affords' multiple outcomes. We argue that these affordances are shaped by a politics of care, and that these politics relate to uptake. We analyse two complementary case studies, drawn from an interview-based project, in which opioid consumers discussed take-home naloxone and its uses. Our analysis maps the ways take-home naloxone can afford (i) a regime of care within an intimate partnership (allowing a terminally ill man to more safely consume opioids) and (ii) a political process of care (in which a consumer takes care of others treated with the medication by administering it 'gently'). We conclude by exploring the political affordances of a politics of care approach for the uptake of take-home naloxone.

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. This article investigates the ways new forms of addiction are encountered by professionals working in the area of alcohol and other drugs. Combining interviews with policymakers, service providers, and peer advocates in three countries (Australia, Canada, and Sweden), and Mike Michael’s utilization of the notion of prehension for science communication, we track the notions of addiction, drugs, and subjectivity that emerge when alcohol and other drug professionals encounter what Fraser, Moore and Keane call the addicting of nonsubstance-related practices. The analysis has three parts: constituting addiction unity, questioning addiction unity, and conflicting logics of addicting processes. We argue that specific articulations of drugs and health and specific health professional and addiction subjects are made anew in these encounters. These notions of drugs, health, and subjectivity shape how alcohol and other drug professionals engage with substance-related addictions. In concluding, we consider the implications of new addictions for professional practice.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.

The Lives of Substance (LoS) website presents personal experiences of drug use and ‘addiction’ in people’s own words as part of a larger project of complicating public discourses of addiction, countering stigmatising misconceptions and acting as an intervention in the social production of addiction. This article presents the findings of a mixed-method evaluation of the website, and comments on some of the methodological and practical challenges of evaluating health-related online information resources. Method: Three data sources were used to examine such as the reach of the website (website analytics); experiences of the website audience (responses to an evaluation survey on the website); and other indicators of use and impact (including social media referrals and organisational links). Results: In the 10-week evaluation period, 3970 unique users visited the website. Comments provided via the online survey endorsed the website as a means of challenging stereotypes and as presenting drug use as only a ‘part of a person’s whole life’. Twenty-four organisations had linked to the website and 987 social media referrals were recorded. Conclusion: These data indicate that the LoS website is having some success as a resource for countering addiction-related stigma and offering more holistic and inclusive social understandings of addiction.

This commentary explores the complex position that take-home naloxone holds as a harm reduction strategy in contemporary public health contexts. Providing the opioid antagonist naloxone to people who consume opioids and others likely to witness opioid overdose is currently positioned as an exemplary lifesaving public health intervention. Few socially oriented studies of take-home naloxone raise questions beyond whether or not take-home naloxone “works”—lines of inquiry that we think should be raised. Until take-home naloxone efforts address harms as effects of social context and policy regimes, the focus on individual behavior change will constrain the equitable distribution of responsibility for tackling overdose and the capacity to achieve more ambitious harm reduction goals such as decriminalization and the associated destigmatization of those who consume opioids. We conclude by arguing for the analytic incorporation of issues of power and normalization that animate responses to opioid overdose, including take-home naloxone.

Commentators suggest the social media platform, Twitter, might afford challenges to hegemonic knowledge by providing voice to those outside traditional media and by enabling vigorous public discussion and contestation of dominant ideas and concepts. In this article, we ask whether such affordances might be reshaping the culturally charged concept of addiction and, in turn, its accompanying abject and maligned subject, the ‘addict’. To explore this question, we examine Twitter messages about addiction posted by celebrities. These people are among the most highly followed Twitter account holders, meaning their Twitter messages can reach millions of people. Our analysis examines how specific addiction problems, and their solutions, are being constituted through the tweeting practices of celebrities. We also consider the unintentional effects these messages produce. Finally, we examine the ways in which these messages are discussed and contested by the audiences of the celebrities. We find celebrity Twitter activity re-enacts familiar realities of addiction, realities that collapse drug use with harm and addiction, addiction with pathology and death. Abstinence is posed as the only effective and genuine response, and the contradictions in simultaneously individualizing action against addiction and condemning stigmatization are ignored. Despite the ‘revolutionary’ potential of Twitter posited by advocates and some scholars, when it comes to addiction, it seems, the global, uncensored, ‘free’ communication on Twitter serves largely to validate and perpetuate dominant addiction concepts and the stigma and discrimination these concepts evoke.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines the legal information provided in Australian alcohol and other drug (AOD) classroom education documents. We focus first on the technical presentation of the information, analysed using Petraglia’s notion of ‘authenticity’ and, second, on the constitution of particular ‘problems’, analysed using Bacchi’s concept of ‘problematisation’. We argue that in working towards deterrence, drug education provides legal information in two ways. First, much of the information focuses on the legal status of drugs, warning young people about the illegality of drugs. Second, information is communicated through structured group activities posed as creating opportunities for discussion. We argue that these strategies aim for a goal of deterrence and that this fits awkwardly with Australia’s avowed commitment to harm reduction drug policies. We argue further that young people’s relationship with the legal aspects of AOD use is too complex for these approaches and the goal of deterrence generally to be productive. In contrast, we propose an approach to drug education that includes a process of open problematisation in which students are invited to consider all aspects of use including the current regulation of drugs. We argue that approaching drug education in this way may more effectively inform about current legal arrangements and encourage the identification of potential problems and solutions more relevant to the lives of its audiences.

Addiction is generally understood to be characterised by a persistent pattern of regular, heavy alcohol and other drug consumption. Current models of addiction tend to locate the causes of these patterns within the body or brain of the individual, sidelining relational and contextual factors. Where space and place are acknowledged as key factors contributing to consumption, they tend to be conceived of as static or fixed, which limits their ability to account for the fluid production and modulation of consumption patterns over time. In this article we query individualised and decontextualised understandings of the causes of consumption patterns through an analysis of accounts of residential relocation from interviews undertaken for a large research project on experiences of addiction in Australia. In conducting our analysis we conceptualise alcohol and other drug consumption patterns using Karen Barad's notions of intra-action and spatio-temporality, which allow for greater attention to be paid to the spatial and temporal dimensions of the material and social processes involved in generating consumption patterns. Drawing on 60 in-depth interviews conducted with people who self-identified as experiencing an alcohol and other drug addiction, dependence or habit, our analysis focuses on the ways in which participant accounts of moving enacted space and time as significant factors in how patterns of consumption were generated, disrupted and maintained. Our analysis explores how consumption patterns arose within highly localised relations, demonstrating the need for understandings of consumption patterns that acknowledge the indivisibility of space and time in their production. In concluding, we argue for a move away from static conceptions of place towards a more dynamic conception of spatio-temporality, and suggest the need to consider avenues for more effectively integrating place and time into strategies for generating preferred consumption patterns and initiating an

This article explores the developing relationship between neuroscientific understandings of ‘addiction’ and ‘youth’. Drawing on science and technology studies theory and social scientific analyses of both these concepts, it identifies a co-constitutive relationship between notions of addiction as a brain disease and of youth as a stage of brain development. These two concepts are then tracked in a series of drug education documents concerned with alcohol and other drug (AOD) use and addiction among young people, and their implications and effects and analysed together. The aim is to investigate the impact on drug education of neuroscientific approaches to youth and addiction. Are new concepts and directions for harm reduction created in the encounters between neuroscience, youth and addiction, or do they simply reinstate and reinforce existing assumptions and judgments? Is drug education shaped by these concepts likely to achieve its aim, that is, to increase young people’s sensitivity to harm and safety? The article begins by introducing neuroscientific accounts of youth and addiction, arguing that the two concepts share three key assumptions. First, both emphasise biology and sideline social context in the making of drug use practices and outcomes. Second, both reproduce uncritical treatments of brain scans (PET and fMRI images) as windows into minds and subjects. Third, both understand the brain as ontologically separate from its environment. These assumptions and their implications are then tracked through an analysis of Australian drug education resources, focusing on how drug education constitutes youthfulness and addiction as pathological disorders. In its reliance on neuroscientific understandings of youth and addiction, we conclude, drug education is unlikely to achieve its goal of reducing drug-related harm.

© 2017Public health research treats intimate partnerships as sites of risk management, including in the management of HIV and hepatitis C transmission. This risk-infused biomedical approach tends to undermine appreciation of the emotional and socially situated meanings of care in intimate partnerships. In this article we explore qualitative interview accounts of the care enacted in partnerships between people who inject drugs, drawing on a 2014 study of 34 couples and 12 individuals living in two locations of Australia. A thematic analysis highlights ‘best friend relationships’, ‘doing everything together’, ‘co-dependency’, and ‘doing normalcy’ as core to narratives of care. As we will argue, the accounts position the care undertaken by couples as at once shaped by day-to-day practices of drug use and by social situation, with the partnership enacting care as a form of social protection, including protection from stigma and other environmental hostilities. The intimacy of doing everything together offers insulation against stigma, yet also reproduces its isolating effects. While the care produced in drug-using partnerships is presented as double-edged, we note how interview accounts are used to deflect the charge that these relationships represent harmful co-dependency. Taken together, the interview accounts negotiate a ‘counter-care’ in relation to normalcy, presenting the intimate partnership between people who use drugs as a legitimate embodiment of care.