NPS and the methadone queue: Spillages of space and time

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Abstract

Background

Between 2008 and 2013, powder-stimulants sold by ‘head shops’ as novel psychoactive substances (NPS) or ‘legal highs’ have displaced heroin among groups of injecting substance users in Bucharest, Romania. Rising HIV-infection rates and other medical or social harms have been reported to follow this trend.

Methods

The study builds on two sets of original (N = 30) and existing (N = 20) interview data and on observations collected mainly at the site of a methadone substitution treatment facility.

Results

By disentangling the space–time continuum of the methadone queue, this paper argues that injecting drug users’ (IDUs) passage from opiates to amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) can be understood as ‘spillages’ of space and time. IDUs thus ‘spill’ out of the disciplinary flows of methadone treatment in two ways. The first is that of space and materiality. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), ATS/NPS appear embedded in reconfigured practices and rituals of injecting use. Such spillages see the pleasure-seeking self being fluidised in forming connections with, or spilling into, nonhuman actants such as substances, settings or objects. The second dimension of spilling is that of time. In this sense, heroin use is a ‘cryogenic strategy’ of inhabiting history and facing the transition to the market society that Romanian opiate injectors spill out of, not able to appropriate choice and legitimate consumption. The phenomenological qualities of stimulants that seem to accelerate lived time and generalise desire thus present them with an opportunity to alleviate a form of what a post-communist moral imaginary of transition frames as debilitating nostalgia.

Conclusion

ATS/NPS are revealed as fluid entities that do not only shape risk conditions but also alter shared meanings and contextual configurations of bodies, substances and disciplinary regimes in unpredictable ways.

Introduction

The distribution of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) or ‘legal highs’ on a global scale has prompted panic reactions and various scheduling measures. These were meant to counteract the dangers of myriad forgotten or unknown, revived or newly synthesised compounds sold by ‘head shops’. Such hazards have been generally situated within risk economies threatening the wellbeing of neoliberal subjects. This paper aims to connect NPS use with wider webs of meaning and social-historical transformations beyond the logic of the risk society (Beck, 1992, Giddens, 1991). To this purpose, it focuses on a group of injecting drugs users (IDUs) transitioning from heroin to amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) sold by NPS retailers in Bucharest, Romania. Between 2008 and 2013 the country witnessed a consistent rise in HIV-infections among its intravenous drug using population (Botescu, Abagiu, Mărdărescu, & Ursan, 2012; NADA, 2014). Such trends were suggested to accompany the increasingly erratic behaviour of ATS injectors.

The study presented here draws on interview and observational data collected mainly around a methadone clinic to understand the migration from heroin, the main substance of choice for Romanian IDUs, to ATS/NPS. In doing so, it reads the methadone queue as a disciplinary device, and separates its spatial-temporal flow into ‘spillages’ of space and time. In the dimension of space, it uses actor-network theory (ANT) to point to the pleasures of fluidising the self in sensual connections with substances, settings and objects. In being re-solidified from such spillages, the self can also face the disorder of sickness or dissolution. In the dimension of time and historical transition, the phenomenological qualities of stimulants indicate an acceleration of historical progression and an expansion of desire. They thus seem to allow heroin users stuck in frozen or ‘cryogenic’ time to move on along with the whole of post-communist Romanian society in its transition to consumer capitalism. Highlighting NPS as a fluid object of policy, the paper ultimately questions the limits of pleasure and health, risk and consumption as ordering principles of life in the late modern capitalist world.

Section snippets

The methadone queue

The author of this paper has elsewhere (Alexandrescu, 2016) looked at injecting NPS users as a counterpublic (Duff and Moore, 2015, Race, 2009, Warner, 2002) trying to ‘normalise’ their identities and shake off the stigma of drug abjection. This would be done by using what initially seemed like legitimate commodities sold in apparently regulated retail spaces they could invest with open meanings. Such observations are also relevant for a critical discussion of the methadone clinic as a

Method

The data used here come from two sets of semi-structured interviews. An original set of 30 interviews was collected between April and September 2012 and mostly focused on a low threshold methadone clinic in Bucharest, Romania. It included 15 injecting substance users who had developed sustained habits of ATS/NPS use that they had either replaced of alternated heroin with and 12 ‘specialists’ (drug/outreach workers, activists or policy makers) who had observed transformations in local substance

Findings

Participants hinted at four types of incentives that pushed experienced heroin injectors to experiment with, and eventually develop habits of using, the powder-stimulants sold by ‘dream shops’—as the Romanian media called NPS outlets. The first was their perceived safe legal status. This meant escaping police harassment and avoiding, or not adding to, a criminal record. The second was their mysterious pharmaceutical nature. Substances referred to by media outlets as ‘legal drugs’, ‘legals’,

Significance

In the goal-oriented, fast-paced and highly ordered human environments of late modern times, intoxication is “a kind of unmaking or decomposition” (Yardley, 2012, p.24) of the socially constituted body that trains itself to be competent in dosing resource expenditures and strengthening instrumental capacities for survival and competition. To experience the world through calculation and utility-value leaves fewer possibilities open for explorations in transgression and communion. But an

Conclusions

This paper has looked at a broken chronotope (space–time flow) of the methadone queue to show how, as a fluid notion, NPS would be invested with different meanings. Through spillages of space and materiality, users would give in to the pleasures of unpredictable encounters with chemistries, places and needles. These could lead to insightful configurations, as well as dangerous crossings of boundaries into the ontological disorder of psychosis or infection. Through spillages of time and history,

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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