According to Dante, “Limbo” is the first circle of Hell located at its edge. Unlike other residents of Hell, the Limbo population suffers no torment other than their lack of hope. We argue that a lack of hope in post-Soviet Ukraine is expressed by a lack of conditions for a better future since the past is overrepresented in the present. Therefore, every movement transforms under the past’s pressure, changing its course in order to reproduce and perpetuate ghosts of what is long gone. We argue that the current state of Ukraine can be framed as “post-Soviet limbo.” If the great stability of the Soviet regime was a result of overregulation and extensive control, or of “uncertainty avoidance,” then a post-Soviet limbo is a result of “managing uncertainty” simultaneously influenced by Soviet legacies and neoliberal promises of growth, calculability, and deregulation on the part of the State. “Soviet legacies” are dominant and represent a mix of formal overregulation explicitly presented through laws and policies and informality which, according to some authors, became even more widespread in the post-Soviet period than it used to be under the Soviet rule. We do not aim to consider the past legacies as being opposite to neoliberal features and futures, but negotiate the way the two are interrelated and mutually reinforced in the present to produce the post-Soviet limbo. Ukraine’s performance of Opioid Agonist Therapy (OAT) coverage is consistently estimated as insufficient and needing further improvement. However, we argue that that there are two modes of OAT implementation in Ukraine: state-funded (formal) and privately-funded (informal). The latter’s size does not fall into official estimates since the national reports on OAT performance never include the numbers of patients involved in informal treatment. We suggest, that the informal mode of OAT implementation appeared as a result of contrasting efforts towards intensive regulation and extensive growth. To understand how these two modes are produced in the context of post-Soviet narcology, how they differ and where their paths cross, we analyze two types of texts: legal and policy documents regulating substance use disorder (SUD) treatment, mainly OAT; and qualitative data, including interviews with OAT patients and field notes reflecting the environment of OAT programs. Finally, the presented article seeks to answer how the state’s contrasting efforts to manage the uncertainty of SUD treatment through OAT regulation and implementation reproduce the post-Soviet limbo and, thus, people with SUD as “patients of the state” who are frozen in a hopeless wait for changes.
Introduction In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended for prison authorities to introduce prison needle and syringe programs (PNSP) if they have any evidence that injecting drug use is taking place in prisons. This article presents descriptive evidence that injecting drug use takes place in Ukrainian prisons, it discusses how (denial of) access to injection equipment is regulated in the current system and what changes should be considered in order to implement PNSP. Background Ukrainian prisons still live by the laws and policies adopted in the Soviet Union. Besides laws and regulations, these legacies are replicated through the organization and infrastructure of the prison’s physical space, and through “carceral collectivism” as a specific form of living and behaving. Inviolability of the prison order over time helps the prison staff to normalize and routinely rationalize punishment enforcement as a power “over” prisoners, but not a power “for” achieving a specific goal. Methods The Participatory Action Research approach was used as a way of involving different actors in the study’s working group and research process. The data were gathered through 160 semi-structured interviews with prison health care workers, guards, people who inject drugs (PWID) who served one or several terms and other informants. Results The “expertise” in drug use among prisoners demonstrated by prison staff tells us two things—they admit that injecting use takes place in prisons, and that the surveillance of prisoner behavior has been carried out constantly since the very beginning as a core function of control. The communal living conditions and prison collectivism may not only produce and reproduce a criminal subculture but, using the same mechanisms, produce and reproduce drug use in prison. The “political will” incorporated into prison laws and policies is essential for the revision of outdated legacies and making PNSP implementation feasible. Conclusion PNSP implementation is not just a question of having evidence of injecting drug use in the hands of prison authorities. For PNSP to be feasible in the prison environment, there is a need for specific changes to transition from one historical period and political leadership to another. And, thus, to make PNSP work requires making power work for change, and not just for reproducing the power itself.
Important factors affecting acid fracturing efficiency include etched fracture geometry, cleanup, and optimum differential etching to retain open channels after fracture closure. A recently applied integrated approach combined improvements in all three factors: new fracture simulation techniques enabled fracture geometry optimization, single-phase retarded acid provided significant increase in half-length, and high retained permeability viscous fluids supported better fracture cleanup. The approach was successfully implemented in several carbonate oil fields and resulted in a substantial productivity index increase. The approach enables acid fracture optimization in three steps. First, the high retained permeability, low-pH pad fluids and polymer-free leakoff control acids are used in combination to enhance formation cleanup after a treatment and to reduce the concentration of polymers in fissures network of naturally fractured carbonate reservoirs. Second, a new single-phase retarded acid is used to achieve longer half-length due to retarded reaction with formation rock and favorable viscous fingering effects. Third, a new acid fracturing simulation model is used to optimize fracture geometry. The simulation technique employs an innovative transport model that includes the viscous fingering effect, advanced leakoff simulation, changing acid rheology upon spending, and a novel calculation approach to mixed fluids' rheology. This combined concept was applied during acid fracturing treatments in moderate permeability wells of carbonate reservoirs with target intervals up to 4,600 m TVD and temperatures up to 125°C. The treatments consisted of guar-free low-pH pad fluid, polymer-free leakoff control acid, and single-phase retarded acid. Treatment optimization was performed using an advanced acid fracturing simulator to properly address the transport processes within the fracture in a low-stress-contrast environment. After the treatments, the pressure transient analysis indicated a strong linear regime for more than 15 hours, indicating effective fracture half-length at least 25% higher than average half-length after acid fracturing in offset wells where the conventional approach had been applied. Post-treatment half-length calculations showed a good match with advanced simulator results and proved the importance of accounting for viscous fingering effects during acid fracture half-length calculations. Calculation of the productivity index from the production data showed at least 15% increase compared to conventional acid fracturing treatments. The post-fracturing production decline rate was at least 20% slower than that of the conventional treatment in offset wells, which can be explained by the longer conductive fracture.
It is becoming more common for operators around the world to use alleged conformance control completions as a means of managing inflow zones and controlling production. When this type of completion is introduced in a field, it is extremely important to analyze its effectiveness at very early stages of the project to achieve maximized zonal contribution together with proper compartmentalization in current and subsequent completions, since this will have a significant impact on the future life of the entire field. A thorough analysis should include understanding zonal isolation before and after acid stimulation, fluid distribution inside the compartments during the treatment, and confirmation of completion integrity. Analyzing completion performance by introducing additional downhole monitoring systems or devices is costly and is more appropriate for the long term. Another option, surveillance with wireline technology, may not provide definite conclusions due to limited acquisition extent. Alternatively, coiled tubing (CT) can provide a fit-for-purpose integrated solution to data acquisition and analysis challenge. The proposed approach uses distributed temperature sensing technology along with real-time data streaming capabilities to provide an instantaneous insight on wellbore dynamics, thus enabling informed decisions on treatment optimization, as well as yielding reliable information on interzonal communication. This study is based on a success story of intervening with CT on 10 wells, with a total of 40 compartments in a carbonate reservoir in the Caspian region. Distributed temperature evolution models are used to build a signature library characteristic of specific flow events in the wellbore. The study consists of distributed temperature surveys lasting from 30 minutes to 6 hours that were acquired before and during the acid stimulation of each conformance compartment. Unique temperature features are identified in specific flow events, such as communication between compartments, loss of completion integrity, and effective stimulated area determination, to name a few. Those events are hypothesized and corroborated using downhole point measurements. A significant finding is that communication between zones occurs through several possible paths (i.e., through the formation/matrix or via the completion). The stimulation strategy can be modified accordingly, leveraging downhole data to maximize completion efficiency. This combination of transient distributed temperature and point measurement data provides an insight into wellbore and reservoir flow dynamics and facilitates an optimized stimulation strategy.
BackgroundTo improve healthcare entry and antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation for HIV-positive people who inject drugs (PWID) in Ukraine, an intervention built upon a successful community-based harm reduction project and the existing best practices was developed. In this article, we present the results of the study conducted in collaboration with one of the recipient organizations of the intervention in Kyiv. The research question was formulated as follows: how does the interaction between different actors work to lead it to a positive outcome (initiation PWIDs into ART) within the limited period of the intervention implementation?MethodsThe central focus of the study was on the work activities of case managers. Their daily routines as well as their interactions with their clients and medical workers were observed and analyzed. Using the institutional ethnography approach, we explore the institutional orders, power imbalances, and social factors that play different roles in coordinating the process of PWIDs entry into healthcare and HIV treatment.ResultsThe most intriguing result of the study is that the performance indicator that must be completed in order to receive a full salary—as a way to manage the activities of case managers—produces conditions for them to develop their cooperation with medical workers but leaves the clients and their needs out of this “boat” because interaction with them, in fact, does not help to meet case managers’ goals.ConclusionsAccountability of case managers’ work assumes the primacy of the result over the process, which makes the process itself less important and the need to achieve the goal becomes the main and the only goal. This can be identified as an unintended consequence of the intervention implementation on the ground, or wider—an unintended consequence of the payment by results practice as a part of the general number-based policy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.