Challenging the addiction/health binary with assemblage thinking: An analysis of consumer accounts

Abstract

Critical analyses of drug use and 'addiction' have identified a series of binary oppositions between addiction and free will, independence, self-control, responsibility, productivity and autonomy. This critical work has also examined how science, policy and popular discourses frequently characterise addiction as antithetical to health and well-being. Furthermore, those diagnosed with addiction are often understood as indifferent to health and well-being, or as lacking the knowledge or desire required to maintain them. In this article, we draw on data from 60 qualitative interviews with people who self-identify as living with an 'addiction', 'dependence' or 'habit', to argue that the binary opposition between addiction and health struggles to attend to their rich and varied health perspectives and experiences. We explore three themes in the interview data: reinscribing the binary opposition between addiction and health/well-being; strategies for maintaining health and well-being alongside addiction; and alcohol and other drug consumption as aiding health and well-being. Perhaps because addiction and health have been so thoroughly understood as antithetical, such perspectives and experiences have received surprisingly little research and policy attention. Yet they offer fertile ground for rethinking the strengths and capacities of those who self-identity as living with an addiction, dependence or habit, as well as untapped resources for responding to the harm sometimes associated with alcohol and other drug use.

Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers

“…Actor-network theory has previously been applied in studies on substance use ( Demant, 2009 ; Duff, 2012 ; Gomart & Hennion, 1999 ), loss of control in addiction ( Weinberg, 2013 ) and the treatment of drug problems ( Gomart, 2004 ). Some studies have also applied such ANT concepts as ‘assemblage’ (e.g., Duff, 2013 ; Fraser, Moore & Keane, 2014 ; Moore et al., 2017 ) to study the multiple realities of addiction; some realities may be related to controlled and enjoyable substance use, while others rather pertain to harmful realities. These studies demonstrate that addiction is a complex assemblage constructed of many mutually constitutive phenomena, including substance, patterns of use, social relations, social conduct, resources, gender, geography, occupation, age, family obligations, health, well-being and state intervention ( Moore et al., 2017 ).…”

“…In this paper, by drawing on actor-network theory (ANT: Latour, 2005 ) and assemblage thinking ( Moore, Pienaar, Dilkes-Frayne & Fraser, 2017 ), we examine how online gambling venues, as actors in specific networks of attachment, may enable the development of gambling addiction and facilitate its continuation. Online gambling venues here refer to various online platforms where gambling such as poker, casino, sports betting, bingo and lottery can be accessed through the internet.…”

Transitions in income generation among marginalized people who use drugs: A qualitative study on recycling and vulnerability to violence

“…People who use drugs (PWUD) represent one population negatively impacted by neoliberal labour market structures (Bourgois, 1995; valentine, 2011). Unemployment among PWUD is common (Galea & Vlahov 2012; Henkel 2011; Richardson 2012), with drug-using populations typically characterized as incapable of and adverse to participation in formal employment (Richardson et al, 2013), despite evidence suggesting the capacity of PWUD to manage concurrent drug use and employment (French et al, 2001; see also Moore et al, 2017). The neoliberal rhetoric of individual responsibility, which shifts responsibility from the state to the individual, further serves to characterize unemployed PWUD as unproductive and culpable, obscuring the influence of macro systemic factors (Fraser & Moore, 2008).…”

Therapy without a prescription: buprenorphine/naloxone diversion and the therapeutic assemblage in Taiwan

“…The elaborations of assemblage thinking (Marcus and Saka 2006) have been present in many areas of scholarship and may address different phenomena of the world (Duff 2016). The notion of assemblage has been widely applied in alcohol and other drugs (AOD) research to account for complexities of drug use and addiction (Bøhling 2015, Dilkes-Frayne 2014, Duff 2014, Fitzgerald 1998, Hart 2015, Malins 2004, Moore et al 2017. These studies refuse to reduce the notion of addiction to a human-centred view in biomedical theories, wherein addiction is considered to be a biological pathology or a maladaptive reaction of a human subject under certain social structures (see Duff 2014: 126-7).…”