“There’s No Sense to It”: A Posthumanist Ethnography of Agency in Methamphetamine Recovery

Abstract

The orthodox construction of agency within addiction recovery discourse is built upon a fault line between two conflicting principles: that people who use drugs in harmful ways cannot control their behavior, but that they can also regain that control through intentional effort. The conceptual confusion inherent in this framework can harm people using drugs by producing inadequate accounts of commonly invoked aspects of recovery such as “triggers,” “self-control,” and “addictive behavior.” This ethnographic study involved qualitative interviews and observations with nine people over 6 months as they engaged in recovery from harmful methamphetamine use, to explore their experiences of agency, and how these experiences could be shaped by the discourse of volition/compulsion. Thematic analysis was conducted using a posthumanist theoretical framework. We found “relapse triggers” to be diffuse aspects of particular environments rather than specific stimuli, able to provoke what would normally be considered conscious, intentional behavior rather than only autonomic or “mindless” processes. Participants also described their identities as internally divided and multiple, with drug related behaviors separated from their true selves. Finally, agency was experienced as emergent and distributed rather than as a particular resource located within individuals. Attending to these complex experiences of agency can help resolve the tension between loss of control and personal responsibility for people who use drugs, by renegotiating the historically imposed categorical distinction between volitional and compelled actions, and the cultural constructions of “addictive” versus “normal” behavior.

‘Making Ground’: An Ethnography of ‘Living With’ Harmful Methamphetamine Use and the Plurality of Recovery

“…Addiction has been called a disease of the brain (Leshner, 1997; Volkow et al, 2016), a disease of the will (Valverde, 1998; Worth & Rawstorne, 2005), and a social disease (Lewy, 2009), each of which can have well-established clinical, social, and policy consequences, as this designation traditionally puts drug use outside of individual’s ‘control’. These implications have been previously addressed in the context of methamphetamine recovery and agency (Brookfield et al, 2021).…”

Fault/Lines: New Directions in Critical Drug Scholarship Inspired by the Work of David Moore and Colleagues

“…The work of Moore and colleagues has traced how these logics emerge, under what conditions or via which practices, and with what effects (e.g., Fraser et al, 2014). The second paper, by Brookfield and colleagues (2022), shares this concern with how the agency of people who use drugs is conceptualized and constructed within discourses of “addiction,” and the implications of this for those who use drugs. Building on this critical work on volition and ethnographic fieldwork with people in methamphetamine recovery, this paper works to challenge and transcend binaries common in the alcohol and other drugs field.…”

Self‐interpellation in narratives about craving: Multiple and unitary selves

“…His narrative echoes key themes from RP and AA. The experience of being both in and out of control is made meaningful through multiple selves (see Brookfield et al., 2021):

I started to misuse alcohol during my teenage years, and when did I realise I was an alcoholic? Well it was when I admitted to myself that’s how it is…so I have continued relapsing into this.

…”

“…The notion of being addicted implies lack of control and assigning a powerful role to substances (Room, 2003 , p. 224), but as Kalant ( 2010 , p. 781) argues, ‘addiction is not produced by a drug, but by self‐administration of a drug; the difference is of fundamental importance’. Inspired by critical scholarship that perceives substance users’ lived experiences as more complex and multiple than epitomised by binaries such as sickness versus health and compulsion versus volition (Brookfield et al., 2021 ; Pienaar et al., 2017 ; Weinberg, 2013 ), our study is concerned with craving and how it relates to identity construction among people previously treated for addiction problems. Craving is at the centre stage of addiction discourse (Tiffany & Wray, 2012 ).…”

“…Challenging addiction as a demarcated phenomenon with fixed characteristics (Fraser et al., 2014 ), our ambition is to elucidate the potential complexities of craving experiences and move away from binary understandings. There is little research on how phenomena such as triggers and craving are experienced by people who use substances (but see Brookfield et al., 2021 ; Bruehl et al., 2006 ; Dennis, 2016 ), not least regarding their significance for identity construction.…”