heroin users in a low-income community Kahryn Hughes, Nick Emmel, Joanne Greenhalgh, and Adam Sales Where, and with whom, we did the research Low income estate, city in north of England ESRC RMP funded study, developing methods to access socially excluded people Accessed drug-user involvement team Provided access to ex/drug users Dimensions of Place and Space: Visibility, invisibility: Place Proximity, distance: Space
Place and space profoundly relational,
embodied through identity and living practices of our study participants The particular character of these dimensions for our sample are defined through the following: Drug using lifestyles
Living and identity practices necessary for
maintaining these lifestyles
Embodied time horizons of heroin users
Avoiding the rattle
Is the driving principle that organises users’
lives
Styles of using around avoiding the rattle:
Maintenance and Chaotic The ‘rattle’ P Well the thing is, if you haven’t got heroin in your system your mind’s on one fucking thing, and overall, over everything you couldn’t give a fuck if the world’s collapsing around ya, your mind’s on one thing and that’s fucking getting that heroin. When you’ve had a heroin problem for so long if you have a hit it doesn’t mean to say that you’re going to be fucking intoxicated out of your mind, it means that you can fucking operate a little bit better and function a little bit better. Pete Maintenance T … somebody who maintains a habit, basically what they actually do is they’ve learnt how to budget their money, budget the drugs, and have got a regular supply so, in that case you can function as a normal human being almost, as long as you’ve got your regular supply and you’re not chaotic with your drug use, so we call it like maintaining your habit basically. […] it’s more I think with your life about how you maintain your life, … I did for a long time, 2 years I worked several jobs and I was still using and I maintained it because I allocated X amount of my wages per week and used. Terry Chaotic use
‘One [way of using] is where you’re chaotic, it
can make you cry, you’re sort of like really going off your head and you get into trouble you know you run into the criminal justice system, you’re very chaotic with your drug use and things…’ Terry Chaotic use
Don’t have much to do with people that
don’t use, e.g., limited family involvement, no home, not on benefits, no job, no health care, no friends from non-using days, only hang out with other users who supply a place to stay, somebody to ‘graft’ with, and somebody to use with Depending on style of use, user is involved and ‘in/visible’ in different networks Purposeful networks: e.g, Grafting P Graft … for a heroin addict is going out and doing crime. Now, every heroin addict or every drug misuser if they do crime, they’ve got their own grafts, some are great at shop lifting, some are great at fraud, some are great at burglary, some are great at nicking cars, and they usually do stick to them crimes, even though they’ll all be opportunist thieves, em, they do have speciality, em, speciality crimes, graft. Pete Grafting: Users are driven to grafting by need for heroin: avoiding the rattle grafting depends on other people: bus fare, grafting partners, grafting is an example of how heroin-users work locally with non-users creating ‘informal economies’: selling stuff that’s nicked Good example of how the living and identity practices necessary for maintaining these lifestyles involves participation and configuration within purposeful networks Junk Time: a different world
‘The addict runs on junk time. His body is a
clock and the junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others and […] he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.’ (Burroughs, 1982, pg. 48) e.g., Getting a script Now I’d heard……. of M C [drugs service], … but you know when you’ve got to fucking take a trip from where you live in to town, you know an hour trip, its er, you just, you don’t seem to er, well its not a priority, its not a fucking priority. Your priority is to sleep, do crime and do gear, and I think what I’d have benefited from is maybe an on the doorstep drugs service, some kind of drugs service or help or support, maybe a one stop shop in G so it wor on my doorstep, you know, I could call in, on the way to scoring, I could call in on the way back from scoring, it’d have been there to help me. Pete Space: Proximity and Distance For these heroin users, specific dimensions of space, namely proximity and distance, are inseparably bound up with particular embodied experiences of time Junk time enhances interdependencies of purposeful networks, e.g, determines their ability to move beyond place to graft and score The healthiness or otherwise of heroin users is seen as compromised as services fail to mesh with users perceptions of space and time Users’ perceptions of Place: Visibility and invisibility the living and identity practices of heroin users means they inhabit place differently from non-users; in doing so they become ‘visible’ in different social networks – e.g., family, health service, or drug using networks. People at their most vulnerable, and most in need (e.g. chaotic use) are least visible to services Yet, chaotic use may increase users’ visibility in appearances in court, police cells, and bail hostels. Often use arrest as an opportunity to get a script They are tied to place through their relational dependencies, yet feel they need to get out of this place (beyond these relationships) to stop using; sometimes use this place differently (no go areas) to stop using Therefore, Users’ understanding of place fundamentally embodied, constituted through particular identity/living practices, and relational. In particular, users’ ideas of proximity and distance are defined and inscribed within these relational practices. Wider economic activities occurring on the estate provide the possibility for these practices (eg. grafting); therefore these networks not isolate Place in turn can be seen as constituted through particular material practices Methods of Access: our findings We suggest access requires us to: Recognise that access requires gatekeepers and successful gate-keepers are those with who the user has relationships based on trust and reciprocity (Emmel et al, forthcoming) Understand the purposeful social networks in which people are engaged in their living and identity practices as heroin users Recognise how place is differently constituted and performed depending on the identity and living practices of users Recognise the different time horizons of drug users which may only tangentially interconnect with a researchers’ Recognise the need for a fine-grain understanding of the relationality of place
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