ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the way in which injecting drug users articulate and acknowledge that the 'game' of the public injecting habitus is 'worth playing'. It explicates how this relationship between social action and structural constraint produces and reproduces harm associated with injecting drug use. According to Bourdieu, the illusio construct is built upon an awareness of logical practice within a given field and involves conscious commitment to the core values, actions and capital located within the habitus. Constructions of 'dirt' by the cohort were many and numerous and the term was used with regularity to describe injecting environments, equipment and other drug users. The harm illusio here relates to the themes of 'drug markets' 'interruption', 'paraphernalia', 'police' 'peer injection', 'group mediation' and 'tax and violence'; each of which are congruous of inter- or intra- group relationships within the public injecting habitus. Responses to police detection typically involved a process of 'fight or flight' in the face of the law.
