ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the affective politics of drug suffering. It considers how and under what conditions compassion is elicited and whether such emotions institute critical or conservative social emotions and social policy. The chapter explains how public feelings of sympathy towards the injecting drug user have implications for the development of Harm Reduction policy and the historicisation of the syringe. In her deconstructive analysis of compassion as 'an emotion in operation' Lauren Berlant suggests compassionate emotions enact the social in particular ways. Berlant's assessment of the politics of affect in The Weight of the World adds a new critical dimension to Bourgois' empirical concerns regarding the relationship between public emotion and public action. Between 2000 and 2003 the British charity Barnardo's aimed to generate public awareness of child poverty in Britain. The aim of the media campaign was to raise donations for the socially vulnerable and disenfranchised.
