ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 explores how bodies become-with drugs as habit. Made up of these habits that extend well beyond a physical reliance on the drug, bodies are potentialized to act through their everyday practices, which means that in some situations the drug does not even have to be present for the ‘effect’ to be felt. Appreciating these broader habituation processes, some drug treatment practitioners turn to changing habits over undoing habits. This offers a third way to traditional harm reduction and abstinence (recovery) models, what one worker calls ‘harm reduction and more’. More than harm reduction, treatment providers plug into habits, focusing on producing healthier bodies, defined by their power or freedom to act, which is no longer dependent on separating the person from the drug, but producing other relations so that this one may not matter anymore, or at least not come to matter or materialise in a harmful way. The chapter argues that it is by mediating or ‘machining’ these desires, for living well, rather than focusing on how to contain them that drug services may have most success.
