ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a notion of power as the capacity to act gained from one’s relationality and, therefore, the potential role for reconfiguring drug-using bodies in better, more empowered ways. Empowerment is a frequent term employed in drug-service provision and wider models of social care. Treatment practices need to get closer to drug-using bodies and their relational forces to identify where power is made – where affects get materialised as thought, feeling and action. Furthermore, treatment providers must increase their awareness over how they can ‘block’ bodies becoming-other, through regimes and regulations that structure people’s days and wed them to the ‘drug user’ or worse ‘junkie’ identity. A policy focus on harm reduction is at risk of missing the many ways that drugs are engaged with for sustaining and enhancing life. Policy advocates and politicians are increasingly willing to recognise that rather than reducing the harm of drug use, prohibition may actually be increasing the harms.
