ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the various addiction frameworks underlying the socio spatial permutations of narcotic modernity. Shifting from moral to criminological to biomedical models, it starts from the initial diagnosis of addiction, charting the evolution of popular and professional paradigms up to the present day addicted city. The chapter locates addiction as a pathology of place, a phenomenon that is both 'of place', and simultaneously perceived as 'out of place' in relation to the normative socio-spatial order of the contemporary capitalist cityscape. As pathology of place, addiction is thus situated as both endemic to the urban and inherently transgressive of the normative borders of all socio-spatial bodies. From its very first diagnosis, the disease of addiction has been preinscribed with the threat of sociospatial disorder. In our recurrent encounters with the disorder of drugs, people are therefore forced to engage with not only the body of the addict, but also the social body of the city in the terms of abjection.
