‘Chemical jail’: culture-centered theorizing of carcerality in methadone maintenance treatment and addiction recovery in the United States

ABSTRACT

This study draws from qualitative interviews with eight adults living in the United States using methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) to recover from opioid addiction and dependence. While MMT can enhance the health and lives of methadone recipients, in this study we argue how MMT relies on carceral discourses of surveillance, discipline, and regulation to contain and control addicted bodies to secure whiteness. Using the culture-centered approach to health, our analysis revealed primary themes that demonstrate the interplay of carcerality and medicalization in MMT: (a) stigma, surveillance, and social control; (b) dualities of freedom and health; and (c) agency and resistance. These findings demonstrate the underlying assumptions of whiteness undergirding MMT as a dominant health regime for addiction treatment and how recipients resist carceral discourses of MMT. Ultimately, we call for communication theorizing and practice to advance a relational means of health that rejects the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

KEYWORDS:

• Methadone maintenance
• addiction
• carcerality
• surveillance
• culture-centered approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 LTC is a fictitious name for the methadone clinic research site in this project.

2 Cheeking means when one pretends to swallow a medication but instead conceals it in their cheek or elsewhere in the mouth to avoid swallowing it.