ABSTRACT
In 2014, Russian authorities in occupied Crimea shut down all medication-assisted treatment (MAT) programs for patients with opioid use disorder. These closures dramatically enacted a new political order. As the sovereign occupiers in Crimea advanced new constellations of citizenship and statehood, so the very concept of “right to health” was re-tooled. Social imaginations of drug use helped single out MAT patients as a population whose “right to health,” protected by the state, would be artificially restricted. Here, I argue that such acts of medical disenfranchisement should be understood as contemporary acts of statecraft.
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Notes
1. The national status of Crimea has shifted several times over the past century. Originally part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR, Crimea was not a part of Ukraine until 1954, when it was “gifted” to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Krushchev in celebration of the 300th anniversary of Pereyaslav, when Cossack leaders joined forces with Russia’s Tsarist military forces in their uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Reid Citation1997).
2. Beginning in 1991, Crimea existed as an autonomous region within Ukraine, retaining its status as a nearly exclusively Russian-speaking population with close historical ties to the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian cultural identity. Russian political rhetoric tends to frame Crimea as a fundamentally Russian place, drawing lines of distinction not between Russia and Ukraine, as world maps might have us imagine, but between a historically imagined “Russian world” and everywhere else. Historian Serhii Plokhy has described this contemporary model of Russian identity as on “which stresses the indivisibility of the Russian nation, closely associated with the Russian language and culture, [and which] poses a fundamental challenge to the Ukrainian nation-building project” (Plokhy Citation2017:350).
3. Original Russian: Чем дольше будит функционировать программы ЗПТ в Крыму, тем дольше эти люди смогуть нормально жить. Они не говорять о политике. Они не просять многого. Они просто хотят жить.
Translation by author: The longer MAT programs in Crimea operate, the longer these people will be able to live a normal life. They are not talking politics. They are not asking for much. They simply want to live.
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Jennifer J. Carroll
Jennifer J. Carroll is assistant professor of Anthropology at Elon University and adjunct assistant professor of Medicine at Brown University. Her first book, Narkomania: The Addiction Imaginary at Peace and at War, is being published by Cornell University Press.