The social constructions of drug users in professional interventions

Abstract

This qualitative study analyses the construction of a subject who uses drugs (injected drugs) so as to offer psychosocial proposals for social healthcare interventions within this collective, and thereby contribute to social healthcare policies that optimise treatment for drug use. The results indicate that identity is connected to positions that are activated in interactions and relationships between users and professionals in various day-to-day contexts of healthcare and treatment. We have labelled these activated positions: therapeutic, drug-sensory, consumerist, legal-repressive and group-community. Understanding them provides clues that may improve interventions in health and legal contexts. These clues include understanding the tensions between the subject and the substance, considering the stigmatised image and identity, and supporting the idea of the existence of dilemmas in users and professionals, as this may allow transformations to occur in the mutual relationships that are established.

Keywords:

• heroin users
• positions
• identities
• social healthcare interventions

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all of those who told us about their lives and thus enabled us to write this paper.

Notes

1 ‘OP’ indicates an annotation from the field diary and the digits indicate the page number.

2 ‘E.’ indicates that the information comes from an interview and the name in brackets, which is fictitious, refers to the person interviewed.

3 Raspi is a user who explains that the police caught him with heroin once, but he told them it was for his own personal use. He went on to explain that for this offence he could have served a sentence of four years in prison and that even though he would explain in court that the heroin was only for his own use, if the police declared that he had been trafficking, his word would mean nothing against their testimony.