Methadone Maintenance as Last Resort: A Social Phenomenology of a Drug Policy

Drawing on qualitative interviews with drug addicts in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article offers a phenomenological reading of a methadone maintenance program. The program is set within the principles of harm reduction, meaning that its aim is not to cure the participants’ addiction but to keep them stable on substitution medicine and slow the deterioration of their lives. We analyze the program’s implications for participants’ sense of agency and constraint and for their orientations toward the past, present, and future. A major concern is with the program as a last resort policy that challenges neoliberal ideals of self‐governance and self‐development. While the program increases the participants’ sense of stability by providing them with methadone and by allowing them to better address their economic, housing, and other needs of everyday life, it also represents a context of physical, emotional, and social dependence. The interviews cast the program as a paradox that simultaneously increases participants’ sense of stability and vulnerability. In essence, the Danish methadone program has the effect of both helping the participants by reducing the drug‐related harm in their lives and of fostering conditions of inferiorization and enduring nonbecoming.