From the street to the drug consumption room. Injected drug use across consumption environments

Abstract

Previous studies have reported that injected drug use cannot be understood in a spatiotemporal vacuum but, paradoxically, they have tended to analyze this practice in a single environment instead of examining how people who inject drugs deploy their agency across environments. This ethnographic account describes and analyzes how David, an injected cocaine user, moved from the streets of Barcelona to a drug consumption room By accounting his transition from exclusively consuming on the street to progressively increasing his visits to La Sala, we uncover how different practices, interactions, and norms, specific to these environments, can contribute to the shaping of the development of specific substance use and the techniques informing the complex relationship between pleasure and harm reduction. Accordingly, we argue that we cannot limit ourselves to analyzing this activity in each environment individually; rather, we must locate and study drug use at the interplay of different environments.