Drug Addiction and De-addiction in India: Genealogies, Politics and Practices

In India opiate use is three times the global average, and drug ‘de-addiction’ services are rapidly expanding across the country - almost tripling in number between 2017 and 2022. Yet very little qualitative information is available on the treatment, experience, or history of ‘addiction’ here. This is highly important as ‘addiction’ and its medical and policy responses combine law, morality, politics, and biology in variable ways both historically and geographically. How are they mobilised in India and what does this mean for the increasing numbers of people who fall under the care of ‘de-addiction’ services? In this anthropological project I address this key problem by taking ‘addiction’ and ‘de-addiction’ as ethnographic objects in northwest India. This project has two key areas of focus: 1) using ethnographic methods it examines how ‘addiction’ is imagined and intervened upon in medical settings, typically ‘de-addiction centres’ (‘nashaa mukti kendr’), and policy spaces. 2) Using methods of archival document analysis, it investigates the genealogical trajectories of these concepts that sit at the intersection of medicine and law. In this way, this project will present a novel anthropological account of ‘addiction’ that demonstrates the entanglement of south-Asian medical knowledges in producing such a notionally universal concept.