Precarious Lives, Precarious Treatments: Making Drug Treatment Work in Northern Myanmar

Abstract

ABSTRACT We explore how precarious livelihoods intersect with precarious treatments for heroin dependency in a setting affected by longstanding conflicts and an illicit drug economy as well as by recent events of pandemic and political change. Working with 33 qualitative interviews with people who inject drugs in Kachin State, northern Myanmar, we explore how drug dependency treatment, especially methadone substitution, is made to work in efforts to sustain everyday livelihoods. Our analysis attends to the work that is done to enable therapeutic trajectories to emerge as “generous constraints” in precarity. We trace methadone substitution as an emergent intervention of livelihood survival.