Substance and Substitution: Methadone Subjects in Liberal Society

Located between three powerful phenomena - public health, the law and social stigma - methadone maintenance treatment attracts loyal advocates, vociferous critics and innumerable engaged onlookers. This book combines contemporary science studies theory with in-depth interviews, policy documents and media texts to examine this controversial approach to addiction, providing a unique approach to the understanding of illicit drugs. Arguing that methadone maintenance treatment depends for its rationale on two contradictory, yet equally powerful, images - the disordered, compulsive heroin user and the responsible, choosing subject of contemporary health care - this book traces the ways the program both reproduces and disrupts conventional understandings of what it means to be human, a citizen, a woman or man, questioning, as it does so, the conditions under which treatment is delivered.

About the Author:
suzanne fraser is Lecturer at the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, Australia. She is the author of Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture

About the Author:
kylie valentine is Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature