Slippery Slopes and Russian Roulettes: Abjection and Drug User (Self-)Governance in an Online Harm Reduction Forum

In this article, we examine if and how harm reduction’s ambitions to destigmatize drugs and limit the risks associated with their use are fulfilled in a web forum self-promoted as a harm reduction resource. Forum content reveals that harm reduction norms contribute to the construction of two opposing figures, differentiated by the knowledge and skills they possess, their self-control, and their lifestyles. We combine critical insights on governmentality and the neoliberal governance of drug users with the concept of abjection to make sense of our findings that forum participants’ perspectives of and responses to one of these figures—the ‘abjected user’—are often negative and exclusionary. We argue that forum participants are not merely partaking in the punitive governance of an othered class of drug users; rather, they are attempting to mitigate the risks associated with their inherently precarious position as people who use criminalized drugs.