Thinking of Harm Reduction and Reducing Harm in a Chinese Therapeutic Community for Drug Users.

Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining addiction recovery services in settings beyond the OECD led me to the question: What does harm mean in an un-urban, un-Western, and un-democratic space? While some emphasize the human rights potential of reducing harm, others speak to the violence of cure. My ethnographic research in a Therapeutic Community (TC) for drug treatment in Southwest China pushed me to consider how the potential for reducing the harms of illegal substance use balance with the complex psychological demands of cure.

Beyond China's drug century: Yunnan's first therapeutic community and narratives of drug treatment and mental health care.

China is experiencing rapid cultural change and new forms of sociability that are accompanied by social problems and novel humanitarian interventions that have been formulated to address those problems. The pressure related to the rapid transformation of the countryside into mid-level cities has led to recreational drug-use as a means of escape. These illegal drugs have greased the wheels of what I call an affective biopolitics that has influenced Chinese citizens.

'Spending My Own Money, Harming My Own Body': Addiction Care in a Chinese Therapeutic Community.

In this article, I explore a Chinese residential therapeutic community I call Sunlight in order to understand its quotidian therapies, its fraught nature binding China's past with its future, and the to care for the self under postsocialism. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically allows for broader theoretical exploration into how China's economic transition created tensions between capitalism, socialism, and communism; between individual and community, care and coercion, and discipline and freedom. Sunlight blended democratic, communal, and communist values that in several ways transition drug addicts into a market-socialist society.

Global flows in drug treatment: heroin addiction and therapeutic community approaches in China.

This article focuses on one residential therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin and opiate addiction in contemporary China. It discusses 2 case vignettes and shows that although addictions are extremely difficult to treat, there are small successes being reached in China's southwest. Residential treatment communities follow mobile global practices that link Western models of 12-step Narcotics Anonymous, self-healing, to other Chinese practices like Maoist "speak bitterness.