Substance use policy and practice in the COVID-19 pandemic: Learning from early pandemic responses through internationally comparative field data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented natural experiment in drug policy, treatment delivery, and harm reduction strategies by exposing wide variation in public health infrastructures and social safety nets around the world. Using qualitative data including ethnographic methods, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with people who use drugs (PWUD) and Delphi-method with experts from field sites spanning 13 different countries, this paper compares national responses to substance use during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Field data was collected by the Substance Use x COVID-19 (SU x COVID) Data Collaborative, an international network of social scientists, public health scientists, and community health practitioners convened to identify and contextualise health service delivery models and social protections that influence the health and wellbeing of PWUD during COVID-19. Findings suggest that countries with stronger social welfare systems pre-COVID introduced durable interventions targeting structural drivers of health. Countries with fragmented social service infrastructures implemented temporary initiatives for PWUD led by non-governmental organisations. The paper summarises the most successful early pandemic responses seen across countries and ends by calling for greater systemic investments in social protections for PWUD, diversion away from criminal-legal systems toward health interventions, and integrated harm reduction, treatment and recovery supports for PWUD.

What is in a name? Autonomic imbalance and medically unexplained symptoms in Taiwan.

Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are persistent bodily symptoms without known pathology. An unofficial term has recently emerged in Taiwan to accommodate MUS: autonomic imbalance (AI). AI literally refers to disturbances of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) that innervates vital organs. However, AI is variously conceptualised by different parties. This study intends to investigate what is in the name of AI. It draws on available databases and in-depth interviews with AI sufferers and Western and Chinese medicine physicians. Some physicians research ANS functions through heart rate variability measurements. Research findings show that physicians regard AI as a convenient term for clinical communication and a euphemistic substitute for MUS or even psychiatric diagnoses. It is not a 'real thing'. However, AI sufferers treat AI as a bona fide disease, only that it has not been officially classified. AI is therefore an unfaithful translation, or an uncontrolled equivocation, of MUS. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of treating AI as an equivocation. These implications include the limitations of the current diagnostic criteria, the necessity to rethink the dichotomy of mind and body, and the underlying realities exposed or masked by 'diagnosis'.

Therapy without a prescription: buprenorphine/naloxone diversion and the therapeutic assemblage in Taiwan.

Buprenorphine/naloxone (B/N) therapy is a prescription pharmacotherapy for opioid dependence. For certain health service providers, when B/N escapes supervision and diverts into the hands of people for whom it is unintended, it can pose serious risks even if it may still have therapeutic benefits. The line between therapy and diversion is thus a problematic one. By qualitatively analysing archival review and in-depth interviews, this study uses the concept of a therapeutic assemblage to understand the relationships among government, knowledge, and professionals that surround the regulation of B/N in Taiwan. The therapeutic assemblage is characterised by the partitioning of administration, the loose regulation of prescription, the exclusion of addiction treatment from National Health Insurance (NHI), and the materiality and technicality of therapies. These elements contribute to the therapeutic assemblage's different territorial modes as reflected in the substance schedules that allow for diversion. This is the first grounded work in Asia that empirically examines and theoretically explains the diversion of B/N from an assemblage perspective. It suggests establishing new associations by incorporating addiction treatment into NHI. Lastly, it addresses the analytic purchase of the assemblage approach in unveiling and problematising unintended outcomes of an intervention.

Harm reduction policy in Taiwan: toward a comprehensive understanding of its making and effects.

BACKGROUND: In response to the spread of HIV caused by needle sharing among injection drug users (IDUs), the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control implemented a pilot harm reduction program in 2005 that expanded nationwide in 2006. The policy led to a significant reduction in the number of HIV-positive cases among IDUs in 4 years. METHODS: This article aims to provide a critical evaluation of this harm reduction policy in Taiwan. The research leading to this article included a thorough literature review and in-depth interviews with 31 active policy participants, including people working in hospitals, the academia, non-governmental organizations, community pharmacies, the legal system, and health authorities at both the central and local levels. The collected data were analyzed on the basis of situational analysis. RESULTS: The article examines the policy success by showing how this policy was assembled and by exposing the frictions and adjustments during its formation and implementation. Inter-departmental conflicts within or without the government and the efforts to coordinate them are addressed, and the transnational dimensions of this harm reduction policy are also discussed. The article then reflects on the effects of the policy and asks where the line should be drawn between what is harm reduction and what is not. CONCLUSIONS: This case illustration reveals the complexity of understanding an assembled health policy that involves multiple participants. The article intends to render an analytic account to enable a comparison with similar policies in other countries.

Education as networking: Rethinking the success of the harm reduction policy of Taiwan.

The harm reduction policy of Taiwan has been considered a success. However, the HIV incidence among injection drug users declined before the nationwide needle and syringe program and drug substitution treatments were implemented. Thus, other factors in the policy might have contributed to its success. Some authors have suggested that education may have played a pivotal part. In this research, the purported significance of education in the success of the policy is conceptualized by reviewing the studies on harm reduction in Taiwan and reflecting upon my own fieldwork. Moreover, relevant literature is used as reference to reformulate this notion of education. This article shows that harm reduction education may be conducted in numerous forms, most of which are non-formal, improvisational, and contingent. Non-governmental organizations may play a role, but more actors, strategies, infrastructures, and interactions should be considered. This article draws from actor-network theory and refines the current thesis that attributes the policy success to education by utilizing three reflections, namely, appreciating materiality and spatiality, recognizing covert actors in the networking, and treating education as an outcome rather than a means. In conclusion, looking at education as a form of networking offers theoretical insight that increases understanding of its participants, mechanisms, processes, and permutations.

Studying up harm reduction policy: the office as an assemblage.

BACKGROUND: By recounting the making of the office that contributed to the implementation of the harm reduction policy in Taiwan, this paper aims to answer two questions: Who and what assembled to make this policy possible? Which conceptual tool works best to understand what this policy-making was all about? METHODS: The research was designed as a multi-sited qualitative study whose materials were collected through archival research, in-depth interviews, and direct field observation. The data were analysed on the basis of the constructivist version of grounded theory. RESULT: Formulating the office as an assemblage with heterogeneous components and shifting territories, the present work endeavours to show how it was constituted by way of guanxi, or webs of social relationship that blur the boundary between the private and the public, the governmental and the social. CONCLUSION: This "studying up" approach is hoped to elicit more research on the office in which harm reduction policies are made into the backdrop of drug users on the street.

Beyond human rights and public health: citizenship issues in harm reduction.

There have been debates amongst harm reduction practitioners regarding the relationship of universal human rights vis-à-vis public health demands. The ideological debates around these two slippery concepts often obfuscate the important theme of citizenship. The author, therefore, argues for the perspective of citizenship as an alternative to comprehend harm reduction practises more thoroughly. An introduction of the concept of citizenship is followed by a case example of Taiwan's harm reduction policy-making, wherein injection drug users were subjected to various disciplinary actions and made into citizen addicts. It is hoped that more harm reduction researchers will have increased familiarity with the notion of citizenship as a useful tool to examine the power dynamics taking place in the name of harm reduction.