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. The alliance linking Sunlight Therapeutic Community with the provincial drug abuse institute and a foreign NGO was fragile. At the TC, they had difficulty weaving the Western psychological construct of the singular self through the Chinese scaffolding of institutional and cultural practices around the group. In thinking with the concepts of harm and reducing harm, I move across time and space to consider how current tensions link to and reflect: 1) the historical harms of opium imperialism; 2) reducing harm in translation; and, 3) reducing harm in the recent psycho-boom.

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. Carlos Rojas argues that development in China results from the effects of discrete protocols, or practices that stem from tensions between capital and labor, governmentality and biopolitics, and nationalism and globalization. To tease out the particulars of Rojas' protocols and practices, in this article, I first review two historical periods: 1) the rise and fall of opium consumption in the early 19th century, and 2) the 21st-century psychology boom. I use these two literature reviews to set the stage to discuss my ethnographic study of Sunlight, China's first residential therapeutic community for drug users in Yunnan Province. Sunlight's residents and founders provide a unique window into local everyday drug use at a particular time in China's economic boom, from 2007 through 2015. We know much about China's opium century but very little about the contemporary context, new consumers who partake in pleasure-consuming drugs, or the reformers who address these 21st-century public health issues.

'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. In focusing on the socialist transition to capitalism much work concentrates on the neoliberal transition as the only path out of communism rather than exploring its exceptions. In exploring China as an exception, I ask: What do the residents, peer-educators and administrators reveal in their stories and reactions to community-based therapeutics of care and what happens when their notions of care clash?

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." In China it is in the drug aid theaters where Sunlight-International traveled to do three things: (a) stave off the American drug market, (b ) reduce drug trafficking across national borders, and (c) address the psychosocial problems associated with global drug trafficking and consumption. Through the process of unraveling the on-the-ground practices of public health international humanitarian nongovernmental organizations and some of their therapeutic models, we begin to see new alliances formed across the globe around drug treatment and care that point toward important results.