Stuck Stability and repetition in an Indonesian methadone programme

Over the last decades harm reduction programmes have become available throughout Indonesia. These programmes that do not primarily aim to end drug addiction seem to run counter to Indonesia’s strict policies on drug use that aim to make the country ‘drug free’. In this dissertation, Lex Kuiper looks at methadone maintenance treatment, a harm reduction programme that intends to stabilise users and prevent HIV transmission through oral administration of heroin’s substitute methadone. He asks what it means to live with or strive for methadone’s stability in Indonesia. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with methadone users in West-Java, he foregrounds the temporal experience of people in treatment. Methadone, for most users, had to be taken daily at the clinic. While the programme provides essential care, the clinic’s policies, the binding properties of methadone, and an understanding of addiction as chronic made treatment endless. This intensified users’ feelings of being ‘stuck’ by further narrowing their possibilities to imagine other futures. With other futures seemingly foreclosed and often no alternatives at hand, their uncomfortable present became chronic and the returns to the clinic exhausting. This dissertation, then, shows how the temporalities of both illness and treatment are intimately entwined with the possibility of people to give meaning to their present conditions and actions.