ABSTRACT
The fifth chapter follows the participants’ first experiences of substance use, and their attempts to make sense of these past experiences, as recovering subjects in the present. Thinking with desire, the gaze is on the becoming other, positioning not the desire for the substance in the focus of attention, but the investment of desire through the substance. Deleuze’s question on the causality of drugs and turning point are addressed. Through the service-users’ narratives, I argue that the turning point does not necessarily happen when one encounters a substance for the first time, but when this encounter is accounted for as a rupture in time, when drug use makes sense in a different way. This chapter also contributes to the literature accounting for the relationship between so-called dependent drug use and freedom. Finally, I account for one’s shift from becoming a drug-user to becoming a service-user. Going beyond the often emotively deployed ‘rock-bottom’ experiences that initiate engagement with recovery services, I focus on service-users’ encounters with care in drug-using environments, and the desires that these encounters mobilise.
