"That original tension". Negotiating abstinence in clinicians' accounts of harm reduction in nonresidential treatment of heroin withdrawal

The aim of this article is to examine how drug and alcohol clinicians, guided by a policy of harm reduction, approach their withdrawal work in their encounter with injecting heroin users seeking nonmethadone withdrawal treatment. The study, qualitative in design, involved detailed interviews with all seven clinicians who worked in the nonmethadone withdrawal program of a nonresidential drug and alcohol center in Melbourne, Australia. I draw attention to the difficulties that these clinicians have in their withdrawal work, especially concerning the place of abstinence in withdrawal and in harm reduction. Abstinence is a legitimate goal of harm reduction. Yet, how harm-reduction knowledge is practiced and reproduced in the clinical encounter is underpinned by dominant and taken-for-granted assumptions about abstinence as 'other' to harm reduction. The ideal of abstinence in drug and alcohol treatment and its decentering within the concept of harm reduction, make introducing harm-reduction strategies in the clinical encounter precarious. The work of withdrawal is compromised with an unresolved tension brought about through the paradox of legitimating illicit drug use in one context (the medical) when it is not legitimate in another context (the sociopolitical).