Abstract EN:

Preventive public health policies and harm reduction policies (AIDS, hepatitis C) have been focusing increasingly on rendering drug “addicts” more responsible, while substitution treatments have been made more readily available ; they are indeed, distributed massively by general, as well as psychiatric, health agencies and practitioners. Nevertheless, high risk practices remain common among the most precarious of drug users. Through the notion of total experience, a framework that permits intelligibility, and through inductive methodology applied to extensive and varied fieldwork in the Parisian and Toulouse areas (prisons, hospitals, non-profit organizations, unorganized squats, streets), the present dissertation focuses on drug uses and drug users who are caught in a circulatory movement between urban vagrancy and carceral experience. What kind of adjustments occur at each end of the movement and how do these adjustments impact the relationship to one's own body and health ? Facing a society that deals with social issues in an increasingly penal and medicalized way, a heterogeneity of practices emerges : heterogeneity of the logics behind drug use, of life trajectories, of adaptation techniques and of the narrativization of these experiences. The analysis of various forms of total experience reveals some of the modes of resistance and self-preservation users develop in order to respond to the apparatuses proposed -and even imposed- to them, at the same time as it raises the question of what it means to limit one's control over one's self and body.