Background: Prescribed safer supply, providing regulated alternatives to criminalized drugs, has emerged in response to the overdose crisis in Canada. A high concentration of safer supply programs are located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), a socioeconomically marginalized neighbourhood often characterized by housing vulnerability, political-economic neglect, and health disparities.
Objectives: This paper examines how safer supply makes possible new subjectivities for structurally vulnerable people who use drugs (PWUD), situating this within the context of single room occupancy (SRO) housing in the DTES. In doing so, we highlight how experience of place frames a “safer supply subject.”
Methods: In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 25 safer supply participants living in SROs. Informed by the broader analysis, this paper draws on three participant narratives to better explore the complexities of these new subjectivities.
Results: Cases illustrate three different expressions of a “safer supply subject” constructed through oral (case 1) and injectable (cases 2 and 3) safer supply interventions. Analysis highlights how continued access to safer supply requires that PWUD reconfigure space and time in fulfillment of a more healthful and responsible subject position. However, this is undermined by the social-structural realities of SRO living and the ways SROs symbolically reinforce an “addict” identity.
Implications: Findings demonstrate how safer supply constructs a subject who is simultaneously out-of-place and stuck-in-place within the context of SRO housing. We explore the implications for policy and praxis that aligns experience of place with the subjecthood produced through safer supply.