Clinic and Elsewhere

Despite increasingly nuanced understandings of the neurobiology of addiction and a greater appreciation of the social and economic conditions that allow drug dependency to persist, there remain many unknowns regarding the individual experience of substance abuse and its treatment. In recent years, novel pharmaceutical therapies have given rise to both new hopes for recovery and renewed fears about drug diversion and abuse. In The Clinic and Elsewhere, Todd Meyers looks at the problems of meaning caused by drug dependency and appraises the changing terms of medical intervention today.By following a group of adolescents from the time they enter drug rehabilitation treatment through their reentry into the outside world-the clinic, their homes and neighborhoods, and other institutional settings-Meyers traces patterns of life that become mediated by pharmaceutical intervention. His focus is not on the drug economy but rather on the therapeutic economy, where new markets, transactions of care, and highly porous conceptions of success and failure come together to shape addiction and recovery. The book is at once a meditative work of anthropology, a demonstration of the theoretical and methodological limits of medical research, and a forceful intervention into the philosophy of therapeutics at the level of the individual.Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Nfyy21fxp8&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1CBnHcw&index=12&feature=plc

Meyers’ exceptional work does a wonderful job of making ‘visible what is visible’ about the lived realities of adolescent drug users, the emergent geographies of contemporary drug treatment, and the philosophical foundations of the clinic., Central to this compelling ethnographic monograph, as indicated by its subtitle, is what the author calls the ‘afterlife’ of therapy: what happens to teenagers following buprenorphinetreatment?...There is much to recommend here for scientists concerned with what happens to the substances they develop once they have left the walls of the laboratory, and how young lives are impacted and changed in the process., Unlike the more commonly encountered statistics of drug use and abuse found in other books, the author’s ethnographic approach provides a very real sense of the subjects’ lives, their experiences, and their definitions of success and failure., A book rich in ideas and one that resists oversimplification…the richness, the layers, and the range of theoretical and methodological discussions that form part of the book are what makes Meyers’ contribution relevant to ongoing discussions in a range of fields., [A]n appropriate book to teach a wide range of anthropology classes. . . . [A]n excellent example of writing about the intersection of methodology and theory. . . . Through its seriousness of purpose and intellectual rigor, The Clinic and Elsewhere leaves us, thankfully, curious and unsettled, asking: What will happen next in addiction medicine? And, equally important, how will we think about it?

Todd Meyers is assistant professor of medical anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit.