The chronic crisis we live in - the citizenship practices of people who use opioids in Poland

In conducting a qualitative study during the COVID-19 pandemic among people who use opioids in Poland, we sought to understand how this new public health crisis was affecting the day-to-day functioning of this group: their access to public services, social relationships, and practices of drug use. While in some cases interview partners emphasised the critical nature of their situation at the time - they spoke of losing their jobs, increasing their debts, or finding it challenging to access detox, in many cases opioid users tended to emphasise the chronicity of the crisis they were in. For many of them, COVID was just one dimension of the complex, systemic stigma and exclusion they lived through. Following the definition of chronic crisis proposed by Henrik Vigh (2008), in this presentation, we want to look at the citizenship practices of people who use opioids in Poland during the pandemic. We understand the notion of citizenship broadly - as a processual and complex relationship between the citizen and the state and its institutions. We want to ask about opioid users' strategies for navigating this relationship in the field of accessing health care and addiction treatment, criminalisation of possession of psychoactive substances, housing and social support. The experiences gathered among opioid users will allow us to demonstrate how the state, through the practices of its institutions, produces drug users as a disposable and exploitable group (Wang 2018). On the other hand, we will explore how people who use drugs respond to such positioning through everyday practices. We argue that many of the civic practices undertaken by people who use psychoactive substances to survive in the context of drug criminalization remain invisible to the state. However, they are crucial from the perspective of the users themselves - ensuring the survival of the chronic crisis.