What is the “Drug User Community”?: Implications for Public Health

Through an exploration of a group that is beginning to be labeled in the public health and drug research literature “the drug user community,” this paper engages the challenges of achieving a shared research definition of the oft used term “community.” While this term has been a central concept in public health since the international Alma Alta conference of 1978, it remains “slippery” and hard to pin down, however useful. While drug users commonly are disparaged as a threat to community—indeed, the very embodiment of such threats, as a result of the AIDS epidemic, postmodernism, and the harm reduction movement—illicit drug users are now increasingly being accorded community status among drug interventionists and researchers alike. This paper examines the development of this trend, the community (and anti-community) features of drug users based on research in Hartford, CT, and the public health implications of conceiving (or failing to conceive) of drug users in this way.