LAUREN TEXTOR

Physician, Ethnographer, Anthropologist

WHAT’S THE “HOLD” UP?
After decades of criminalization within the context of the U.S. War on Drugs, outpatient medications for opioid use disorder represent an ideological shift and are celebrated as a non-carceral and liberatory solution to addiction. Despite political support for medicalization, such medications have been unequally distributed and experienced across geographic settings and populations. Drawing on my interlocutor’s description of one medicine's “hold,” I interrogate how medications' symbolic and pharmacological power to embrace, restrain, and otherwise “hold” people arises through their social context.

“Holding” is a patient-driven epistemology, working metaphorically and neurochemically to illustrate raced, classed, and gendered positionalities that
simultaneously express and constrain forms of agency and resistance in ideological struggles over the meanings of care in addiction treatment. Embodied knowledge becomes a site of ideological struggle against carceral biomedicine. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's theorization of neurochemical effects of state violence, I ask how a medication's “hold,” or lack thereof, can reveal intensities of
carceral forms of “care” and possibilities for transforming addiction treatment.

Lauren Textor holds a PhD in anthropology and an MD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently a resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA.