ADDICTION AND THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF TIME

Addiction and the Social Production of Time seeks to broaden the discussion of how the social impacts the lives of those who identify as addicted. This thesis pulls from qualitative interviews to answer the question, “How do addicted people seeking services in Carroll County, Maryland experience the multiple temporalities placed on them through treatment requirements, drug court requirements, public transportation, poverty, and the needs of physiological drug dependency?” Paying attention to the ways people navigate time based demands of physical addiction, treatment requirements, and drug court requirements, alongside temporal demands of daily life, reveals new insights into the lived-experience of the addicted. This thesis argues that opioid agonist treatment clinics and drug courts use time as a linear measurement of a person’s progress towards socially constructed ideas of normalization. This practice of linear measurement veils the socially constructed temporal demands that addicted people must navigate on a daily basis. This results in individuals becoming stuck and unable to meet institutional requirements, thus exacerbating their continued suffering from structural and institutional inequalities.