Carroll publishes article on health care in Russian-occupied Crimea

Jennifer J. Carroll, assistant professor of anthropology, has published a new article titled “Sovereign Rules and Rearrangement: Banning Methadone in Occupied Crimea” in the peer-reviewed journal Medical Anthropology.

The article is available online here ahead of a special issue investigating interpretations of “right to health” due out this summer.

Carroll’s article details the sudden closure of all methadone maintenance programs for the treatment of opioid use disorder in Crimea, the southern-most region of Ukraine, following the forced annexation of the region by Russian authorities in March 2014. Based on her extensive ethnographic research on substance use and treatment programs in the region, Carroll argues that closure of MAT treatment programs and the overt marginalization of drug users were constitutive of a new political order in Crimea.

This policy shift served both as a statement about what types of personhood were acceptable and as a demonstration that the citizenship rights of undesirable subjects could, at any time, be revoked. The closing of these programs was also an attempt to gain the trust and faith of the many by excluding the blame-filled few. In short, Russian leaders purposefully re-established state sovereignty in Crimea by excising part of the population framed as dangerous and problematic and redefining the bounds of its citizenry.

Carroll’s book, “Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine,” which details the role that social imaginaries of “addiction” play across post-Soviet societies, will be released by Cornell University Press in Spring 2019.