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Over the last ten years, UK drug policy has moved towards making abstinence-based recovery rather than harm reduction its primary focus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork involving participant observations and interviews at two London drug services, we explore how this shift towards recovery materialises through the practices of drug service delivery as an 'evidencemaking intervention'. We understand recovery's making in terms of 'movement'. Where previous policies performed harm reduction through 'getting people into treatment' and 'keeping them safe in treatment', new policies were said to be about 'moving people through treatment'. Approaching movement as a sociomaterial process, we observe how movement is enacted in both narrow ways, towards abstinence from drugs, and more open ways, in what we call 'more-than-harm reduction'. We think of the latter as a speculative practice of doing or 'tinkering with' recovery to afford a care for clients not bound to abstinence-based outcomes. This is important given the limits associated with a recovery-orientated policy impetus. By engaging with these alternative ontologies of movement, we highlight an approach to intervening that both subverts and adheres to perceptions of recovery, embracing its movement, while remaining critical to its vision of abstinence.

Since the 1980s, the primary public health response to injecting drug use in the UK has been one of harm reduction. That is, reducing the harms associated with drug use without necessarily reducing consumption itself. Rooted in a post-Enlightenment idea of rationalism, interventions are premised on the rational individual who, given the right means, will choose to avoid harm. This lies in stark contrast to dominant addiction models that pervade popular images of the 'out of control' drug user, or worse, 'junkie'. Whilst harm reduction has undoubtedly had vast successes, including challenging the otherwise pathologising and often stigmatising model of addiction, I argue that it has not gone far enough in addressing aspects of drug use that go beyond 'rational' and 'human' control. Drawing on my doctoral research with people who inject drugs, conducted in London, UK, this paper highlights the role of the injecting 'event', which far from being directed or controlled by a pre-defined individual or 'body' was composed by a fragile assemblage of bodies, human and nonhuman. Furthermore, in line with the 'event's' heterogeneous and precarious make-up, multiple ways of 'becoming' through these events were possible. I look here at these 'becomings' as both stabilising and destabilising ways of being in the world, and argue that we need to pay closer attention to these events and what people are actually in the process of becoming in order to enact more accountable and 'response-able' harm reduction.