Enacting Fentanyl Tests Strips for Overdose Prevention: The Socio-Material Transformation of “Suspect Technologies” into “Technologies of Solidarity”

Abstract

Fentanyl Test Strips (FTS) make possible rapid visual determinations of whether or not fentanyl is present in a given drug supply. This article places FTS within the historical contexts of drug-checking for drug control, overdose prevention, and harm reduction in North America. Following Fentanyl Test Strips (FTS) as artifacts made to signify and enact possibilities other than those for which they were developed and licensed, this article contributes to socio-material theorization of drug control, overdose prevention, and harm reduction in relation to the agency, empowerment, and liveliness of drug users through enactment of the policy and practice of off-label use. The socio-materialities of FTS co-constitute their semiotics and their interpretive flexibility within prevailing forms of evidence-based reasoning that have transformed clinical practice over past decades. They offer new renderings of facticity and artifactuality, which I connect to Ludwik Fleck’s work on the Wasserman test in Genesis and Structure of a Scientific Fact. Reading both the materiality and the semiotics of FTS as artifacts provides a hybrid concept of socio-materiality attentive to the social and material relations embedded in and embodied by FTS, and those who use them in both intended and unintended ways. Such uses differ from individualized expertise and evaluation taken as contributory to the evidence base of the global North. The political work of articulating between different grounds of struggle is underway among those seeking to distribute FTS more widely. But it is their sociomaterial flexibility that makes these artifacts move into new relations that sustains the more affective and artisanal forms of political and cultural recognition characterized in this article as “artifactual” use for an alterbiopolitics.