Sheltering the Drug Environment: An Ethnographic Study of Boundary Practices and Social Harms in a Partly Accepted Drug Market

Abstract

People who use drugs and experience homelessness face disproportionate health and social harms and are often embedded in street-based drug markets. In welfare states, supported housing—including homeless shelters—is one strategy to address their needs. Yet such services typically prohibit drug use and supply, creating barriers for some potential clients. At times, however, homeless shelters allow certain drug-related practices, generating drug environments in which the boundaries between institutional and street spaces blur. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2023) in a homeless shelter located in a social service hub in a large Danish city, and on interviews with 20 shelter users (5 women, 15 men) and 15 professionals (frontline staff, management, and local police), this article examines how onsite drug-market activity is regulated by residents and staff. Using boundary practices as the primary analytical lens and situating the analysis within scholarship on pragmatic care and risk/enabling environments, we trace everyday negotiations over what is acceptable inside the shelter space and what belongs outside. These boundary practices shape and are shaped by the shelter drug environment, revealing how institutional and material factors, social relationships, and tensions between care and control intersect in regulating onsite drug-market activities. We show that residents and staff sustain a fragile order that partially tolerates small-scale supply while excluding disruptive actors and elements. This arrangement carries risks, yet it also produces protections distinct from the street. We argue that the pragmatic regulation of this partly accepted drug market can be understood as a form of harm reduction related to the supply side: it mitigates risks and social harms associated with street-based markets while enabling pragmatic care and security resources. We contribute to debates on how the supply side, integral to drug environments, can be addressed pragmatically within institutional harm-reduction settings serving marginalized people who use drugs.