109 Complexities, hopes, possibilities – People who use drugs doing research in Cape Town: Reflections on inclusion and methodologies Anna Versfeld, Eugene Beukes, Cedric Gallant, Andre Beukes, Marlon Cookson, Jeremy Titus, Maseehmo Maree, Rushana Benjamin and Shaun Shelly Nomad and his writing partner, Andre, were seated at the table in quiet conversation, with pens scratching. They were completing a section on research ethics. Anna sat staring out the window. ‘We’re almost done,’ said Nomad, who assumed that Anna was waiting for them. ‘It’s okay, I’m just thinking,’ replied Anna. She shifted into teaching mode, and said, ‘Writing is a slow process.’ ‘Writer’s block?’ asked Nomad (always keen to provide an explanation). ‘Processing,’ said Andre, who had a knack for precision of language. This snippet of conversation took place as we – an anthropologist (Anna) and a trainee research team composed of people using drugs – sat developing the content of the present chapter. The research team were all members of the Cape Town Network for People Using Drugs (CANPUD), an organisation established in 2016 to represent the rights of people using drugs and to help inform services for, and research about, them. 1 People who use drugs are experts on their own lives but are often not treated as such. Locally, this is evident in the exclusion of people using drugs from the development of policy that relates to them, including, until recently, the South African National Drug Master Plan (2018–2022). However, the extent to which the recent inclusion has influenced policy is uncertain, and simple inclusion is not enough. Summerson Carr (2010; 2013) and others (Campbell & Shaw 2008; Moore 1993) have shown that people using drugs easily assume for themselves, and integrate into how they speak about their identities, ways of talking about and understanding drug use (and their own behaviour) that are prevalent discourses in treatment centres and within the public at large. For example, the notion that denial of a drug use problem is a marker of addiction is a cultural form manifested in treatment processes, which is then echoed through the ways in which the treated understand and present themselves and their drug use (Carr 2013). This suggests that, even when people using drugs are included in the research process as active voices, the result can yet reproduce dominant explanatory frameworks, and ones that do not necessarily reflect fresh perspectives (Bourgois 2002). People using drugs who are included in research may thus benefit from a participatory process that both incorporates critical thinking about accepted paradigms and supports the possibility of challenges to received models that do not do justice to their own lived experiences. 8