Nick joined the university of Exeter as Wellcome Trust research fellow in 2025. A medical anthropologist, his current research project (‘Drug Addiction and De-addiction in India: Genealogies, Politics and Practices’) utilises ethnographic and archival methods to examine how ‘addiction’ is imagined and intervened upon in medical settings in north India. Prior this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, on the project ‘Grid oncology: remaking cancer care in India’. He completed his PhD in anthropology at King’s in September 2022, with a project analysing the material and symbolic circulations of morphine in Indian cancer care. His work has been published in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Science and Medicine, Medicine Anthropology Theory, and the Lancet Global Health.
Drug Addiction and De-addiction in India: Genealogies, Politics and Practices
In India opiate use is three times the global average, and drug ‘de-addiction’ services are rapidly expanding across the country – almost tripling in number between 2017 and 2022. ‘Addiction’ and its medical and policy responses combine law, morality, politics, and biology in variable ways both historically and geographically. How are they mobilised in India and what does this mean for the increasing numbers of people who fall under the care of ‘de-addiction’ services? This project addresses this key problem by taking ‘addiction’ and ‘de-addiction’ as ethnographic objects in northwest India. It has two key areas of focus: 1) using ethnographic methods it examines how ‘addiction’ is imagined and intervened upon in medical settings, typically ‘de-addiction centres’ (‘nashaa mukti kendr’), and policy spaces. 2) Using methods of archival document analysis, it investigates the genealogical trajectories of these concepts that sit at the intersection of medicine and law. In this way, this project will present a novel anthropological account of ‘addiction’ that demonstrates the entanglement of south-Asian medical knowledges in producing such a notionally universal concept.
