“Good” Heroin, “Bad” Methadone: Moral Governance and the Politics of Treatment in Kyrgyz Prisons

Why does heroin circulate as a “good” drug in Kyrgyz prisons, while methadone is deemed morally degrading? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2015–2019) in three Kyrgyz correctional facilities, this article examines how drugs come to organize moral life in prison. We argue that methadone's limited uptake is not best explained as an “implementation barrier.” Instead, heroin and methadone enact competing moral orders that sort belonging and loyalty inside prison walls. Heroin circulates through the prisoner-governed collective, producing relational dependency and reinforcing informal authority. Methadone is dispensed under state supervision, producing bureaucratic visibility and aligning users with institutional compliance, functioning less as treatment than as a mode of governance. In this setting, to accept methadone is to risk moral downgrading within the prisoner collective; to refuse it is to defend a moral economy in which heroin paradoxically becomes the substance of belonging. By foregrounding drugs as boundary-making devices, we challenge the effective/ineffective binary in addiction treatment scholarship and show how pharmacological interventions are negotiated across competing ethical regimes.