"The missing 'I' in drug research and the epistemic justice of disclosure"

The multiple disciplines and epistemic communities of the drug research broad landscape outline the context of what we collectively and officially "know" about drug use. While there is a growing body of ethnography with people who use drugs (PWUD), researchers who are themselves out as drug users-and their unofficial expertise-are largely absent. Miranda Fricker's "epistemic injustice" framework (2007) illuminates this knowledge deficit, describing an inability to conceptualize a person's experience due to historic marginalization from the very knowledge-making that defines that experience. The disclosure of lived experience in self-reflexive critique offers an authentic way to explore the complex, intersectional politics of drug use, something that is representationally and critically missing in drug studies. Locating the missing "I" in drug research may help drug studies recognize and interrogate the hegemonies of academic discourses that influence the varieties of lived experience important to drug scholarship.