Fifteen long days: the pandemic in a therapeutic community for drug users in Lambayeque

Abstract

The lack of mental health care in Lambayeque has motivated the creation of informal projects for the rehabilitation and punishment of drug use in young people. This research seeks to understand how the program of a therapeutic community is assembled with the logic of medical immunity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter had consequences on the health and economy of families, which reduce the financial capacity of rehabilitation projects. Based on an ethnographic work and the narratives of five inmates about their first fifteen days of quarantine in the establishment, we show that, far from representing an organizational limitation, the pandemic consolidates the disciplinary procedures of this and other punitive, clinical, and mental complexes. Compared with the known situation, the new modality of preventive reception of the disease is functional to the programming process that turns the individual into an object susceptible to reformulation and transformation.