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This article discusses drug use treatment as a particular, indispensable institution in the political and cultural imagination of contemporary welfare societies. It is argued that the existence and funding of treatment is legitimate less on grounds of what it produces in terms of improvements to drug users' lives, and more as a politically and culturally suitable form of organizing the relationship between drug using and non‐using sections of the population. In this regard the analytical concept of treamentality ‐ a term formed as a combination of ‘treatment’ and the Foucauldian notion of ‘governmentality’ ‐ is suggested to help focus on how treatment has become the ‘obvious’ way to address certain problems of certain people.