In the past decade, informal addiction treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated throughout Mexico. Run and utilized by low-income communities, these centers utilize coercion, captivity and violence as a mode of recovery. Based on four years of ethnographic research focused on anexos in Mexico City, this talk examines anexos’ social and therapeutic practices, demonstrating how they conjure up, amplify, and rework contemporary forms of affliction in Mexico City’s peripheral neighborhoods. In doing so, it challenges the prevailing view of anexos as a purely punitive or criminal institution, and reveals them as a microcosm that makes visible the profoundly unequal world that Mexico is today.