Two of our favorite contributors at Points, Dr. Ingrid Walker and Alexine Fleck, have recently co-edited a special issue of NANO, New American Notes Online, a publication of the New York City College of Technology. The issue, released last month, deals with the theme of intoxication, and features articles from our assistant managing editor Kyle Bridge …
When we use a drug off label because it makes us feel good and we are tired of feeling bad, or calm nerves with a glass of wine, or have an extra shot of espresso to get through a long day, we are self-medicating. “I’d better figure out where to score some pot,” my friend said before beginning her treatment for breast cancer. People self medicate. Obviously.
youtube comment: “Addiction is such a vague term”
reply: “Disease is also a vague term…we can spend hours picking apart words and meanings”
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an author who wants to remain in possession of her sanity must avoid reading the comments section of anything she writes. If the internet is a neighborhood into which one might enter to tell a truth about something personal, if I may borrow again from Jane Austen, an author must accept that her words are taken as the rightful property of some one or other of the many trolls lurking in the deep recesses of the intertubes. Here at Points, we screen comments in order to keep nasty, provocative, or derailing comments out of the mix (this post being the exception), but elsewhere, they flourish like kudzu.
Perhaps it was morbid fascination that drew me to explore some of these cesspools pockmarking our information superhighway, so I donned my emotional hazmat suit and clicked my way in to the comments sections.
“This pussy has teeth; no one should fuck me ever” — Margaret
I begin this post with exciting news: Slava Tsukerman and Anne Carlisle are collaborating on either a sequel to or a documentary about the making of Liquid Sky, the 1982 science fiction movie about Margaret, the new wave Edie Sedgewick-inspired club-hopping model who, assisted by her alien lover, kills with her cunt.
A summary is all but impossible, but here goes:
“I think that if you say something three times out loud, people take it as fact. And also, I think there are certain ideas that people want to believe, that really fit in with cultural stereotypes, and it’s hard to get rid of those”– Claire Coles
A friend recently posted a Retro Report video about the crack baby myth on my facebook page with the comment, “you called this, like, a year ago.” Another friend emailed me the link and a note, “always ahead of the game, you are.” While I appreciate my friends’ propers, I should point out that people have been debunking the crack baby myth for over twenty years. The correction just can’t seem to stick. If I called anything, it’s that sad fact: we just can’t let go of the crack baby.
As I argued before, one reason why we can’t let go of this myth is that it has the structure of a conspiracy theory, one in which the conclusion is sacrosanct even if the evidence is not yet identified. We have such agile, creative minds, and we really want the crack baby to be real because it has the ring of truthiness. Just the other day, a friend tried to grok the crack baby that wasn’t and concluded that crack still did something – even if that was just to stand in for all the other awful consequences of using crack and, of course, it’s true: some of those awful consequences can have very damaging effects on a human being. I had to agree: in that way, yes, one could say that there is such a thing as a crack baby.
This is not the first time the New York Times has run a story about what it called (in 2009) “The Epidemic That Wasn’t.” A cynic might wonder if maybe debunking the myth has become almost as good a story as the crack baby him or herself, even if it does require a journalistic mea culpa. Perhaps this is a second reason for the persistence of the crack baby myth: saying there is no crack baby makes for some great copy.
In most cases, people gain expertise through direct experience. This is not true when it comes to addiction, where legitimate expertise is derived from a lack of direct experience. There are many reasons for this, including cultural investment in educational prestige, faith in systems of authority, resentment of those who take their pleasure in what Derrida calls “an experience without truth,” and a distrust of addicts, who are “by class the most lying, scheming, dishonest group of patients.”
So when it comes to talking about addiction with any sort of legitimate authority, we generally turn to those with letters after their name rather than those with addiction in their background. The field of expertise has changed over time, from moral to legal to medical but, with very few exceptions, addicts have not been included in the cohort of experts.
Karl Marx is credited with observing that, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” It is hard not to remember this insight when reading the brilliant Addicts Who Survived two decades after its initial publication. After all, the year the book was published, 1989, was the same year Bush Sr. announced that the $2400 bag of crack he had in his hand was purchased (gasp!) directly across from the White House. Of course, the dealer – a high school student – had been lured to that spot by DEA agents in order to produce the theatrical prop. In the years preceding this stunt, crack had entered the public consciousness as it burned through poor inner city communities. The government had responded by setting mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and creating a legal disparity between crack and cocaine that led to imprisonment of the most vulnerable and stigmatized drug users. Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS rates were ballooning exponentially, and injection drug use was increasingly the mode of transmission. The most popular response to the problems associated with drug use and addiction was Nancy Reagan’s 1984 campaign to “Just Say No.” Her husband remained silent on the subject of AIDS until 1985, when he expressed skepticism about allowing HIV-positive children to attend school. Although early forms of harm reduction were emerging in the UK and junkies were unionizing in the Netherlands, the movement did not take significant form in the US until the mid- to late-1980s.
So when I bring Marx’s quote to mind, it is with the painful recognition that every farce is still a tragedy.
In an attempt to garner publicity for its services, Rehabs.com published an infographic entitled “The Horror of Methamphetamines.” It is, indeed, a horrifying spectacle, a “sobering depiction of REAL individuals who’ve fallen victim to the temptation of drug use.” We know what we are seeing is “REAL” because all the photos are mugshots. The dispassion of the mugshot, the idea that nothing is staged here, no one is posing or even thinking about an audience, is what lends legitimacy to the project.
The face at the top of the infographic serves an explicitly educational purpose, with information boxes explaining how meth can cause acne, tooth decay, and weight loss. The other photos are just sequenced in chronological order. Explanations are not really necessary; the images clearly show that meth turns young people into zombies.