Drug Use on One 'Night on Earth' in 1929. Authors_ Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal, Halea Ruffiner, Judith Vitale (original) (raw)
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“A ghost in daylight”: drugs and the horror of modernity
Palgrave Communications, 2018
This article examines how drug literature-writing on drugs by drug users-has consistently resorted to Gothic conventions, images and atmospheres for 200 years. It discusses some ways in which drug-addict writers have employed Gothicism to explore the formation of the addict self; its existence in, and reactions to, the conditions of life in capitalist modernity. The horrors buried in drug literature are exhumed here in a study of four texts: Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821-22), William Burroughs' Junky (1953), Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book (1960) and Steven Martin's Opium Fiend (2012). Modern drug literature's genealogy descends from De Quincey; his Confessions launched the "sub-genre" that Carol Davison has termed "Gothic pharmography." De Quincey spliced Gothic obsessions-mysterious visitations, dream states, mental extremity-with the first full-scale recounting of the wraith-like experience of an addict's life. His nightmares of labyrinthine entrapment and distorted, menacing faces register a sense of shock: transforming his drugged navigations of nocturnal London into the stuff of nightmare. Romanticera shock at Capital's metropolitan monstrosity is revisited in Burroughs, Trocchi and Martin. All follow De Quincey in reporting their drugged explorations of urban capitalist modernity: haunted images, manias and hallucinations are doubles of Capital's phantasmagoria. The argument begins with Jacques Derrida's observations on the pharmakon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's conceptualisation of "addiction"-a form of repetitive-compulsive consuming habit-as an organising principle of life under capitalism from the early nineteenth century. The doctrine of "free will" collides with the syndrome termed "addiction," and "drugs" becomes a metaphorical filament for an interrogation, and introjection, of market forces-literature mainlines Capital. As Burroughs wrote: "Junk [heroin] is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy." The horror is the "real world," defined by patterns of mass consumption that abjectify the individual self. After a Gothic-Marxist visitation to Confessions, the article follows De Quinceyan literary track-marks in Burroughs' and Trocchi's drugged psychogeographies of Capital's physical and mental spatialisations. Finally, it uncovers the narco-Gothic's persistence in Martin's Opium Fiend-subtitled "A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction" and asserting a discursive heritage. Burroughs, Trocchi and Martin render alienation in extremis, the ghastly transmogrification of the material human self into the apparitional: "a ghost in daylight on a crowded street" (Junky), "the grey ghost of the district" (Cain's Book) and the "raw ghost … dead to the world yet still walking around among the living" (Opium Fiend). Like revelations of hidden genealogies in Gothic narratives, the article makes an uncanny and unique discovery about the identity of "the addict." In Capital's hellish regime, the addict represents the modern consumer par excellence.
‘Context’ is one of the most enduring analytical devices in social science accounts of alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, although its elaboration tends to emphasise macro-structural processes (like economic change, law enforcement, health policy, racism or stigma) at the expense of more finely-grained understandings of the place and time of consumption. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the assemblage, and its reception in recent critical geographies of AOD use, I will characterise context as an assemblage of social, affective and material forces. Such a characterisation is not indifferent to the range of structural forces that are often understood to mediate AOD use. Rather, it is concerned to document how these forces actually participate in the modulations of consumption. The assemblage will thus be construed in ways that align context with the ‘real conditions’ (place and time) of drug use. I will develop this argument by way of a case study drawn from a recent qualitative study of the social contexts of methamphetamine use in Melbourne. My goal is to document the ways ‘context’ is produced in the activity of drug use, and how ‘context’ so constructed, comes to modulate this use. By contrasting traditional approaches to the analysis of context with methods borrowed from Deleuze, I aim to transcend structural understandings of context in order to clarify the active, local and contingent role of contexts in the mediation of what bodies do ‘on’ and ‘with’ drugs.
Review of: Cocaine: Global Histories by Paul Gootenberg
Despite the prominence of illicit drugs both in contemporary popular consciousness and in the social agenda of modern states, the history of drugs remains an underdeveloped field. This collection of essays on the history of cocaine in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers a promising step in advancing our understanding of the ways in which the new drug quickly became the focus of attention from international trading organizations (both legal and illicit), state centred prohibitionary regimes, and drug consumers alike.
2006
Between about 1964 and 1969, drug consumption was embedded into the transnational networks of a countercultural youth underground. In London the high mobility of the underground members was evoking a deeprooted fear of a casual way of life. The West Berlin underground was much more politicized than its London counterpart. In West Berlin until the last third of the 1970s, there was no coordinated anti-drug policy. This changed when the situation of heroin users deteriorated. Politicians as well as the members of the self-help organizations began to realize that a close cooperation and an improved communication were imperative. The situation for heroin users in 1970s London was not that bad when compared to Berlin because a relatively well-functioning civil society already existed, and there were special clinics, the Drug Treatment Centers, and a relatively well-working network of voluntary organizations. Research on drugs or drug consumption 1 is still far away from having a strong foothold in the 'mainstream' of the historical professions. Currently drug problems are mainly researched by authors in medical or social sciences. Thus we have a number of studies whose findings can give historical research some stimulating impulses. 2 There are signs, however, that drugs have recently gained a growing interest among historians who do research on social problems in Western Europe and in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But even these recent historical studies mostly are focused on single countries. 3 A good test case for the potentialities of comparative analysis is the trans
Spirit and being: interdisciplinary reflections on drugs across history and politics
Few commodities are as global as drugs. Cannabis, opium, heroin, amphetamines, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), khat, psychedelic cacti and mushrooms as well as an interminable list of other natural or synthesised substances travel and are consumed around the globe for all possible reasons. Human migration, trade, cultural trends, medical practice, political repression: together they constitute the drug phenomenon today – and indeed in much of human history. In this, drugs are spirit-like commodities, their value resting upon a fundamental ambiguity made up of individual, psychological, social, cultural, economic and medical circumstances. Defining a drug is an attempt at defining a spirit on the edge, which metamorphoses in time and space. At the same time, drugs remain a fundamentally political object. They are substances controlled by states, through mechanisms of policing, legitimated by judicial and medical evaluation, condemned often on moral grounds. Situated between a fluid social existence and a static legal dimension, drugs can become inspiring hermeneutic objects of study.