Reconsidering Drugs I Reconsidering Drugs Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses Lawrence Driscoll pal grave * RECONSIDERING DRUGS Copyright © Lawrence Driscoll, 2000. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-312-22272-7 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2000 by PALGRAVE™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE™ is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-62241-2 ISBN 978-1-349-62239-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-62239-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Driscoll, Lawrence Victor. Reconsidering drugs : mapping Victorian and modern drug discourses I Lawrence Driscoll. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Drug abuse. 2. Drug abuse-History. 3. Drug abuse in literature. 4. Drugs of abuse. I. Title. HV580l.D554 2001 362.29'09--dc21 00-059142 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: October 2000 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 we must love truth for itself, to such an extent that we do not we love it for ourselves but against ourselves. must ever con tradict ourselves; we must always welcome the opposite ofo ur thought and scrutinize what worth this opposite may have. -Nietzsche Although the most clear-sighted judges ofw itches and even the witches themselves were convinced the witches were guilty of witchcraft, no guilt in fact existed. So it is with all guilt. -Nietzsche For my mother and father Contents Preface lX Acknowledgments Xlll Introduction Chapter 1 "Unpopular Everywhere," or Forgetting the Self, Remembering Drugs 23 Chapter 2 "A Creature Without Species": Constructing Drug Users 43 Chapter 3 "Pleasures Impossible to Interpret": Freud and Cocaine 69 Chapter 4 "The Doctor Does a Good Job": William Burroughs's Critique of Control 87 Chapter 5 Planet Heroin: Women and Drugs 101 Chapter 6 Up from Drug Slavery?: Drugs and Race in Contemporary America 129 Notes 161 Bibliography 187 Index 197 Preface W alter Benjamin has written that "The reader, the thinker ... are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane."1 Accordingly, I would hope that this text will stimulate a process of profane illumination in the reader. Benjamin suggests that thinking is "eminently narcotic" and I hope my read ers will be prompted to think in such a way as to slip themselves past the guards that usually patrol the borders of our thought. My hope is that this book will be of use to anyone whose theory or prac tice comes into contact with drugs. I imagine that it would be of interest to clinicians and psychologists, as well as to sociologists and policymakers in health and government. I would hope that my analyses will open a space for them to reevaluate our accepted theories and practices, and hopefully en courage them to locate new ways of approaching drugs at a time when it is becoming more and more clear that current practices are stagnating. My in tention throughout this book is to open up some discursive space for our selves so that we can construct other discourses about drugs that will not produce the damaging consequences that we are currently experiencing. I also hope that this book will offer readers of cultural theory, media, and literature a chance to focus on the subject of drugs in such a way as to open up a range of possible readings in other areas of cultural studies. Due to their proximity to drug discourses I hope that the book can provide readers of class, gender, and race with a way to rethink how these frameworks are re lated to established drug discourses. I believe that the real difficulty with "the drug problem'' is that it is not a field of knowledge in motion but is an ac cepted body of truth around which other discourses simply orbit. It is the unquestioned centrality of this truth that I think needs to be disrupted if we are going to move beyond the current borders of our thought. While this book is by no means exhaustive, I hope that the fissures that I will open can continue to be explored. Although there are bound to be gaps and omissions in my selection of texts, I have tried to focus on what I see as the discursive foundations of how we shape our knowledge of drugs and their users. I have tried to focus on I x Reconsidering Drugs the discourses that we generate about drugs rather than any particular au thors. I have therefore chosen to open up the discussion by working with au thors who I felt raise some of the central discursive concerns. Here you will find chapters that orbit around Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sig mund Freud, Anna Kavan, William Burroughs, and Ray Shell. I have also drawn on the work of Conan Doyle, Jean Cocteau, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Jacques Moreau, as well as looking briefly at Aleister Crowley, Kim Wozen craft, Irvine Welsh, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Discussions of literary texts are placed alongside analyses of discourses from medical history, sociology, counseling, and psychology, as well as looking at narratives that we use in popular culture, ranging from English antidrug advertising to Hollywood cinema. Finding different ways of talking about drugs is not an easy task, and I have had to choose an eclectic range of texts and discourses because the roots of our drug discourses are far from localized. Discourses that ap pear in an official psychological report one day will show up in popular cul ture the next. I have tried to follow the discourse wherever it seemed to lead rather than limit myself or the reader to a restricted area. In many ways drug discourses seem to have a very good free trade agree ment and cross borders and time zones with impunity. Therefore, you will find a discussion of both English and American drug discourses and it may seem that I am conflating the two countries. However, while it was true in the 1960s that English drug policy was radically different from that of the United States, since former president Ronald Reagan and prime minister Margaret Thatcher redrew much of the political map in the 1980s, the drug discourses of both countries have become almost indistinguishable. For ex ample, Avril Taylor's discussion of Scottish women heroin users in chapter six is not meant to be seen as a regional exception, but is meant to stand as an example of how heroin addiction could be read in any Western country. Similarly, I think that readers in England will find that the discussion of William Burroughs will reverberate throughout British culture and is far from restricted to the United States. The trans-Atlantic success of the film Trainspotting is proof that when it comes to drugs, the English and the Americans are speaking the same language. Obviously there are local differ ences, such as the legalization of marijuana in Holland and various policies in Switzerland, and Sweden, but I have tried to examine the roots that hold the bulk of Western antidrug discourses together, rather than looking at the surface variations. Objections could also be raised by a literary historian that I have moved too quickly across literary time zones. Again, the focus of the book is the construction of our own current drug discourses; for example, I am more in terested in what Burroughs can tell us about how we treat the concept of control, rather than trying to place Burroughs's comments in relation to the Preface I) x1 1950s and the Beat writers of his generation. I have done this with all the literary works in the hope of liberating the voices of the texts from the re strictions of a strict historicism. Similarly, the discussion of Anna Kavan in chapter six is intended to open a discussion of how we could rewrite the structure of our own drug narratives, rather than trying to explain her work in relation to British experimental fiction in the 1940s. My other omission is any extended discussion of legal drugs. While nar ratives surrounding alcohol deploy the same logic as our drug narratives, for the sake of space I have had to exclude this discussion, which really deserves a book in itself. Other omissions include extended discussions of LSD, mushrooms, or legal drugs or medicine such as Prozac, simply because these subjects would require more space than is currently possible. The discussion that follows will deal primarily with illegal drugs such as cocaine, crack, heroin, and marijuana. Obviously, the field of drugs is almost beyond the scope of any one writer's areas of expertise, but I hope that I have pointed to several of the core concepts that need to be further dealt with.