At the boundary of the skin - "A____"
Since 2002, when I initiated the research project that led to the production of Blood Sugar, I have worked in various ways with the HIV Education and Prevention Program of Alameda County (HEPPAC) in an effort to: 1. enhance awareness of the relation between poverty, addiction, and HIV transmission; 2. expose some of the social and political implications of the “war on drugs;” and 3. empower injection drug users to represent themselves in the media and, thus, to participate in and shape the public discourse around the social conditions and material circumstances they face on a daily basis.
The first phase of my collaboration with HEPPAC involved meeting with the organization’s clients and training them to use disposable cameras and recorders to document their own lives and author websites populated with their own images, sounds and texts. Ultimately, this effort failed – partly because the walk-in center (where I was supposed to work with the clients) was burned down by an arsonist and never rebuilt. But the failure of the “participatory media” approach in this context was principally due to the exigencies and extremities that made up the daily life -- circumstances of the largely homeless and impoverished addicts who used the needle exchange. They were mostly transient, dislocated, and focused principally on survival. It was naïve of me to expect them to keep appointments -- to concentrate on documenting a daily struggle and pursuit that in itself absorbs everything. Over a period of several years I met many addicts at the exchange who genuinely wanted to participate, but I was able to sustain minimal contact with only two.
I did, for a time, get to know one woman rather well -- the woman that I call A____ in the texts that are part of Blood Sugar. The needle exchange was the last frayed layer of the social safety net for someone like A____. I learned a lot from her about the third world inside the first. I learned that the realities of poverty, racism, social isolation, trauma, sexual abuse, and sex-based discrimination could make a person, even an extraordinarily intelligent person, vulnerable to addiction and psychosis. I learned a lot from A_____ about desperation and about resilience. While I worked with HEPPAC A___ would come and go, disappear and reappear. I also, disappeared for a time – forced by what I learned, from her and others, to re-think and restructure my methodology.
After this hiatus I recorded hours of conversations with current and former addicts who were invited to step out of group therapy and education sessions at HEPPAC in order to speak with me. I saw and interviewed A___ once during this time.
An account of my relationship with her and my understanding of the life history she had related to me outside the context of this final meeting is woven through the “anecdotal theory” that frames the interviews in Blood Sugar.
Blood Sugar is a work full of questions – questions like, what is the social and political status of the addicted? Is the addict fully human, diseased, or possessed by an “other inside”?i Do we find the addict wholly “other” and thus rendered ideologically appropriate to her status as less than human? Its central and, perhaps, most fundamental question (one that was posed by Jacques Derrida in his Rhetoric on Drugs) is “What do we hold against the drug addict?” These questions are “answered” in a fashion, through A_____’s story, and mine, in the introduction, conclusion and “question texts.”
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