Blood Sugar - question texts
Blood Sugar is a documentary 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”? Do we find the addict wholly “other” and thus rendered ideologically appropriate to her status as less than human? And perhaps, the most fundamental question, one that was posed by Jacques Derrida in his Rhetoric on Drugs, “What do we hold against the drug addict?” What follows here are excerpts from the eleven ‘question texts’ in Blood Sugar.
What do we hold against the drug addict?
She sometimes phoned from John George, the county mental hospital criminal ward, when she was picked up -- her voice raw and broken. They usually released her after two days. She hadn't been to the needle exchange in over two weeks. She hadn't called and no one on the street had seen her. There was really no telling. People, addicts, disappear all the time. Jack had already called both the city and county jails and she wasn't on their lists. I tried John George on my cell. No luck. A week later -- they found her at Santa Rita County Jail. There was a typo on the inmate list -- one letter off was enough to render her invisible, lost in the system for 21 days. She had been there all along -- picked up for possession just a few blocks from the exchange site where patrol cars sometimes hover lazily - waiting for the obvious, another easy and senseless conquest in their one-sided War on Drugs.
What are they fighting for?
Wars are supposed to be fought over liberty, justice, sovereignty, the fundamental rights of citizens, of human beings. But in the age of multi-national capital, false consciousness is masked by our many deceptive and self-contradictory conflicts. The war on poverty launched in the 60's has been displaced by what amounts to a multi-pronged war on the poor -- the war on crime, the war on terror, the war on drugs -- each in its own way a war on the racial and economic other.
In the war on drugs the State is in a seemingly impossible, conflicted position relative to the rights of the legal subject -- how can the state propose to protect the freedom of its citizens to pursue pleasure or happiness and simultaneously enforce prohibitions on the grounds of a negative "right" to be protected from the conditions of enslavement that drugs are assumed to produce? Is the body the private property? Can the state "zone it"? The relation between the state and the body is as parasitically circular as that between drugs and the body. The question remains "...at what point [does] the object take possession of the subject...?"
Why make war on drugs?
Any substance can function like a drug. It is the actual work of the drug, its unacceptable function, (function in the mathematical sense of transformation), with which we are at war. The prohibition against certain so-called "drugs-of-abuse" is "one on which the very concept of culture and state depends." Quite simply, the drug violates our borders. It crosses the blood-brain barrier, the cellular coating that keeps many substances that are absorbed by the bloodstream from entering the brain. The drug slips through this boundary and permeates the body's communication systems -- enticing and betraying the chemical network of neuro-transmitters and receptors. Simultaneously, it invades the territory of political sovereignty and corrupts its very foundation -- the "natural" citizen whose body and birth are legitimate. The state craves its legal subject -- a conscious, vigilant, responsible, "normal" person who can provide for her own needs and master her own desires. We are all already on the pharmacopoeia our own bodies produce. The drug denatures and dilutes the chemistry, pain is subsumed by longing, the subject is transubstantiated.
To repeat Derrida’s query, “What do we hold against the drug addict?"
Her dissent: She rejects community through the violence of her "non-address", her refusal to participate, her exile from reality.
Her ethics of choice: She can decide for destruction, powerlessness, fascination -- and assimilate to a world defined by destruction in a culture dependent upon the creation of destructive desire.
Her narcissistic self-enclosure: She embraces a technology of alienation, forgetting, and denial, and by doing so reveals our own insufficiency in the face of pain, the imperfection of the body of experience.
Her libidinal economy: Her autonomy, "like the charm of the cat," is a social menace and her pleasure is "taken in an experience without truth" -- that the structure of addiction is that of seduction and non-satisfaction, the illicit, promiscuous cycle renewed every day.
Her impenetrable irresponsibility: She is desocialized, that "no single word of the addicted subject is reliable, and here [s]he escapes analysis altogether."
Her incorporation of violence: She willingly injects the foreign into her body, self-medicating, interiorizing the alien, proliferating contagion.
---
During 21 days in county she had had to detox. We visited her, Jack and I. Jack was a 72-year-old heroine addict. She called him her “brother-in-law” and he was, in fact, the brother of the man whose habit she also supported -- collecting bottles in a shopping cart and prostituting herself -- the man she apparently loved. I picked Jack up at the circle where they held the needle exchange, and we drove down to Santa Rita. I had never been to visit anyone in jail before. I was too naïve then to understand why he was so disappointed when it turned out that it was not a "contact" visit – he was carrying and he had hoped to slip her a hit. I'm glad I was unaware -- from my world-view it seemed so unbelievably reckless, a betrayal of my trust.
When she got out she had nowhere to go but back. I had gone to court to speak on her behalf a few days before. But when they let her out she had nowhere to go but back – back to the same street, back to the homeless camp, back to prostitution, back to the drug.
She was angry -- no one had picked her up. Why bother to visit or to stand in court -- she blamed her relapse on everyone and everything else? I didn't know. I didn't know when she would be released. I didn't know what might happen. I didn't know that it is simply not possible to solve -- that I would never be able to do enough. A psychological snap-shot taken at that moment would have shown the two of us caught up in a narcissistic, co-dependent loop – my naïvely arrogant assumptions tangled up with her unassailable, self-destructive drive. She had nowhere else to go but back.
A week later she was manic, decompensating, depressed, violent, screaming at people on the street.
What do we hold against the drug addict?
That she releases "uncontrolled signs" of impurity, corruption, and contamination, into the public sphere -- that in her there is no distinction between need and desire -- that no one is safe.
What do we hold against the drug addict?
She sometimes phoned from John George, the county mental hospital criminal ward, when she was picked up -- her voice raw and broken. They usually released her after two days. She hadn't been to the needle exchange in over two weeks. She hadn't called and no one on the street had seen her. There was really no telling. People, addicts, disappear all the time. Jack had already called both the city and county jails and she wasn't on their lists. I tried John George on my cell. No luck. A week later -- they found her at Santa Rita County Jail. There was a typo on the inmate list -- one letter off was enough to render her invisible, lost in the system for 21 days. She had been there all along -- picked up for possession just a few blocks from the exchange site where patrol cars sometimes hover lazily - waiting for the obvious, another easy and senseless conquest in their one-sided War on Drugs.
What are they fighting for?
Wars are supposed to be fought over liberty, justice, sovereignty, the fundamental rights of citizens, of human beings. But in the age of multi-national capital, false consciousness is masked by our many deceptive and self-contradictory conflicts. The war on poverty launched in the 60's has been displaced by what amounts to a multi-pronged war on the poor -- the war on crime, the war on terror, the war on drugs -- each in its own way a war on the racial and economic other.
In the war on drugs the State is in a seemingly impossible, conflicted position relative to the rights of the legal subject -- how can the state propose to protect the freedom of its citizens to pursue pleasure or happiness and simultaneously enforce prohibitions on the grounds of a negative "right" to be protected from the conditions of enslavement that drugs are assumed to produce? Is the body the private property? Can the state "zone it"? The relation between the state and the body is as parasitically circular as that between drugs and the body. The question remains "...at what point [does] the object take possession of the subject...?"
Why make war on drugs?
Any substance can function like a drug. It is the actual work of the drug, its unacceptable function, (function in the mathematical sense of transformation), with which we are at war. The prohibition against certain so-called "drugs-of-abuse" is "one on which the very concept of culture and state depends." Quite simply, the drug violates our borders. It crosses the blood-brain barrier, the cellular coating that keeps many substances that are absorbed by the bloodstream from entering the brain. The drug slips through this boundary and permeates the body's communication systems -- enticing and betraying the chemical network of neuro-transmitters and receptors. Simultaneously, it invades the territory of political sovereignty and corrupts its very foundation -- the "natural" citizen whose body and birth are legitimate. The state craves its legal subject -- a conscious, vigilant, responsible, "normal" person who can provide for her own needs and master her own desires. We are all already on the pharmacopoeia our own bodies produce. The drug denatures and dilutes the chemistry, pain is subsumed by longing, the subject is transubstantiated.
To repeat Derrida’s query, “What do we hold against the drug addict?"
Her dissent: She rejects community through the violence of her "non-address", her refusal to participate, her exile from reality.
Her ethics of choice: She can decide for destruction, powerlessness, fascination -- and assimilate to a world defined by destruction in a culture dependent upon the creation of destructive desire.
Her narcissistic self-enclosure: She embraces a technology of alienation, forgetting, and denial, and by doing so reveals our own insufficiency in the face of pain, the imperfection of the body of experience.
Her libidinal economy: Her autonomy, "like the charm of the cat," is a social menace and her pleasure is "taken in an experience without truth" -- that the structure of addiction is that of seduction and non-satisfaction, the illicit, promiscuous cycle renewed every day.
Her impenetrable irresponsibility: She is desocialized, that "no single word of the addicted subject is reliable, and here [s]he escapes analysis altogether."
Her incorporation of violence: She willingly injects the foreign into her body, self-medicating, interiorizing the alien, proliferating contagion.
---
During 21 days in county she had had to detox. We visited her, Jack and I. Jack was a 72-year-old heroine addict. She called him her “brother-in-law” and he was, in fact, the brother of the man whose habit she also supported -- collecting bottles in a shopping cart and prostituting herself -- the man she apparently loved. I picked Jack up at the circle where they held the needle exchange, and we drove down to Santa Rita. I had never been to visit anyone in jail before. I was too naïve then to understand why he was so disappointed when it turned out that it was not a "contact" visit – he was carrying and he had hoped to slip her a hit. I'm glad I was unaware -- from my world-view it seemed so unbelievably reckless, a betrayal of my trust.
When she got out she had nowhere to go but back. I had gone to court to speak on her behalf a few days before. But when they let her out she had nowhere to go but back – back to the same street, back to the homeless camp, back to prostitution, back to the drug.
She was angry -- no one had picked her up. Why bother to visit or to stand in court -- she blamed her relapse on everyone and everything else? I didn't know. I didn't know when she would be released. I didn't know what might happen. I didn't know that it is simply not possible to solve -- that I would never be able to do enough. A psychological snap-shot taken at that moment would have shown the two of us caught up in a narcissistic, co-dependent loop – my naïvely arrogant assumptions tangled up with her unassailable, self-destructive drive. She had nowhere else to go but back.
A week later she was manic, decompensating, depressed, violent, screaming at people on the street.
What do we hold against the drug addict?
That she releases "uncontrolled signs" of impurity, corruption, and contamination, into the public sphere -- that in her there is no distinction between need and desire -- that no one is safe.
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