Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury 3030884619, 9783030884611

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Narratives of Addiction Savage Usury Kevin McCarron

Narratives of Addiction

Kevin McCarron

Narratives of Addiction Savage Usury

Kevin McCarron University of Roehampton London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-88460-4 ISBN 978-3-030-88461-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Shooting heroin is like kissing God. (Lenny Bruce) Drug overdose had already taken the lives of 300,000 Americans over the past fifteen years, and experts now predicted that 300,000 more would die in the next five. (Beth Macy, Dopesick, 2018) Overdose, n. A fatal dose of medicine when administered by any other than a physician. (Ambrose Bierce, The Expanded Devil’s Dictionary, 1887)

The American stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce was the greatest stand-up comedian of his time. He was a trailblazer, an iconoclast. He was brilliantly irreverent, had superb timing, and had a perfect lock on what hip young Americans really wanted to laugh about. He was by no means dedicated to his script and could surge into impromptu feats of comic fantasy that from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s had audiences across America crying with laughter. Lenny had rhythm, too; he flowed on stage; formless yet commanding, and his phrasing was bewitching. He learned the value of rhythm and the importance of a qualified, flexible control over an audience not as one might expect from earlier stand-up comedians but from jazz musicians. Lenny loved bebop particularly, but he listened to a lot of jazz: Freddie Webster, Billie Holliday, Fats Navarro, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and he spent a lot of time after his own performances in after hour clubs listening to live jazz being played by numerous other hip, cool, jazz musicians, the vast majority of v

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whom were heroin addicts. Albert Goldman writes in his biography Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce “Part of being a great jazz cat in those days was being a junkie. Jazz and junk were words that went together as naturally as ham and eggs” (Goldman, 1975: 139). Lenny Bruce and junk were also words that went together very well, because Lenny too was a drug addict. To give him the energy he needed on stage he shot up amphetamines—especially methedrine (another name for methamphetamine). It was heroin that he really loved to inject, though. Goldman writes “As far as his personal preference went, there was no drug like heroin! The flash made him feel like a ‘sunflower opening in my stomach. That sensation lasts only thirty seconds, but it is so powerful it feels like three minutes. Imagine having an orgasm for three minutes!’” (295). If he was in an unfamiliar city, or he was being watched too closely by the police after yet another drug bust, and so was unable to get hold of heroin, he was happy to shoot up morphine. If the drugs he particularly liked were currently unattainable he would pulverise prescription pills like Demerol, Dilaudid, and Tuinal into powder and shoot them up. He died of a morphine overdose at his home in Los Angeles, aged forty. On 3 August 1966 the death of the most shocking, scabrous, and exhilarating stand-up comedian in America was dutifully added to the drug-related death statistics of Los Angeles. The great jazz musicians whose work and lifestyles he so much admired, meanwhile, were similarly augmenting the drug-related death statistics of cities throughout the United States. Fats Navarro died aged twenty-six in New York City of what was ostensibly tuberculosis but this was exacerbated by his heroin addiction. Freddie Webster died in Chicago of a heroin overdose aged twenty-one. Charlie Parker died in New York City, essentially, as a result of decades of heroin abuse and a cirrhotic liver in 1955; he was thirty-four. Billie Holliday died aged forty-four in 1959 of a combination of malnutrition and alcohol and heroin dependencies, also in New York City. Lester Young died of alcoholism in 1959 in New York City at the age of forty-nine. All of these great artists would have been added to various city’s drug and alcohol related death numbers and they, too, would become statistics; to be interpreted, analysed, and mulled over by the nation’s most important politicians, policy makers, and medical doctors. The emphasis throughout Savage Usury is upon the drugs that were implicated in the deaths of the artists referred to above: alcohol and opioids. These are the most dangerous of the commonly abused drugs in the West. Although the words “opiates” and “opioids” are commonly

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used interchangeably, particularly by addicts themselves, outside quotations I use the word “opioid” when discussing heroin, fentanyl, and OxyContin. While reference is made in this book to crack cocaine and methamphetamine, no attention is given to what William L. White in his comprehensive study Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America refers to as a ‘…broad category of so-called ‘process addictions’ that included destructive relationships with food, work, people, sex, gambling, shopping, religion, and the Internet’ (White, 2014: xx). In America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, for example, Benoit Denizet-Lewis vigorously insists on his own addiction to sex “…my brain reacts to sex and pornography as a crack addict’s brain responds to crack cocaine—there’s never enough of it, and it’s the only thing that matters in the world” (Denizet-Lewis, 2009: 6). Unsurprisingly, he is in favour of extending the concept of addiction “First, I believe in an expanded understanding of addiction. That is, I believe that gambling, sex, food, spending, and work (to name a few) can, for some people, be as addictive and debilitating as an addiction to drugs. This is not a radical idea—an increasing number of addiction experts and researchers agree with me…” (6). And so they do. In her introduction to Jean Cocteau’s Opium, for example, Margaret Crosland writes ‘Addiction to opium or any drug may seem to be a vice, or a sign of moral weakness, but in fact it is a form of extremism: for who is not or has not been addicted to something, if only chocolate or television?’ (Cocteau, 1930, 1993: 11). One could, of course, as easily claim that strangling somebody is just an extreme form of tickling them. Commonplace as it now is to hear and read people claiming that they are “addicted” to some Netflix drama, Spotify, chocolate; indeed to just about anything, I am not alone in questioning the claims. The Times columnist Giles Coren, for example, mocks this use of the word in an evaluation of “binge watching TV shows ‘…perfectly intelligent people are proud to yodel: “I’m a total Game of Thrones addict, darling. Binged out on series 73 and 74, back to back, all weekend. Ha ha ha. Never even opened the curtains!”’ (Coren, Times, 30: 30 Jan. 2021). What people mean, usually, is that they like that particular substance or activity a little more than is good for them. But the use of the same word to describe staying up an extra hour or two to watch a TV programme, and someone who has drunk so much alcohol that their liver is cirrhotic, or someone whose leg has to be amputated because it is septic from infected needles, is undeniably confusing, unhelpful, and actually dangerous. What

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we might call this “addictive relativism” can only trivialize the far more dangerous and often fatal dependencies on alcohol and drugs. Obesity, for example, can obviously be as fatal as heroin addiction or alcoholism but that does not legitimize a claim such as ‘she was as addicted to food as any AA member was to alcohol’ (Denizet-Lewis: 124). Another of DenizetLewis’ interviewees similarly claims ‘when I looked at my life and how I used food, I used it exactly like a drug addict uses a drug. Food is my drug. I have no control over it’ (37). The comparison is invidious; the word “exactly” is unforgivable. Alcohol and food have nothing in common; indeed, many alcoholics are hospitalized for malnutrition. This modern insistence that everybody is addicted to something and therefore, crucially, nobody should be criticized, or “judged” (in the erroneous synonym now commonly used), for the specific nature of their addictions perhaps reaches its absurd apotheosis in Liz Moore’s best-selling novel Long Bright River. At the conclusion of the book, the narrator, a hard-working, efficient, and responsible female police officer, compares herself to her own drug-addicted mother: ‘I think of the choices my own mother made—and realize, painfully, that I am not so different from her after all. It’s only the nature of our respective addictions that diverged: Hers was narcotic, clear-cut, defined. Mine is amorphous, but no less unhealthy. Something to do with self-righteousness, or self-perception, or pride’ (Moore, 2020: 426). Only in the world of addiction discourse would the “only” in ‘it’s only the nature of our respective addictions that diverged’ be permitted, even extolled. Moreover, to state that the ‘clearcut, defined’ urges of the drug addict are somehow actually superior to her own “amorphous” addictions, is little more than meretricious. All it does is perpetuate the pervasive modern urge to relativize all addictions. Even more dangerous, though, is a more recent practice which involves the writer or speaker moving beyond the word “addiction” and actively employing the argot of the drug addict, as when Phyllis Rose writes in The Year of Reading Proust “I am a narrative junkie. I consume stories in all forms. TV shows, novels, dreams, newspaper accounts of kidnapping, murders, heroism, panic, disaster: they all feed the habit” (Rose, 1998: 37). Later, when two of her favourite TV shows end at the same time she experiences a double sense of loss and writes ‘I had to tune into an old episode of Law and Order to come down, as experienced druggies will use one drug to help them come off another, a little pot to end an acid trip, heroin to ease off cocaine’ (39). In his biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi, like Rose, uses a comparison taken from the world of drug

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dependency “She now, most unusually, found herself between novels, and resembled an addict suffering withdrawal symptoms” (Conradi, 2001: 429). The reader, particularly one familiar with Murdoch’s impressive oeuvre, recognizes Conradi’s use of hyperbole to stress the discomfort Murdoch felt at this time but, nevertheless, she did not in any way actually resemble “an addict suffering withdrawal symptoms”. A similar comparison is made by Alison Graham, a columnist in the Radio Times, the UK’s most prestigious television and radio listings magazine which has a weekly circulation of well over half a million readers. Graham’s full page piece was entitled ‘My TV drug of choice: why daytime television is like lockdown crack cocaine’. In the article itself she wrote ‘I will go as far as to say that daytime television is my lockdown crack, my habit. If I’m ever six feet away from a repeat of The Farmers’ Country Showdown at 3.45pm on BBC1, I start sweating and shaking and demanding a fix’ (20–26 Feb 2021: 45). The only feature which cracks cocaine and daytime television share is that the former is often smoked in front of the latter. In Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, the crack cocaineaddicted Lee Stringer also links the act of writing with smoking crack ‘Pretty soon I forget all about hustling and getting a hit. I’m scribbling like a maniac; heart pumping, adrenaline rushing, hands trembling. I’m so excited I almost crap on myself. It’s just like taking a hit’ (Stringer, 1998: 15). Clearly, chairs would have to be designed very differently indeed if writing was anything like smoking crack cocaine, but there is actually no viable comparison between the two activities. Again, we can see the same comparison with writing and addiction being used by Trysh Travis, in The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey, with these opening words “For me, writing is not unlike an addiction. It occupies enormous amounts of time, much of which is spent chasing a high that comes infrequently and rarely satisfies” (Travis, 2009: xi). We have to assume, though, that writing, certainly in the West, is very much unlike an addiction to heroin or alcohol in that it rarely involves the “addict” losing their family, their job, their freedom, their limbs, and even their life; unless, of course, they are an unusually bad writer, which Travis is not. The principal problem with these types of comparison is that they give the impression that dependency on alcohol or drugs consists of nothing more than wanting more of them; essentially an Oliver Twist comprehension of dependency. However, such a belief facilitates the further

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mistaken, widespread view that alcohol and heroin are inherently addictive, that the substances themselves somehow possess the ability to addict the hapless, blameless, and consumer. Because so many people, even in the field of Addiction Studies it seems, are unaware of the liberating benefits of heroin for the addict it is rarely deemed necessary to claim that heroin is highly addictive. Actually, a great many people seem to believe that heroin is only addictive; that it has nothing to offer the addict except addiction. Crack cocaine is widely believed to be among the most addictive of drugs and DuPont is emphatic ‘Cocaine is a highly addictive drug’ (46), while Barry Woodward, in Once an Addict, makes a claim for crack that is repeated throughout addiction narratives ‘While we were living in north Manchester we started to dabble a bit with ‘crack’, an extremely addictive derivative of cocaine. It gave an unparalleled degree of pleasure, but only for a short time’ (Woodward, 2007: 95). Undoubtedly a great many people become addicted to cocaine, as well as its “extremely addictive” derivative but, again, this does not make the drug itself particularly addictive. We might as well say that peanuts are deadly. Alcohol and drugs are not so much addictive as they are attractive; those who find them the most attractive will, almost certainly, become dependent on them. Some people do, obviously, become dependent on alcohol and drugs, but it is more sensible to look at the “unparalleled degree of pleasure” the drug is capable of offering rather than addictive properties inherent in the actual substances themselves. Because alcohol is socially tolerated in a way that heroin is not, alcoholics are particularly insistent upon the inherent dangers of the substance itself. In The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, Catherine Gray writes ‘Alcohol is a highly addictive drug that is moreish, like all addictive drugs’ (Gray, 2017: 15), while in The Sober Diaries Clare Pooley offers the same misinformation ‘The reason alcohol is so harmful is partly because it is extremely addictive’ (Pooley, 2017: 63). Alcohol and opioids, however, I am arguing, become addictive only to the maladjusted. Certainly alcohol was addictive to Gray and Pooley, and to countless others, but that does not in any way demonstrate that alcohol is itself either “highly addictive” or “extremely addictive”. This is the pervasive misunderstanding that drove Prohibition in America, a draconian piece of social engineering, which was, by most reckonings, a failure. Prohibition, as the very name indicates, was an interdictional strategy that insisted the problem resided in the substance and not in the consumer who was too fond of drinking it.

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The same is true of the equally unsuccessful, yet still ongoing, War On Drugs. Leslie Jamison in her autobiography The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, is incorrect when she writes of Harry Anslinger, who was appointed Chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930 ‘Anslinger effectively channelled the punitive impulse that had fuelled Prohibition—the impulse to see addiction in terms of weakness, selfishness, failure, and danger—and redirected it towards narcotics’ (63). Prohibition thinking, on the contrary, actually side stepped the issue of moral culpability by placing all the blame on alcohol itself. Anslinger learned from the failure of Prohibition; he did not at all incorporate its ideology into his approach to drug addiction. He was far less interested in the substance itself than he was in the consumer of it. Indeed, and strikingly, he now understood, as his Prohibition predecessors did not, that the problem was not in the substance but in the type of person who became an addict. It is the anachronistic and incorrect belief that the substance is the problem that, inter alia, David Foster Wallace mocks in a bitterly amusing scene in Infinite Jest ‘My mom won’t even have it [alcohol] in the house. She said it’s what made her father drive into concrete and wipe out his entire family. Which like I’m so tired of hearing it’ (Wallace, 1996: 775. Author’s italics). It would not be at all helpful to jeer at alcoholics or drug addicts themselves, but we can, and should, laugh at and ridicule some of the more outrageous and delusional statements made about alcoholism and drug addiction, especially when these statements come from those in positions of power and authority. Humour, however, which has always been a useful tool for challenging authority, has been removed from citizens’ armoury over the last century when the subject is alcoholism or drug addiction. A.A. Gill writes ‘It was the medical Latin that killed the humour of drunks, when they designated alcoholism as an illness rather than a weakness or a choice or a culture—that’s when it became mocking the disabled. You can’t laugh at an illness, an ism, unless you’re pissed’ (Gill, 2016: 17). Humour is indeed rare in addiction narratives and Gill has identified a major reason for this absence. However, ‘Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world’, claims the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (Monk, 1990: 529–30). Yes, it is, and undoubtedly society overall would view addiction to drugs and alcohol in a different way had people been allowed to enjoy the salutary barbs and ridicule of stand-up comedians and humourists. Nevertheless, there are a handful of writers who do use comedy to expose idiocy, mock the legion

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of clichés and euphemisms about addiction, and to express withering scorn at official pronouncements about addiction. Apart from Wallace and Gill, this very short list would probably contain only the names of Jerry Stahl, Jean Cocteau, Paul Torday, Tibor Fischer, and Edward St Aubyn. Their humour and concomitant lack of respect for authority is one of the several contributions to addiction discourse made by creative writers which has, so far, largely been ignored. In his celebrated essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), George Orwell criticizes the ugliness, pomposity, and actual dishonesty of much contemporary writing, but concludes his essay on a note of optimism ‘One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase…into the dustbin where it belongs’ (Orwell, 1985: 21). I agree with Orwell here, mockery and jeers are a perfectly respectable, even responsible, reaction to views that have been a danger to society for over a century. Throughout Savage Usury I show that alcohol is not an inherently addictive substance and neither is heroin. What people become dependent on are the effects these substances produce in them. If alcohol was indeed a highly addictive substance, then the large majority of adults in the West, and plenty of children too, would be alcoholics, but they are not. The huge majority of adults drink sensibly. They do not need what alcohol gives to the individual who becomes an alcoholic. Although it is rarely written about, because there is no publishable story, many people use heroin for quite some time before giving it up, usually because of the expense, or the difficulty and danger involved in obtaining it, or for a combination of reasons. This latter group eventually abandon heroin because they no longer want or need the peculiar escape and detachment which heroin, and indeed all the opioids, offer the user. Alcoholics, too, as will be seen, readily stop drinking when they become less reliant on what alcohol does for them. Jamison, too, expresses her unease at the increasing tendency to apply the word “addictive” too readily: I’m wary of attributing addiction so broadly it ceases to mean anything besides compulsively desiring something capable of causing harm. I don’t want to ignore the particular physical mechanisms of addiction by mining it too easily for universal truths: We all crave. We all compensate. We all seek relief. Because we don’t all seek in the same ways, and the seeking

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doesn’t always punish the seeker. It’s important to acknowledge the specific damage wrought by certain cravings: what they can do to a brain, what they can do to a life. (Jamison, 2018: 364)

Jamison understands, as Denizet-Lewis and Travis and numerous other writers do not, the “specific damage” that alcohol and heroin cause to people dependent on these substances. The poet Chris McCully writes ‘Alcohol has only one function: it wants to be consumed’ (McCully, 2004: 82–83). As will be seen in the next chapter, the attribution of human qualities to alcohol and opioids is pervasive throughout addiction narratives. Alcohol is an inert substance, it can’t “want” anything. Additionally, alcohol would not be drunk by so many people so zealously that they become dependent on it if its only function was to be consumed. We might, cautiously, say that of a bottle of water, but not of a bottle of wine or a bottle of whisky. Alcohol’s only function begins to operate during consumption, as does that of the opioids. It is this function which should set them apart from all the other modern addictions: shopping, coffee, television, sex…Unlike any of these activities, the only function of alcohol and opioids is to deceive the consumer. Alcohol and opioids lie; they convince the consumer that life is other than it is. It is quite possible that those who claim to be addicted to satellite television, say, or gardening, will find themselves eventually deceived by these activities but they did not seek out deception, they did not pay good money to be lied to. Drug addicts and alcoholics do pay, excessively, to be deceived, over and over again. This is the principal reason these addictions should be separated from the others. It is precisely the pleasure generated by such deceptions that causes some people to become dependent on drugs and alcohol. It is a central premise of Savage Usury that alcohol and heroin are desirable long before they become addictive. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, it is a mistake to describe any drug as “powerful”; the alcohol equivalent, of course, is “strong”. These are words traditionally associated with masculinity, they indicate force and authority, but it is important to note that drugs and alcohol are inanimate substances, they have no power at all. Much is made, however, within addiction discourse of the strength and power of alcohol and drugs, especially crack cocaine and heroin. Macy opens Dopesick with the information that twenty-six people died in a single day in Huntington, West Virginia ‘Those overdoses were fuelled by the latest synthetic opioid, Carfentanil, imported from China with a stroke

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on a computer keyboard. Carfentanil is an elephant sedative one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, which is twenty-five to fifty times stronger than heroin’ (4). The strength of drugs and alcohol is always emphasized, even grotesquely exaggerated, to both invite sympathy for the addict’s own powerlessness over them, and to justify their continued dependence on them. Mark Lanegan, a musician and a poet, writes in Look Backwards and Sing ‘I had begun using heroin on a more regular basis, still carefully trying to not get too strung out, but I found its appeal overwhelming. It was everything that booze was not’ (Lanegan, 2020: 94). Lanegan does not invoke the power of heroin, or its strength; it is the “appeal” of it that he finds “overwhelming”. The reason people become dependent on alcohol and drugs is not because of the putative power or strength of the substances themselves, but because alcohol and drugs have effects upon them which become more attractive than life itself. As will be seen in later chapters, drugs and alcohol are not so much powerful as they are immensely attractive to some people. My concern is dependency, rather than addiction, although the use of the latter word is so ubiquitous within the field that, as will be seen, I am compelled to use it. Further details on the distinction between these two words will be given in the next chapter. Essentially, the focus of this book is on what are now often euphemistically called Substance Abuse Disorders (SADs); dependencies created by the act of drinking alcohol to the point of physical need, or the injecting, smoking, or snorting of opioids, or crack cocaine, again to the same extreme point. Nobody “addicted” to, say, shopping is likely to start their day in so abject a manner as AA Gill describes his alcoholic mornings in Pour Me “After the first mouth of whisky or slug of flat Special Brew had been negotiated, winched up to the mouth using a towel as a sort of sling pulley so as not to break my teeth, the shakes would subside, like settling tectonic plates, and I’d have a sweaty, bitter moment to consider the day and offer a morning prayer. I’d ask God to send me an incurable illness, a fatal condition” (Gill, 2015:26). Nor will somebody “addicted” to the internet, or weaving, ever resemble the politician in Jay McInerney’s short story ‘My Public Service’: ‘looking up at the broad ruined nose with its craters and exploded veins. I was afraid of him, of his caustic whiskey breath with its whiff of decomposition and corruption’ (McInerney, 2000: 40). Wallace notes the look of two detox patients in Infinite Jest ‘The man, like Tiny Ewell, has the rougedcorpse look that attends detox from late-stage alcoholism. The man is in addition a burnt-yellow beneath his flush, from chronic hepatitis’ (86).

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In A Million Little Pieces, James Frey’s narrator describes a heroin addict who has lost limbs as result of sepsis ‘His left arm is missing, and his right arm has been freshly amputated just above his shoulder…Worse than anything I can see is what I can smell. The man smells like he is rotting, like there is something inside him that is either dying or dead, like whatever it is has been there for a long time’ (Frey, 2003: 325–6). These might seem extreme examples but they are not particularly unusual in addiction narratives. The principal focus of Savage Usury is upon those people who have drunk or drugged themselves onto the streets; homeless, begging, selling sex for money or drugs, overdosing in shop doorways, or dying of hypothermia in parks. These drunks and drug addicts have lost families, jobs, their liberty, and even their lives. These are the people who go, voluntarily or forcibly, into rehab clinics, often more than once. Some of them become the people who attend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings in desperate, last chance attempts to save their sanity and their lives. Not everybody succeeds; many die. A slew of statistics pertaining to contemporary drug and alcohol deaths has been published in recent years by a number of highly respected authorities. In his book The Thirteenth Step: Addiction in the Age of Brain Science the neuroscientist Markus Heilig writes: Addictive disorders kill and debilitate countless people, most of whom are in the prime of their lives. Alcohol alone ranks as the third most common preventable cause of death in the United States and is estimated by the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) to kill an astounding eighty to ninety thousand people each year…Beyond the deaths, the CDC has estimated the annual economic cost of damage inflicted by alcohol and other drugs as over a quarter trillion dollars in the United States alone. (Heilig, 2016: 4–5)

Beth Macy writes two years later, in Dopesick “Drug overdose…is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of fifty, killing more people than guns or car accidents, at a rate higher than the HIV epidemic at its peak” (Macy: 2018: 5). In the same year, Chris McGreal’s American Overdose also opens with a distressing set of figures ‘A crude calculation is that prescription pain killers have claimed more than quarter of a million American lives, although there are good reasons to believe the toll is higher because of under-reporting and stigma’ (McGreal: 2018: xiii). At the end of his book, McGreal has few words of comfort ‘By 2018

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deaths from drug overdoses had risen to more than 200 people a day, and were the single largest cause of mortality for people under the age of fifty’ (281). Robert Du Pont, MD, was the first Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In his introduction to Du Pont’s Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic, again published in 2018, General Barry R. McCaffery writes (in his capacity as the former Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy) “The problems generated by addiction are staggering in magnitude. Roughly 21 million Americans are substance abusers, costing our society $442 billion a year. This slow-rolling epidemic killed 500,000 people in the past fifteen years. We have a massive criminal justice population of over two million behind bars and 5 million on parole or probation” (Du Pont, 2018: ii). Du Pont himself writes “An estimated 8 to 10 percent of Americans suffer from addiction to alcohol or other drugs. Addiction is the largest preventable health problem in the US” (9). He continues ‘In 2016, substance use disorders affected 20.1 million people in the US—and are estimated to cost $442 billion each year in health care, lost productivity, and criminal justice costs’ (Du Pont, 2). It would be a rare reader who was not astonished, even appalled, by these staggering statistics, by the needless deaths of so many hundreds of thousands of human beings, huge numbers of whom were little more than children when they died. Cocteau writes in his 1930 journal ‘Scholars are not curious, said [Anatole] France. He is right’ (58). No, he is wrong, and so is Cocteau. I am curious. Actually, all scholars are curious; the object of their curiosity is all that separates them. The specific objects of my curiosity in this book are the actual viability of current understandings of alcoholism and drug addiction. Denizet-Lewis, for example, cites the mother of a drug addict who testified before Pennsylvania’s state legislature on the lack of affordable addiction treatment ‘we can build a better system, or we can continue to bury our children’ (53). This binary fatalism, this emphasis upon treatment rather than causation, this uncontested assumption that the problem is systemic and not rooted in individual, human behaviour, are all queried throughout Savage Usury. So, too, is the blithe assumption that what we are doing now, and have been doing for the last century, about the problems of drug addiction and alcoholism are in any way viable. In his memoir of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Noel Malcom quotes from Philosophical

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Investigations (1953) ‘problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known’ (Malcolm, 1958: 51). What we have “always known” for three thousand years of recorded human history is that being too fond of alcohol or drugs are flaws in a person, weaknesses which can be overcome. Later in his book, Denizet- Lewis cites another addiction “expert” who claims ‘A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong’ (27). Something is indeed “wrong”, but I reject the lazy criticisms of “society” for its failure to contain drug addiction and alcoholism. I suggest that what is “wrong” are the century-old exercises in the exoneration and exculpation of drug addicts and alcoholics that have previously characterized almost all writing about drug addiction and alcoholism. In her evaluation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Iris Murdoch focuses on what she sees as ‘an image of, and then as a case of, mauvaisefoi, bad faith, failure to reflect, spiritless acceptance of habits, conventions and bourgeois values’ (155). Murdoch could be referring here to modern addiction discourse. It has become obligatory in the course of the last century to perceive alcoholics and drug addicts as vulnerable, ill, diseased, victims of chemical imbalances, unwanted products of an unjust economic system, traumatized survivors of hellish childhoods, plagued by spectacularly vague “mental health issues”, sufferers of a specific brain disease, and the innocent prey of a ruthless epidemic. Such approaches view these dependencies as conceptual categories, as states or conditions, in which the addicted have somehow found themselves. Indeed, to suggest that alcoholics and opioid addicts have contributed entirely to their own undesirable situations, that their dependencies are all their own work and that no credit need be given to anyone or anything else, is to invite derision ‘We still have this idiotic notion that addicts somehow brought their addictions upon themselves, that addicts are dangerous fuck-ups who just need to grow some willpower and pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get their shit together’ (Denizet-Lewis: 52). It is surely quite reasonable to suggest that addicts do bring their addictions upon themselves. I argue in Savage Usury that those who become dependent on alcohol or opioids are human beings who have made choices; they are victims of nothing other than their own desires and urges. Alcohol and drug dependency is freely chosen states of servitude. But who would choose such a fate? Who, or what, is an alcoholic? Who, or what, is a drug addict? In Infinite Jest, one of Wallace’s legion of dope fiends and drunks becomes irritated at the lack

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of guidance on this particular issue ‘I’m not denying anything. I’m simply asking you to define “alcoholic”. How can you ask me to attribute to myself a given term if you refuse to define the term’s meaning?’ (Wallace, 1996: 177) Later, a less articulate character claims that he too is not in denial about his drug addiction ‘I want understanding I have no denial I am drug addict…I am no trouble to stand up in the meetings and say I am Alfonso, I am drug addict, powerless!’(178) I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict. Like Alfonso, there is no denial from me either. To offer such statements, however, is merely to give an example; not a definition. I am also an academic, a literary critic, a consultant, the author of several previous monographs, a Doctor of Philosophy, a Fellow of the United Kingdom Higher Education Academy…. Paul Campbell, who at the time of writing his book was an addiction counsellor, begins I’ll Stop Tomorrow (not to be confused with perhaps the better known book by Vernon Johnson I’ll Quit Tomorrow: 1976) with a disclaimer ‘Let me start off by telling you what this book is not. It is not a book written by an academic or a doctor. It doesn’t have carefully drawn charts or squiggly diagrams describing a variety of personalities and behaviour patterns’ (Campbell, 2007: 13). In the place of academic obfuscation and incomprehensible diagrams, Campbell announces himself as “someone who had everything and who lost everything; someone who went through the living hell of chronic alcoholism and the tough times of recovery” (13). Campbell believes himself to be robust in his understanding of alcoholics, quoting from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous ‘Self-centeredness is the root of all our problems’. If this sounds harsh on alcoholics, it’s not intended to be. It’s not that alcoholics are bad or weak people. They never asked to get this terrible illness and every active alcoholic would love to be rid of it. ‘I say this as a disclaimer to fend off people who think I’m not understanding of alcoholics or that I’m unduly hard on alcoholics. Believe me I’m not’ (3). His last sentence, at least, is true. Given that he insists that alcoholics have an illness, and that they are, connectedly, not bad or weak people, it is comical of him to suggest that he could be considered as “unduly hard” on them. His views are, in fact, typical of modern understandings of alcoholism, and of drug addiction; he is very gentle indeed with alcoholics, while numerous other writers are just as indulgent and lenient towards drug addicts. This apparent kindness, this refusal to criticize, was rebuked as long ago as

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1762 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract ‘Certain drunkards from Samos once defiled the tribunal of the Ephors; the following day the Samians were given permission to be filthy. An actual punishment would have been less severe than such a form of impunity’ (Rousseau, 2004: 153). Earlier, I quoted from Margaret Crosland’s introduction to Cocteau’s Opium, in which she writes ‘Addiction to opium or any drug may seem to be a vice, or a sign of moral weakness…’. As was noted, she makes the modern choice to exonerate Cocteau from such accusations, claiming instead that his opium addiction was just an extreme form of the addictions to other pleasures which we all share. Savage Usury is not an exercise in exculpation or exoneration, nor is it in any way an autobiography. I make my own alcoholism and drug addiction clear at the outset only because throughout this book I suggest that both drug addiction and alcoholism are precisely what they appear to be in Crosland’s construction: manifestations of vice and emphatic signs of moral weakness. London, UK

Kevin McCarron

Works Cited Campbell, Paul. I’ll stop tomorrow. Dublin: Mercier Press, 2007. Cocteau, Jean. Opium: The Illustrated Diary of his Cure. Trans. Margaret Crossland. London: Peter Owen, 1990. Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins, 2001 Coren, Giles. Times, 30: 30 Jan. 2021. Denizet-Lewis, Benoit. America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Dupont, Robert L. MD. Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic. Maryland: Institute for Behaviour and Health, Inc, 2018. Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 2003 Gill, A.A. Pour Me: a Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2016 Graham, Alison. Radio Times, 20–26 Feb 2021: 45 Gray, Catherine. The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober. London: Aster, 2017. Heilig, Markus. The Thirteenth Step: Addiction in the Age of Brain Science. New York: Columbus University Press, 2015. Jamison, Leslie. The Recovering. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2018

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Lanegan, Mark. Sing Backwards and Weep. London: White Rabbit, 2020. Macy, Beth. Dopesick. New York: Head of Zeus, 2019. Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2001. McGreal, Chris. American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts. London: Faber & Faber, 2018 McInerney, Jay. Brightness Falls. London: Quality Paperbacks Direct, 1992. ———. How it Ended. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. McCully, Chris. Goodbye Mr Wonderful. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2004. Moore, Liz. Long Bright River. London: Hutchinson, 2020 Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Orwell, George. ‘The Politics of the English Language’. Collected Works of George Orwell (iv), London: Penguin, 1987. Pooley, Clare. The Sober Diaries. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017. Rose, Phyllis. The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. London: Vintage, 1998 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Trans. Peter France. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. London: Penguin, 1979. Stringer, Lee. Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998 Travis, Trish. The Language of the Heart. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1996. White, William. Slaying the Dragon: the History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. Bloomington: Chestnut Health Systems, 2014. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Sweden: Chiron Academic Press, 2016. Woodward, Gerard. I’ll Go to Bed at Noon. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members and moderators of the thirty-seven socalled recovery internet sites which have blocked me over the last eight years merely for querying the cliches and metaphors that have characterized discussions about drug addiction and alcoholism for the past century. Every one of these blockings served to reinforce my conviction that there must be something very wrong indeed with the received wisdom that I was so persistently prevented from discussing in open forums. Of course, I also wish to acknowledge the more constructive help and support I have received in the writing of this book, while emphasizing that those people whose skills were of great benefit to me did not necessarily share or endorse my views about the causes of drug addiction and alcoholism. They had, for the most part, jobs to do and they did them very well. I would like to thank Dr. Pam Lock who enrolled me in the Drinking Studies Network and who showed me how to access Dionysos: The Literature and Intoxication Tri-Quarterly, all copies of which are now available online. I thank that shrewd editor Jim Harbaugh, SJ, who allowed me to quote from my article in Dionysos ‘For to Beg for the Price of a Jar: Alcoholism and Begging’ in the chapter in this book called “The Streets”. I also wish to thank Ineke Elskamp, of John Benjamins Publishing, who granted permission for me to quote briefly from a chapter in Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, Omoniyi, T. and Fishman,

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J.A. (eds), 2006. My chapter was entitled ‘Alcoholism and authority. The secularization of religious vernaculars in Alcoholics Anonymous’. I lived for twelve years in a staff flat at the University of Roehampton. The environment was hugely conducive to teaching and writing and I particularly wish to thank Julia Noyce and Philippa Davies, both of whom did a great deal of much appreciated work to provide me with a clean, well-lighted place in which I too could work. When I began this book, I felt obliged to read a great number of books and journal articles about drug addiction and alcoholism written by neuroscientists, sociologists, and psychologists. (In doing so, I discovered that none of these writers had burdened themselves with reading fiction or autobiographical writing by gifted authors who were themselves drug addicts or alcoholics.) I am grateful to the library staff at the University of Roehampton for getting me these scientific books and articles and, in particular, to Min Allen for her patient guidance in showing me how to use electronic publications. It was on seats outside the library where for many years, rain and shine, I drank coffee and chatted between lectures and seminars with, especially, Sarah Wake, Dr. Darren O’Byrne, and Professor Suman Gupta. These lively, sometimes combative, talks enriched my vocabulary and my comprehension. I miss them. For fifteen years I taught a module in the English and Creative Writing Department called ‘Literature and Addiction in the Twentieth Century’. I want to thank the hundreds of students who took the module over those years and especially those who chose to write their dissertations on addiction. Their questions, criticisms, essays, and presentations obliged me to keep reassessing the connection between literature and addiction—a reassessment which made a significant contribution to the development of my ideas. Among these students are Emma Coquet and Jonny Wilkinson, who have since become two of my dearest friends. Their encouragement and support (especially after yet another internet blocking or another failed grant application) have been invaluable. I am grateful, too, to the several external examiners who commented on this module. I am especially grateful to Professor Mark Knight, who was not only a splendid colleague while working at Roehampton, but also whose perceptive and often humorous suggestions, particularly about religion and addiction, enriched the module and, connectedly, this book.

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I am grateful to all my ex-colleagues, all the way back, for contributing to such an intellectually stimulating, friendly, and energetic working environment. I learned a great deal from a series of Departmental Research Mentors who, despite their own views on the causes of drug addiction and alcoholism, offered useful criticisms and made helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of several chapters in this book: Dr. Kate Teltscher, Professor Jane Kingsley-Smith, Professor Clare McManus, Professor Shelley Trower, and Professor Ian Haywood. My greatest academic thanks are to Professor Laura Peters, who was my Head of Department for the years while I worked on this book. Her support and enthusiasm were unflagging, even when my progress was slow. Laura’s cheerfulness was matched only by her scholarly and managerial skills, and I am greatly indebted to her for very many reasons, not least for her ability to obtain for me, somehow, a much needed sabbatical just as I began to see the end of this book in sight. Not all of my acknowledgements are to university staff. I want to thank the Laughing Horse crew of comedy promoters and stand-up comedians. On long car journeys to and from far-flung comedy clubs, many of my more esoteric stand-up routines about addiction were subjected to first-class malicious mockery by, in particular, Kevin Shepherd, Nik Coppin, Lewis Bryan, Nigel Taylor, and Jay Sodegar. These attacks kept me grounded; they alerted me to the truth that not everybody thinks like an academic. I also benefitted from discussions with Dave Chawner about Schopenhauer’s criticisms of Kantian ethics and morality, and with Robin Perkins about addiction, individual culpability and the responsibility of the state. Most of all, though, I am indebted to Alex Petty, who now runs Laughing Horse Comedy. Alex’s robust common sense, impatience with pretentiousness, and fondness for the plain and simple, eventually led me to reconsider, and then re-read, the British Empiricist philosophers. I want to thank my ex-wife Kim for the truly splendid job she did in raising our children Ella and Max, who were so supportive during the writing of this book. Their intelligence and tolerance of different opinions are a credit to them, and also to their mother’s intelligence and ability to stimulate discussion. Max’s computer skills and grasp of modern technology have also been invaluable. Thanks to Terry at PEP printers in Worthing. During various stages of lockdown, he and his team delivered draft chapters of this book to my

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door. Also, many thanks to the indefatigable Susan U’ren, whose work on tracing and verifying quotations was crucial to my progress. My greatest thanks and gratitude go to Dr. Kathy Farquharson. She was such a brilliant teacher that working with her on several literature modules at the University of Roehampton was a constant education and joy. I am hugely indebted to Kathy for her perceptive eye, her feel for literature, and particularly for her often trenchant criticisms. I am just as grateful to her for her unwavering support for my agendas in this book. More than even all that though, I want to thank Kathy for the light and the love which she brought into my work and into my life. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Petra Trieber, Molly Beck, Sophie Li, Manikandan Murthy and Azarudeen Ahamed Sheriff at Palgrave Macmillan, for their support in bringing this volume to publication.

Contents

‘Define Your Terms’ Narratives Addiction Savage Usury Works Cited

1 3 7 28 39

Language and Addiction Works Cited

43 60

Morality and Addiction Works Cited

63 85

Philosophy and Addiction Works Cited

87 108

The Streets and Addiction Works Cited

111 133

Prostitution and Addiction Works Cited

135 155

Rehabilitation Clinics and Addiction Works Cited

157 180

The Rooms: Alcoholics Anonymous Works Cited

183 207

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Bibliography

211

Index

219

‘Define Your Terms’

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. —George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 1946 We must indeed preserve and cherish a strong truth-bearing everyday language, not marred or corrupted by technical discourse or scientific codes; and thereby promote the clarified objective knowledge of man and society of which we are in need as citizens and as moral agents. —Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1992 Vanity of Science: Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science. —Pascal, Pensees, 1670

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” (1882), he advocates a disciplined approach to the quest for knowledge, and he is insistent upon the need for discrimination. It has caused me the greatest trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble, to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon what things are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_1

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called rather than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance; the usual measure and weight of things – each being in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and even to their exterior – have gradually, by the belief therein and its continuous growth from generation to generation, grown as it were on-and-into things and become their very body; the appearance at the very beginning becomes almost always the essence in the end, and operates as the essence. (Nietzsche 2006: 52. Author’s emphasis)

This book is entitled Narratives of Addiction 1990–2020: Savage Usury. Nietzsche’s concern here with what things are called, rather than with what they actually are, is unlikely to have more resonance or more relevance than in the field of Addiction Studies – a field that has long been crowded and disputatious”. During the last century alone there have been hundreds of books, thousands of academic journal articles, and a literally uncountable number of magazine and newspaper features focusing on alcoholism and drug addiction. These publications have been produced by an army of sociologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, anthropologists, criminologists, penologists, counsellors, and, increasingly, neuroscientists. There have even been a few contributions by literary critics. The number of people who died as a direct result of alcoholism and drug abuse, however, continues to rise. The senior healthcare professionals and politicians who looked at the statistics in California and then in Washington the year Lenny Bruce overdosed would have been horrified, even incredulous, at the number of deaths attributable to alcohol and opioids that we now routinely post fifty years later. At one of Lenny Bruce’s numerous legal trials (this one for obscenity) the defence called Richard Gilman of Newsweek. Albert Goldman characterizes the journalist as ‘thin, pinched, bespectacled, with the dry condescending manner of a monastic academic…’ He then describes how, under pressure from the judge, Gilman could not resist ‘falling back on the academic’s classic posture of “define your terms”’ (Goldman 1975: 468–469). It may be a “classic posture” but, an academic myself, as indeed was Goldman, it seems very helpful indeed to “define your terms”. A crucial aspect of Savage Usury is the belief than enormous loss of life has occurred over the past century because we so demonstrably have not defined our terms. In The Language of the Heart, Trysh Travis draws attention to the confusion generated by the multiplicity of

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contributions to ideas about addiction ‘Both the allergy-plus-obsession model of AA and the symptomatic-of-infantile-neurosis theory of psychoanalysis contributed to a diagnostic cacophony that also included ideas drawn from gospel temperance and nineteenth-century inebriety medicine as well as from good old-fashioned quackery’ (Travis 2009: 36). In Drink and Drinking Problems, Clive Eastman refers to ‘the difficulties resulting from the absence of universal or even wide-spread agreement concerning the definitions of terms that are the common currency of most people working in the field…different people use the same term to refer to different things or different terms to refer to the same thing’ (Eastman 1984: 15). Karl Popper raised an objection to this sensible position—an objection which is ably summarized by the philosopher Bryan Magee in his Confessions of a Philosopher. The clinging notion that if we are to have a worthwhile discussion we need first to define our terms is demonstrably self-contradictory. Every time we define a term we have to introduce at least one new term into the definition, otherwise the definition is circular. But then we are under an obligation to define our new term. And so we are launched into an infinite regress. Attempts to clarify all our terms must, and can only, result in discussions of words and meanings to which it is logically impossible that there should ever be a conclusion. So discussion, if it is to take place at all, has no alternative but to make use of undefined terms. (Magee 1998: 60)

There is considerable truth in Popper’s argument here. In the field of addiction discourse, however, with the death toll rising, surely it is valid to attempt to arrive at a more stable terminology in order to achieve a more effective praxis.

Narratives “Addiction Narratives” in this book refers to a large body of publications: indeed more than a hundred of them. These include writings by alcoholics and drug addicts, and sometimes their families, in the form of novels, short stories, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and journals. Considerable reference is also made to publications by sociologists, literary critics, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, counsellors, philosophers, and journalists. They all combine to form what I call here

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“addiction discourse”. Savage Usury does not offer a detailed analysis of a limited number of texts in order to evaluate them “deeply”; indeed, the word “deeply” is itself queried throughout the book. I evaluate this very wide range of texts especially in order to note the frequency of words, phrases, tropes, clichés, and euphemisms which are pervasive throughout addiction discourse. Although all the writing by academics is, inevitably, assured and in the main well expressed, the same is not always the case with the writing of some of the addicts themselves. In nineteenth-century American temperance tracts, it was common practice for the author to apologize in advance to the reader for any infelicities of style or any other possible solecisms. In Drunkard’s Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery, John W. Crowley has collected and edited some of the most impressive of these writings, and he includes an extract from the Narrative of Charles T. Woodman, A Reformed Inebriate (1843). Woodman informs his reader that he “makes not the least pretension to the erudition of the scholar, having never devoted a day’s study to grammar in his life; and this confession will account for the lack of polish in his style, and also commend his unpretending work to the charity of the critic” (Reynolds 1997: 82). The most popular temperance speaker of his day, John Gough, also addresses any possible critics in his Autobiography (1845) ‘To gratify others, rather than myself, has been my object in reducing to a permanent form my somewhat eventful history. I make no pretensions to literary merit, and trust this candid avowal will disarm criticism’ (Reynolds: 122–113). This is, perhaps, a nineteenth-century custom that the authors of many of the addiction narratives to be discussed in this book could have usefully adopted, but in an age of universal education it has become as obsolete as temperance preachers themselves. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives tend to demonstrate a certain kind of modern thinking and writing characterized by Iris Murdoch in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals which offer “…brokendown fragmented weakened modes of discourse …emotive, unreflective, inexact bearers of inarticulate emotion and idees recues ” (Murdoch 1992: 161). Many of the addiction narratives to be discussed in this book, while unlikely to be awarded literary prizes of any kind, are nevertheless highly regarded by other addicts, are often referred to on social media recovery sites, and are regularly passed on to other addicts at Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings. These texts draw heavily upon a range of stock images, clichéd scenarios, and worn out metaphors that help to maintain, strengthen, and perpetuate some of

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the hoariest and laziest ideas about addiction that have been allowed to accumulate over the last century. The majority of texts to be discussed in this book are autobiographies or memoirs published between 1990 and 2020. The word ‘memoir’ is clearly connected to the word ‘memory’ and the issue of accurate recollection in a narrative is always uncertain even in the soberest of narratives. ‘Memory’, as Julian Barnes narrator observes in The Sense of an Ending, is ‘bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed’ (Barnes 2011: 3). Because they are subject to periods of total memory loss, as narrators alcoholics are even less reliable than drug addicts, as Sarah Hepola evocatively reports in Blackout … ‘But if you’re like me, you know the thunderbolt of waking up to discover a blank space where pivotal scenes should be. My evenings come with trapdoors’ (Hepola 2015: 2). In the preface to her Blackout Girl, Jennifer Storm describes her first blackout, which followed ‘the first time I drank. I drank a lot, too much, and I blacked out, leaving me with a dark empty space in my mind where the memory should have been. Other times, I would be left with bits and pieces of a memory. It was like a film playing in my head that felt sort of familiar’ (Storm 2008: x). Autobiographical writing overall is, of course, a hugely problematic genre for the literary critic, particularly with reference to verisimilitude. It is not uncommon now to find police reports, psychiatric evaluations, and counsellor’s assessments and recommendations within addiction narratives in order, clearly, to assure the reader that the events in the narrative are true. ‘James Frey wasn’t a junkie, just addicted to lying’ (iv) Beaudoin claims in his introduction to American Junkie, alluding to the media frenzy over the generic status of Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). However, in addition to the issue of verisimilitude, the genre of autobiography itself is deeply problematic for many literary theorists John Sturrock writes, for example, in The Language of Autobiography, of Paul de Man’s writing on autobiography: In common with others who have reflected on the specific nature of autobiography, de Man doubts whether it constitutes a literary genre at all, given the apparent miscellaneous and ‘self-indulgence’ of the forms in which the autobiographical project may be realized…To a deconstructionist critic such as de Man, autobiography is an especially inviting literary kind because it purports to be so straightforwardly mimetic of life: it is charged with

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turning life into a Life. But the way from life to a Life lies through language and de Man argues that far from being restorative of the past, as its practitioners and Common Readers would like it to be, autobiography can but mummify the past, the effects of language being necessarily ‘privative’ in putting rhetoric in place of reality’. (Sturrock 1993: 4)

Against such extravagantly theorized anxieties about the status and quiddity of the genre, it can also be suggested, following the lead of such temperate theorists as Philippe Lejune that autobiography ‘is as much a way of reading as a type of writing. Lejune argues pragmatically that if autobiography is to be defined at all it should be in terms of the relationship created between the autobiographical text and its readers, rather than that between the text and the ‘life’ of which it stands as the – unverifiable – account’ (Sturrock: 285). From this perspective, the genre of autobiography functions on the basis of a ‘pact’ between author and reader grounded in the referential bedrock of the proper name. Such a position acknowledges that the ‘truth’ of a life is indeed subject to authorial manipulation, but does not go as far as de Man in suggesting that, in essence, autobiography is another word for fiction. Barrett J. Mandel writes in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney ‘Of course it is true that autobiographers use techniques of fiction, but such usage does not turn an autobiography into a fiction any more than Dvorak’s’ use of folk motifs turns the New World Symphony into a folk song’ (Olney 1980: 53). Olney writes in his introductory essay ‘In addition to being the simplest and commonest of writing propositions, autobiography is the least “literary” kind of writing, practiced by people who would neither imagine nor admit that they were “writers”’ (4). Certainly, many of the authors of the autobiographies to be discussed in Savage Usury never wrote another book. These autobiographies are concerned primarily with stories of addiction and recovery; autobiography is the privileged mode of delivery chosen to recount the stories. In Derrida and Autobiography Robert Smith writes, appropriately enough ‘Autobiography meddles with academic knowledge in its desire for clear and detached understanding. Not only is it not quite a ‘proper’ topic, but dealing with the topic seems too often to lead to autobiographism on the part of the one dealing with it, like a drug dealer who is tempted into sneaking from his own supply’ (Smith 1995: 52). In her ingeniously structured and perceptive memoir of her own addiction Heroin: How to Stop Time, Ann Marlowe suggests that fiction is not

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as successful as autobiography when describing drug addiction. She also here shows an awareness of the inevitability of the principle of exchange: whatever the author gains, a price must be paid “The problem with heroin fiction may be that the aura of the drug is so strong as to lead the writer to neglect conventional lures like suspense, character development and convincing dialogue. He forgets that nonusers won’t accept fulsome descriptions of the glory of the heroin high in exchange” (1999: 141). Of course heroin is a particularly enervating narcotic, rarely leading to energetic exploits, and Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) is successful because the protagonist’s working life as a jazz musician and a gambler shifts the focus from his long periods of comatose inactivity. Alcohol, however, is notorious for enabling revelations, drama, even chaos, the prerequisites for much fiction, and this is the primary reason that successful “alcoholic novels” are considerably more numerous than canonical “drug addict fiction”. A list of important novels featuring alcoholics would surely include Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Frank Norris’ McTeague (1899), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (1947), Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944), Hans Fallada’s The Drinker (1950), William Golding’s The Paper Men (1984), John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas (1990), Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang (1994), Gerard Woodward’s I’ll Go to Bed at Noon (2004), and Paul Torday’s The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce (2004). Marlowe suggests a highly persuasive reason for the attraction of the autobiographical form, over that of the novel, when writing about drug addiction ‘On a deeper level, heroin is stronger than imagination; it enforces its own reality. Dope is antifiction. A novel about heroin is weighed down by the inherent consistency of everyone’s experience of the drug in a way that a novel about love or revenge is not; those experiences are universal but not identical. Few writers are skilled enough to overcome this obstacle. So heroin demands nonfiction, memoir, truth-telling…’ (142).

Addiction In Narrative Means to Sober Ends, the psychiatrist and therapist John Diamond writes “The word “addict,” in Latin, means toward (ad) voice (dict ), and I find that people often prefer to listen to (or move toward) that voice, rather than their own or that of the therapist” (Diamond 2000:

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12). William White reminds his reader that “The term addiction, derived from the Latin root addicere meaning to adore or to surrender oneself to a master…” (White, xix). Similarly, in An Anatomy of Addiction, the medical historian Howard Markel writes ‘The full-fledged diagnosis of addiction did not really exist in the medical literature until the late nineteenth century. The earliest use of the word appears in the statutes of Roman law. In antiquity, “addiction” typically referred to the bond of slavery that lenders imposed upon delinquent debtors or victims on their convicted aggressors. Such individuals were mandated to be “addicted” to the service of the person to whom they owed restitution’ (Markel 2011: 7). We have lost the gravitas of “surrendering to a master”, as well as the sense of debt, or the state of indebtedness, once central to the state of addiction. There are numerous dictionary definitions of “addiction” but it is perhaps more useful here to consider the implications of one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most influential observations from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) ‘an expression only has meaning in the stream of life’ (Monk 1990: 536). This is generally understood to mean that the meaning of a word or a phrase will be found in its current usage, not in dictionaries which are in the business of embalming language. This seems very sensible; however, there is a problem: it centres on the issue of how a word or phrase is actually being used in the ‘stream of life’. When McCaffrey writes ‘The problems generated by addiction are staggering in magnitude’ (DuPont, ii), he uses the word ‘addiction’ in such a way as to completely remove actual addicts from his statement. The staggering magnitude of the problems he alludes to are generated not by this reified, obfuscatory, use of the word ‘addiction’, but by human beings who have become addicted. I suggest that the use of the word ‘addiction’, particularly by addiction professionals, has enabled many individuals and organizations to avoid speaking about addicts themselves and, therefore, to mitigate any suggestion of the addicts’ own culpability in their addictions. Timothy West begins his Theory of Addiction by pointing out ‘Addiction is an abstract concept. It has no objective existence as would for example a chair or an elephant’ (West 2010: 9). This is surely correct; without addicts we would have no need of the word “addiction”, and if we were surreptitiously to point out an addict we would not be pointing at addiction but at somebody who was addicted. In his book The Myth of Addiction (1997), John Booth Davies moves away from such abstraction to argue that ‘addiction is a myth, a legend’ (West: 31). Similarly,

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in US of AA, Joe Miller writes in the opening words of his book ‘We call alcoholism a disease, but we treat it like a story’ (Miller 2019: 1). The word addiction then provides a convenient narrative framework into which people can fit their preconceived understandings, misunderstandings, preferences, and prejudices. Again, it avoids engaging with actual addicts. But neither of these understandings of the way the word addiction is used ‘in the stream of life’ can account for the qualities ascribed to it by both addicts and Addiction professionals. DuPont is always an enthusiastic celebrant of addiction’s malice ‘You will not understand addiction unless you see clearly that addiction is modern, chemical slavery. Addiction is cruel and relentless. It devastates its victims – dominates and corrupts their lives. It is commonly fatal’ (vi). Addiction, in such constructions, and they are ubiquitous throughout addiction narratives, exists outside the addict; it possesses qualities which are so malign and powerful that very few people are able to overcome it. Addicts themselves, and those directly affected by addiction, also routinely attribute human qualities to addiction. In The Joey Song, the truly unfortunate mother of the thoroughly despicable, titular Joey does not in the slightest blame her son for his drug addiction but, like so many others, she has harsh, and quite useless, words to say about addiction ‘Never could I have imagined an illness so cruel. With its insidious ways and nasty grin, addiction not only snuffed out my child’s emerging light; it broke bonds and hearts and all the rules. Addiction is the destroyer of everything’ (Swenson 2014: xv). As will be seen in later chapters, addicts also very often invest the substances to which they have become addicted with human qualities; in Heroin, Julie O’Toole laments her inability to escape the clutches of heroin ‘I was stuck in a rut. Heroin had me by the throat’ (O’Toole 2005: 127). O’Toole also, again like numerous other drug addicts and alcoholics, perpetuates a pervasive view of heroin as predatory, as possessing an evil agency of its own ‘I know now that these were the first victims of heroin in Dublin’ (54). We could say, instead, that they were the first people in Dublin to start using heroin. Attributing agency to addiction, or the substances to which people are addicted, is a rampant topos in addiction narratives. In My Will: a Portrait of Love and Addiction, Nicola Vivian observes of the titular, heroin addict Will ‘Heroin had got hold of him quickly’ (Vivian 2019: 208). This is not just a matter of phrasing; this is a lie—heroin did not get hold of Will, he got hold of heroin. Eventually, heroin dependency killed him. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the authors of Tightrope, write of a drug addict ‘Christine was consumed

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by drugs’ (225), but the opposite is true; it is Christine who consumes the drugs, they have not consumed her. The international rugby player Jason Robinson writes in his autobiography Finding my Feet ‘Tragically, drugs took the life of my cousin Lisa when she was only twenty-one years old’ (Robinson 2003: 164). Again, the opposite is true; drugs did not take this unfortunate young woman’s life: she took the drugs. Various forms of misattribution can be seen throughout addiction narratives, as when Kristof and WuDunn write ‘Most people who have an addiction need outside resources’ (139), as though addiction was a type of accessory instead of the result of becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs. In High Achiever, Tiffany Jenkins ascribes human qualities to addiction and, like many other addicts, also constructs it as somehow both internal and external ‘I thought that his love was all I needed, but I was wrong. My addiction snuck in and tricked me into thinking I could manage it, but I couldn’t. It was too strong, and things got out of hand so fast’ (Jenkins 2017: 352). This very useful technique, for addicts, is also applied to the condition of addiction itself, as when Roger Forseth, in Alcoholite at the Altar, writes that ‘a firm grasp of the nature of alcoholism, of how it works its devious ways into the most ordinary aspects of the human condition, can serve as a useful explanatory tool’ (Forseth 2018: 97). Like drug addicts, alcoholics themselves can be devious, extremely devious, but alcoholism, like drug addiction, is merely a consequence of excessive consumption; alcoholism itself cannot be devious. The very title of Jack Erdman’s Whiskey’s Children indicates that whisky possesses sufficient agency to reproduce itself, but he actually means that he comes from a long line of drunks ‘He died of the D.T.’s (sic) at fifty-six. They were called rum-fits then, with a bit more feeling. All in all, my German blood wasn’t promising’ (Erdman 1994: 13). The very popular, because hugely comforting, view that because addiction “runs in families” then it must have a genetic component will be addressed in the next chapter. Addiction, as understood by professionals and addicts, is not seen as abstract or conceptual; indeed far from it, but neither is it envisaged as myth or legend. The attributes ascribed to addiction are always among the least desirable of human qualities: cunning, malice, cruelty, aggression, and so on. The dominant modern understanding of addiction is actually a literary technique, thousands of years old: personification. It is worth noting that personification is not a narrative form, like myth or legend, but merely a rhetorical device. However, a number of writers are convinced that they have identified the elusive thing-in-itself, the ding

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an sich, of addiction ‘And this uncomfortable feeling, this emotional void, this uncertainty that I am experiencing is the essence of addiction’ (Novak 2008: 252. Author’s emphasis). The psychoanalyst Lance Dodes, in The Heart of Addiction, as his title indicates, also sees addiction as possessing a quiddity, an essence ‘If addiction is about powerlessness, rage at powerlessness and reassertion of power, as I have been describing…. (Dodes 2002: 168). Vivian, like Dodes, sees addiction in corporeal imagery ‘Was fear the pumping heart of addiction? I wondered a thousand times’ (Vivian 2019: 234). She writes ‘There is nothing pretty or soft about addiction; its very nature is clawing and shameful’ (xi). She then informs the reader ‘I examined addiction from every angle and dug under its cover, into the broken core of the human spirit from which it grows (xii). Her quest for knowledge leads her to ‘train as a counsellor so that I could fully understand addiction’ (231). In One Hit Away the mother of the heroin addicted Jordan Barnes tells her son that she has been watching the TV show Intervention ‘religiously’, because she ‘wanted to learn everything about addiction so I could learn how to help you’ (Barnes 2020: 33). There is, though, nothing to explain “to a normal person”. In The Joey Song, the mother of the drug addicted, titular Joey writes ‘You can’t know addiction, but you live it. And then you still don’t know it’ (Swenson 2014: 55). This is certainly true, but not because addiction is so unfathomable. It is true only, I suggest, because there is nothing to know. Addiction is a straightforward, maladaptive behavioural disorder. Addiction has no covers, no geometric angles. Addiction has no nature. Addiction has no heart. Addiction has no essence. When addiction is personified, as it invariably is in these narratives, it is only a rhetorical technique, a figure of speech. A figure of speech, a rhetorical device. As such it cannot itself have an essence; it can only be used, at most, as a technique to gesture towards an essence. Despite literally hundreds of claims to the contrary, I further suggest that addiction has no depths either. Storm writes of some sensible advice she was given “I was too deep into my addiction to really grasp it all, so I kind of just blew it off and kept using” (123). Spatial metaphors are particularly pervasive in addiction narratives and addicts are very keen to present a progression as a fall. In his best-selling memoir A Street Cat Named Bob, James Bowen describes being ‘in the depths of my heroin addiction’ (Bowen 2012: 223). However, the ‘depths of addiction’ is actually a sequence of events, encountered and experienced chronologically, linearly. Although the metaphors used throughout addiction discourse privilege

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spatial imagery, addiction is surely a becoming; certainly, it is a becoming less rather than more, but it takes place in time, not space. The relentless focusing on space rather than time throughout these narratives allows for the suppression of this very important chronological aspect of addiction. It is a rhetorical manoeuvre designed to avoid inconvenient queries about time and choice. I also suggest that “the depths of addiction” is not a “place” which contains more knowledge of addiction than the surface of it. There are no depths and there is nothing to know. Jamison observes of Stringer’s In Grand Central Winter (1998), a memoir of crack addiction and homelessness “Stories of addiction are full of this insistence that addiction can’t be fully explained. It’s a trope of the genre” (121). We have also lost the meaning of the word “trope”. The inability of addicts to describe fully their addictions is not a trope of the genre but a topos. A trope, in fact, is a rhetorical device, like a metaphor, for example, while a topos is the persistent appearance of a subject, or a narrative convention within a genre. The indescribability of the addictive experience is a topos of the genre, certainly; a pervasive, burnt out topos, which is routinely used as a self-serving device to depict addiction as mysterious and complex. As was noted in the Preface, we have also lost ‘addiction’ as a useful word when discussing dependency on drugs and alcohol. The word has been used casually for a very long time, however, as can be seen from the meditations of Pascal in his Pensees (1670) upon the inherent unhappiness of humanity “I see other people around me, made like myself. I ask them if they are better informed than I, and they say they are not. Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive objects to which they become addicted and attached” (Pascal 1989: 88). Similarly, the word can be seen in a letter Karl Marx wrote to Frederick Engels in 1853 which, among numerous rather more weighty matters, mentions the flatulence of Princess Eugenie “That angel suffers, it seems, from a most indelicate complaint. She is passionately addicted to farting and is incapable, even in company, of suppressing it” (Wheen 1999: 84). In Swann’s Way, published in 1913, Marcel Proust records the response of the Princess de Guermantes to a comment by General de Froberville on the antiquity of a family name: ‘“I see no objection to its being old,” the Princess answered dryly, “but whatever else it is it’s not euphonious,” she went on, isolating the word euphonious as though between inverted commas, a little affectation to which the Guermantes set were addicted’ (Proust 1971, Part 2: 166). Clearly, the aristocratic inhabitants of the

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Faubourg Saint Germain enjoyed making the gesture; that’s why they have become “addicted” to this particular affectation—they take pleasure in the act. We now use, actually overuse, the word “addiction” but we have sedulously removed an important aspect of its enjoyable nature when we apply it to drugs or alcohol. This is the crucial shift in Proust’s use of the word “addicted” and our own over the past century. There is also a sense of compulsion associated with the word now, particularly in the context of substance abuse, where once there was just pleasure. We have lost any sense of the addict’s pleasure, and we have been robustly encouraged over the past century to do just that. Nevertheless, people become dependent on alcohol and heroin primarily because of the pleasures these drugs offer them, at least initially. Nicholas Warner, in Spirits of America: Intoxication in NineteenthCentury American Literature, writes specifically of Edgar Allan Poe’s work ‘Poe does not sharply divide opium from alcohol. Indeed, he draws an explicit parallel between the two substances in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, when he writes that Usher’s voice often sounded like that of the “lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement” (Warner 1997: 73). Poe’s story was published in 1839, when it was not at all common to elide the differences between alcohol and opium. Now, though, it has become increasingly fashionable to minimize the differences between alcoholism and heroin addiction, indeed to argue that all that separates these two substances is the law. This is the position the psychotherapist Jerome D. Levin adopts in Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Addictions ‘Drug addiction differs from alcohol addiction in that it is illegal’ (Levin 1987: 196). This is, of course, an inevitable consequence of relativizing addictions. If, say, Spotify is as addictive as heroin, then there is no distance at all to travel in order to claim that drug addicts only differ from alcoholics in a specific, legal sense. A number of writers inform their readers that any distinctions drawn between drug addiction and alcoholism are capricious, illogical, and prejudiced. Tom Hansen writes in his autobiography American Junkie ‘But the laws regarding drugs were inconsistent and arbitrary. I had seen much more mayhem, pain and suffering come from booze, and if they were going to keep saying that drinking was just fine, even encourage it, I was going to make up my own rules’ (Hansen 2017: 214). In the novel The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, Paul Torday’s well-meaning medical doctor informs the titular alcoholic ‘The kind of habitual drinking you indulge in is no different in degree from

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the addiction of a heroin addict. In both cases the brain becomes progressively more damaged, probably irreversibly, by an excessive consumption of a harmful substance’ (Torday 2008: 35). In her memoir everything I Never Wanted to Know, Dina Kucera, although less eloquent, is just as insistent ‘Many people feel that alcohol is different from drugs but it’s the same. The only difference is that the commercials for alcohol are better. Alcoholics end up cradling the toilet just like heroin addicts. One isn’t more glamorous than the other. They both suck’ (Kucera 2010: 106). The same point is made rather more obliquely, and more flamboyantly, by Sean Beaudoin ‘Nixon started the War on Drugs fifty years ago, oblivious to the fact that the Sumerians were brewing beer a good eight-thousand years before Christ got his apostles ripped on goblets of O-positive’ (Hansen: iii). All these writers, and many more, are mistaken; alcohol and heroin are very different drugs and although there are exceptions, they appeal to very different types of people. The difference is shrewdly summarized by Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting. At his dealer’s flat Renton sees that Johnny Swann is high on heroin and notes ‘High cunts are a big fuckin drag when yir feeling like this, because thir too busy enjoying their high tae notice or gie a fuck aboot your suffering. Whereas the piss-heid in the pub wants every cunt tae git as ootay it as he is, the real junky (as opposed tae the casual user who wants a partner-in-crime) doesnae gie a fuck aboot anybody else’ (Welsh 1994: 4). As will be seen throughout Savage Usury, the pleasure of getting or staying ‘high’ is not at all the same experience as staying or getting drunk. The pleasures offered by heroin are solitary ones, while those offered by alcohol, certainly in the beginning, are sociable pleasures. The laws pertaining to the supply and consumption of alcohol and opioids which Hansen above, along with many others, sees as “inconsistent and arbitrary” are, in fact, neither; they are laws which were, and still are, predicated on the awareness that these are such very different substances that each requires separate legislation. This was understood by Cocteau ninety years ago ‘Opium desocialises us and removes us from the community. Further, the community takes its revenge. The persecution of opium addicts is an instinctive defence by society against an antisocial gesture’ (112). Hansen, too, eventually starts to realize that he has isolated himself while in a methadone clinic surrounded by whining, complaining drug addicts ‘I had everything in common with these people, and yet, I had nothing in common with them. I was just like them except I’d known

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that trying to live a normal life while being a junkie was impossible, a sure fire recipe for a train wreck’ (101). Cocteau’s robust understanding of the drug addict’s own culpability is anathema to modern understandings of addiction. DuPont has little hesitation in ascribing the cause of addiction to a cerebral home ‘Often when people think about the roots of addiction, they think of social or economic factors such as family dysfunction or poverty, but, while these can contribute to drug abuse, the root of addiction lies far deeper than just demographic characteristics. The root of addiction is in the human brain’ (73–74). When neuroscientists such as Markus Helig, Carl Hart, and Marc Lewis discuss the subject of an addict’s pleasure, they focus, understandably, on the neurological transmission of these pleasures; however, and again understandably, they are unable to inform us of the nature of these pleasures. They cannot tell us what kind of pleasure is being experienced. In High Price, Hart writes enthusiastically of his early research studies that they ‘had begun to expose important truths. Not just about crack cocaine and about addiction, but about the way the brain works and the way that pleasure affects human behavior’ (Hart 2017: 4). Like many other writers on addiction, by no means all of them neuroscientists, but all of them bewitched and bedazzled by brain imagery and scientific talk of dopamine spikes, serotonin levels, and neurotransmitters, Hart assumes that the human brain is central to any understanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. This belief, this privileging of the brain, is pervasive throughout addiction discourse, never more so than in the last decade. However, this increasing emphasis on the brain as the principal determinant of such ruinous addictions as alcoholism and drug addiction is not as scientific as it appears to be to the vain and easily impressed. Indeed, this insistence on the role of the brain in determining addiction is mocked by the stand-up comedian cited in Jim Ander’s book All Drinking Aside ‘How come if alcohol kills millions of brain cells, it never killed the ones that make me want to drink?’ (Anders 2013: 141). To see the brain, a piece of meat, which can be extracted from the human skull, then weighed, dissected, and incinerated, as representing the entire human being is not at all a scientific methodology; on the contrary, it is actually a literary trope, a figure of speech; specifically synecdoche, which has been in use for thousands of years. Moreover, the view is predicated upon an unexamined a priori assumption that the brain is a form of command or control centre, issuing instructions to the attached body. As will be seen in later chapters, to complicate further the linguistic

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chaos that characterizes modern addiction discourse, the words ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ are often used as synonyms, particularly by addicts themselves. In Ninety Days, although Bill Clegg is only hours out of an expensive rehab clinic, he is assailed by the urge to use drugs again ‘That craving, once it begins, is almost impossible to reverse. What my addict mind imagines, my addict body chases’ (Clegg 2012: 10). This anachronistic, Cartesian dualism between mind and body is a striking feature of modern addiction narratives. In St Aubyn’s Never Mind, it is noticeable that the character who is uniquely alert to this issue is a professional philosopher ‘As to brains and minds, was there really any problem about two categorically different phenomena, brain process and consciousness occurring simultaneously? Or was the problem with the categories?’ (85). We note, though, that Victor only raises it rhetorically, interrogatively. Although never contested (or even analysed) within the field of addiction studies this incorrect and unhelpful view of the primacy of the brain in determining human behaviour is not at all unproblematic and has been vigorously criticized for many centuries, particularly by philosophers. Although several important eighteenth-century philosophers, especially Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville, had raised doubts about the brain’s role in deciding human actions, it is the Scots philosopher David Hume who formulated the most elegant and memorable criticism of the view that the brain is in control in his 1751 publication ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (Harris 2015: 114). The addict’s brain does not give the order to drink alcohol or buy heroin; on the contrary, the addict’s urges, passions, and desires tell the brain to discover the best way of satisfying these desires. Drug addicts and alcoholics are surely among the least likely of people to possess anything resembling a coherent sense of a stable ‘self’. Undoubtedly less elegantly than Hume, we could say in the language of today that the purpose of the addict’s brain is to get the addict the particular substances that are most desirable at that time. The brain of the addict, like everybody else’s brain, is a servant of their passions, and not in the slightest the master. The narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld (1864), a frequenter of brothels and no stranger to alcohol, echoes Humean epistemology when he states ‘always and everywhere, and no matter what his station, man loves to act as he likes, and not necessarily as reason and self-interest would have him do. Yes, he will even act straight against his own interests. Indeed, he is sometimes bound to

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do so’ (Dostoevsky 1937: 31. Author’s emphasis). Dostoevsky’s narrator is aware that his reason does not always decide his actions; in fact he knows that it rarely does. The narrator of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891) reflects on Gray’s opium addiction and informs the reader that the desire for illicit, immoral, illegal pleasures ‘so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move’ (Wilde 1985: 226). While Dostoevsky’s narrator views the will as actually irrelevant, Wilde’s narrator speaks for the coming century, disastrously. Although Wilde states that the freedom of the will has been “lost”, he implies throughout this fatalistic passage that the will has not so much been lost as it has been defeated by a more powerful opponent, in this case opium. This is a crucial difference between the two understandings of the role of the will in all human affairs, which very much includes addiction. The truth is that addiction is not the result of a vanquished will; on the contrary, addiction is the expression of the addict’s will. Alcohol and drugs are what addicts most want. In Dangerous Parking, Stuart Browne emphasizes the irrelevance of thought in his alcoholic behaviour ‘On this sideboard was an unopened bottle of Bombay gin. I had no thoughts of taking a drink. Suddenly, as I drew level with the sideboard, my right hand flashed out and grabbed the gin. Before the action had even registered in my brain, the top was off the bottle and I was standing there in this stranger’s flat, naked as the day I was born, penis dangling like the flag of a defeated regiment, guzzling neat gin like a fucking maniac’ (Browne 2001: 109). This bypassing of thought is a common topos throughout addiction narratives. Jenkins stresses its total defeat when she finds a stash of the highly desirable Oxy80s ‘There was an inner battle going on in my mind between my addiction and myself’. She puts the pills down and leaves the room but ‘suddenly my mind was hijacked. A dark force took over the helm and I was merely a helpless bystander. I watched from somewhere far away as my body turned around and my legs began moving toward the dresser before my brain could process what was happening’ (168–169). Obviously, inevitably, she takes the pills but not because of greed or weakness. No, she takes the pills because her addiction is at war with her ‘self’—as though it were separate from this ‘self’. In order to confirm that she is not in any way responsible for her actions, she then employs nautical imagery and shifts from the psychological to the supernatural: “a dark force” possesses her. There

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are so many examples of this type of illogical, elaborate, dishonest cant running through addiction narratives that it is a pleasure to recall Lord Darlington’s words in Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan ‘I can resist everything except temptation’ (Wilde 2019: 20). Dostoevsky’s narrator observes that the wine the enigmatic Ordinov was drinking “was so strong that a single cupful of it had sufficed to obscure his vision, to inflame his blood, and to weaken his will power” (288). A century and a half later, the rock musician and heroin addict Mark Lanegan writes in Sing Backwards and Weep ‘During that cab ride in Chicago, I had finally been beaten down to a place where I surrended. I was exhausted to the point where willpower wasn’t gonna see me through. I had to get loaded’ (Lanegan 2020: 65–66). In America Anonymous, Denizet-Lewis talks to a drug counsellor who was himself a drug addict ‘I have no idea why I didn’t relapse through all of this, but it has nothing to do with having strong will power’ (268). Of course it has nothing to do with willpower, strong or weak. In White Rabbit, Martha Morrison employs a very modern, and for addicts a highly agreeable, understanding of her own addiction ‘These biochemical abnormalities in the brain and liver are responsible for the compulsive craving that leads to repeated use of a drug, despite negative consequences. Willpower has no influence whatsoever’ (Morrison 1991: 185). Morrison is correct when she claims willpower is ineffectual, but incorrect when she blames chemicals for her addiction. She is, again, both correct and incorrect when she later writes ‘I learned that addicts don’t lack willpower; they suffered from a disease’ (185). Addicts do not suffer from a disease, and they do not necessarily lack willpower. The very notion of willpower, though, is an irrelevance. The will is generally perceived as a ratiocinative instrument and, in the case of addiction, as having the role of imposing restraint and denial upon the unrulier urges. It invariably fails because the will has no authority; it has no authority because the brain is not in control. This perception of the brain as existing in synedochic isolation from all other aspects of the addict’s humanity is pervasive throughout modern addiction narratives. This misunderstanding of the primacy of thought in addictive behaviour, this insupportable faith in the centrality of the brain in determining the choices made by alcoholics and drug addicts, is responsible for the equally pervasive, self-aggrandizing belief that alcoholics and drug addicts are continuously engaged in some form of warfare with drugs, or alcohol, or addiction, or themselves. In The Freedom Model, the authors

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refer to a client who wants to stop using drugs ‘This fight with addiction defined here for years, and now it’s gone’ (Slate et al. 2017: 200). In The LA Diaries, James Brown thinks of the night of his sister’s suicide ‘you storm out of the house in the heat of another fight with your husband, the last fight you will ever have, and end your lifelong battle with alcohol and drugs’ (Brown 2004: 163). In Long Way Home, Cameron Douglas writes of his uncle that he ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ (Douglas 2019: 6). We might note here that the ‘struggle’ is not with alcohol and drugs but with the abuse of them. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the authors of Tightrope, are especially enthusiastic employers of oppositional, combative imagery ‘A boy named Mike is dead from suicide, after struggles with drugs’, and, in the same paragraph ‘Others are alive but struggling with dead-end jobs or wrestling with drugs and alcohol’ (Kristof and Wudenn 2020: 8). Later, they write of another helpless victim ‘Stacy, a vivacious cheerleader and volleyball player while in high school, wrestled with alcoholism and ended up homeless, living in a tent. She froze to death on a cold winter night, at age 48’ (20–21). This is a very sad ending to a human life, certainly, but if she was of a conventional age at high school then she drank for at least thirty years, and very little of that time was actually spent “wrestling” with alcoholism. Of course, Kristof and WuDunn’s belief that the substances themselves are the enemy is manifested in many other ways ‘Clayton struggled with his weight’ (105), but nobody “struggles” with their weight; their weight is a consequence of their being unable to curb their appetites. Macy writes in Dopesick of an OxyContin addict ‘ OxyContin had stolen everything from him’ (114). This is untrue, too, the addict gave everything he had to buy the drug; it stole nothing from him. There is a considerable amount of “struggling” and “battling” in Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict; his sister recalls ‘My kids knew from a very early age that Uncle Ben was struggling with addictions’ (96). At Ben’s funeral, the ubiquitous, synonymous, and combative metaphor was used ‘For all too many of his years he battled against addictions to both drink and drugs. He was an addict, a fact that Ben never ran away from, he was very aware of that fact’ (106–107). Being aware that you are an addict is sufficiently laudable to require no effort at all to actually stop being one. We do have to note, however, that not just in Ben’s case, all this battling and struggling with addictions to drink and drugs is totally, completely ineffectual. When Galton writes of one of her characters ‘Dorothy had taken her battle with alcohol right into the gutter’ (216), we can assume that Dorothy relentlessly drank her

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way into destitution; there was no battle with alcohol. There never is a battle, or a struggle; nobody ever wrestles with addiction or is in the grip of addiction. Addiction, or dependency, is an uncomplicated consequence of the excessive, unnatural consumption of alcohol and drugs. The persistent use throughout addiction narratives of such imagery demonstrates a characteristic inversion of the truth, such as was seen earlier. In this case the combative imagery is used to incorporate the addict into an evolving, Homeric event, one in which the alcoholic or the drug addict participates as a respected combatant. The truth, masked by the metaphors, is that the addicts have been thoroughly defeated in a series of grim, dismal routs by nothing other than their own desires and appetites. Throughout America Overdose McGreal, a journalist and not a neuroscientist, is fully committed to the modish view of the brain as, paradoxically, even illogically, both in control and totally helpless in the presence of drugs, as when he describes a woman who was prescribed pain killers for a broken back. She was drunk when she fell over, so not averse to artificial enhancement ‘Even as her injury healed, the narcotics drew Karen in. The drugs worked on her brain to demand ever larger doses of opioids with the promise of a few hours bliss’ (xi). There are several issues worth noting here. We could note the spurious agency given to the actual drugs “the narcotics drew her in”. Then we might query the assumption that these drugs “demand” more drugs. Drugs cannot demand anything; they are merely substances. We might then note that Karen’s brain is not Karen; it is one of her organs. We might then conclude that it is Karen herself, her entire self, who “demands ever larger doses of opioids”. McGreal continues “With that, Karen’s life spiralled into a perpetual hunt for pills, costing her her job, destroying marriages, and taking a harsh toll on her family” (xi). As will be seen, “spirals” only go one way in addiction discourse: down. Nothing is said here about the warm, comforting pleasure conferred by OxyContin, or by any opioids, upon the consumer, let alone the level of euphoria that Jenkins in High Achiever reaches, if only very briefly ‘If I could have had that fifteen seconds of ecstasy after shooting the pill be my permanent state of mind, life would have been perfect’ (Jenkins 2017: 312). Pleasure is what drugs and alcohol offer the addict, certainly in the beginning. It is the precise nature of these specific pleasures offered by opioids and alcohol that some very gifted creative writers are capable of articulating. In assessing the descriptions of the more articulate drug

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addicts and alcoholics, we can see what the appeal of the substance is. We can see, too, the very different responses they elicit. Cocteau, who smoked opium until his death, claimed ‘Opium remains unique and the euphoria it induces superior to that of health. I owe it my perfect hours’ (14). In his 1992 novel Bad News, Edward St Aubyn describes Patrick Melrose preparing then injecting cocaine ‘Before he felt its effects he smelled the heartbreaking fragrance of the cocaine, and then a few seconds afterward, in a time-lapse frenzy, its cold geometric flowers broke out everywhere and carpeted the surface of his inner vision. Nothing could ever be as pleasurable as this…Drunk with pleasure, choking with love, he lurched forward and put the syringe down heavily on the mirror’ (St Aubyn 2014: 200.) In Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl observes ‘You don’t exactly hallucinate on smack. But you do see, when the first, fast rush courses north to glory, the smiles of all the unseen beings in the world nodding in the shadows. All the benevolence hidden in the universe makes itself known’ (Stahl 1996: 141). In Infinite Jest, Joelle is depicted smoking crack cocaine ‘The ‘base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God’ (235). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century it was not uncommon for drug addicts to be described as “lotus eaters”, a reference to the Tennyson poem of that name first published in 1832. Tennyson bases his poem on a very brief episode in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, which is authoritatively estimated to have been written in the eighth century BC. Tennyson introduces his titular addicts as wan, sad: And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy Lotus-eaters came.

We then see that their requirements are modest; all they wish for is never again to have to do any work: Why should we toil alone, We only toil, we who are the first of things.

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The apex of the drug’s pleasure for the lotus eaters is again, although far from negligible, temperate by modern standards: How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem. Falling asleep in a half dream! (Tennyson 1994: 81, 82, 83)

Half asleep, melancholy, with no work to do, is how modern drug addicts begin their day. Alcoholics are far less rhetorically extravagant than drug addicts when describing the effects of alcohol on them. Nick Johnstone is unusually flamboyant in A Head Full of Blue ‘I watched the bubbles pirouette in the glass. The champagne picked through my brain like an electrician. Faulty circuits were rewired. Loose cables were soldered. When the repairs were complete, my eyes sang as beautifully as Billie Holiday’ (Johnstone 2002: 3). Jamison, too, allows herself some poetry ‘Drinking had been the honeyed twilight sun falling over every late afternoon, softening everything to amber’ (216). Overall, though, alcoholics’ depictions of alcohol’s effects on them are modest, muted; even prosaic, as when the actress Ali McGraw writes in Moving Pictures ‘But from the instant I took my first drink, I loved it; I felt pretty and witty and bright. Not phony and uncomfortable. And I gave myself permission to be something I never dared to be sober: uninhibited, even promiscuous, and out of control’ (MacGraw 1991). Elizabeth Vargas, who at the time of writing Between Breaths: a Memoir of Panic and Addiction was co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight and 20/20, writes ‘I liked alcohol. I liked the way it made me feel. There’s a sweet feeling that you get from those first few glasses of wine. The world is softer, smoother, more golden; the tension drains from the tightly clenched muscles in my neck and shoulders. I could finally breathe. I would go out with my friends after work in local news. Everyone seemed smarter and prettier and more interesting, even me’ (Vargas 2016: 7–8). In Parched, Heather King describes the effects of her first drink of alcohol ‘my awakening was instantaneous and it was complete. For halfway through that first bottle, suddenly, miraculously, I was transformed. Suddenly I felt pretty, competent, at ease; I felt embraced and welcome’ (King 2006: 65). From these examples, and others will be seen in subsequent chapters, it is clear that the drug addicts stress transcendental pleasures; their blissful experiences are predicated on a complete removal from the dreary quotidian. Conversely, the alcoholics’

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more understated pleasures arise from a sense of confidence, not only in themselves but also of belonging now to a larger, now welcoming, social group. ‘Feelings of estrangement, uniqueness, and alienation are well-nigh universally reported by alcoholics’, writes Levene (94), and it is obvious that it is these unpleasant feelings that are alleviated, even extinguished, by alcohol. Just as Tennyson as early as 1832 understood the opioid addict’s desire to remove themselves from the wider community, so too an even earlier writer understood the alcoholic’s desire to join the wider community. Charles Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard, first published in 1812, is unsparing in its depiction of Lamb’s own alcoholism. In Sarah Burton’s biography of Lamb and his sister, Mary, A Double Life she writes ‘Charles had written in John Woodvil, and was to write in his Confessions of a Drunkard, of the sense of needing to drink merely to arrive at the level that his peers found naturally…he got into the habit of artificially inducing the sense of confidence, well-being and carefreeness that he assumed came naturally to others’ (Burton 2013: 198). Over two hundred years later, AA Gill marvels at precisely the qualities Lamb believed his peers came by effortlessly ‘I looked at Peter and men like him and wondered how they did it. How did they know what to do? Say? How to be? Where did they learn the silky confidence, the certainty that everything would be all right, that they would always belong and be welcome in any room they walked into’ (30). Gill, like Lamb, drinks in order to “artificially induce” these feelings and his debilitating alcoholism is the result. Heather King, too, shares this sense of estrangement with Gill and Lamb, and indeed with all other alcoholics ‘I had always secretly suspected that everyone but me had been handed a rule book at birth’ (191). In his travels around America researching the subject of alcoholism, Jack B. Weiner reports in Drinking ‘I drank the first time because I wanted to be part of , instead of apart from”, I was told in city after city’ (Weiner 1976: 88, Author’s italics). The alcoholic seeks incorporation; the opioid addict seeks transcendence. The alcoholic wants to be a presence; the opioid addict wishes to be an absence. The alcoholic desires to be included; the opioid addict wishes to be excluded. The world is too much for the alcoholic; it is not enough for the drug addict. Essentially, the alcoholic wants in; the drug addict wants out. Wittgenstein’s celebrated dictum from his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Wittgenstein, x) is not as prescriptive as it might initially seem. We are

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entitled to assume that Wittgenstein means his comment to be understood with strict reference to expression, not to experience. A small, sobbing child in a boarding school dormitory may not know the word “homesick” but this will not prevent him from feeling all the emotions we adults understand by that word. David Foster Wallace was a regular at AA meetings and his biographer D.T. Max writes ‘The members loved the way he talked – for many he was the most articulate person they had ever met – and felt his elaborate, run-on narratives of the daily battle to maintain the equanimity that kept him sober expressed what they were thinking, only better’ (Max 2013: 179). Few drug addicts and alcoholics are as articulate as Wallace, St Aubyn, Stahl, Marlowe, and some other writers but while that may prevent them from expressing certain pleasures it will not prevent them from experiencing those pleasures. That alcohol and drugs offer addicts unique and even overwhelming pleasures is a view that is vigorously rejected by many very powerful people as well as by numerous, perhaps most, alcoholics and drug addicts themselves. McCaffrey writes ‘The life of an addict is sheer misery’ (DuPont, I). This is a sentence of sheer nonsense. It is, of course, very much in the interests of a great many alcoholics and drug addicts to minimize the effects of their respective substances on them, but even when pleasure is muted it is hardly negligible. This can be seen in Even the Dogs when Jon McGregor’s drug addict narrator remembers what he loves about heroin ‘Feeling well, feeling sorted, feeling like all the, the worries have been taken away. The fears. All the emotions taken care of. That feeling of, what is it, just, like, absence, from the world’ (McGregor 2010: 81). In Melvin Burgess’s novel Junk, which won the Carnegie medal for children’s fiction, one of his several narrators says of the 12- and 13-year-old children who are using heroin ‘They don’t take smack to have a good time. They take it to escape’ (Burgess 1997: 161). As will be seen in later chapters, the belief that escaping an unpleasant environment by shooting up heroin is more in the nature of an entitlement than a pleasure is one enthusiastically shared by a great many adult addicts. Only in a thoroughly spoiled culture can the absence of pain and anxiety be seen as anything other than pleasures. This mistake too has a history. In 1848, Edgar Allen Poe writes to Sarah Helen Whitman ‘I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories — memories of wrong and injustice and

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imputed dishonor — from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom’ (Silverman 1992: 512). It is very difficult to see how an “escape from torturing memories” can be viewed as anything other than a pleasure, while knocking back mint juleps and brandy in order to avoid the “dread of some strange impending doom” verges on the Paradisial. William Burroughs, a totally unregenerate drug addict, like Cocteau, writes in Junky ‘I experienced the agonizing deprivation of junk sickness, and the pleasure of relief when junk-thirsty cells drank from the needle. Perhaps all pleasure is relief’ (xli). In his book Freud, Anthony Storr writes ‘It is characteristic of Freud’s predominantly pessimistic view of human nature that the so-called ‘pleasure principle’ upon which so much of his thought depends, is much more concerned with the avoidance of pain than with the pursuit of pleasure’ (Storr 1996: 47). In Goodbye, Mr Wonderful, the poet Chris McCully asks ‘Does anyone really think that the drinking alcoholic is having a good time? That the bewildered, snivelling body that soils and disfigures itself and hugs itself into a vomiting unconsciousness is really having the best days of its life?’ (McCully 2004: 84). McCully has deliberately placed his alcoholic in extremis, but there was a great deal of pleasure in drinking before this point, the end game, was reached. Moreover, withdrawal from alcohol and drugs can be very unpleasant experiences and avoiding the sweating, cramps, vomiting, and diarrhoea can indeed be seen as a pleasure. Many drug addicts also work hard at eliminating any suggestion that they might be enjoying their daily injections of heroin; it is a strategy employed by Vivian’s titular Will ‘And it was only about three weeks in when I realised I was hooked. God. Was sick without it. More than anything then, more than any high, I needed to score, just to feel normal. It’s been like that all these years. On and on’ (208). This is a lie. Nobody who becomes a drug addict or an alcoholic ever previously found comfort in the “normal”. It is connected to another very popular belief, particularly among addicts themselves, that addiction to alcohol and opioids can “happen to anybody”. Clea Myers, in her memoir Tweaking the Dream, tells her uncle when he comes to visit her in rehab ‘It can happen to anybody – addiction’s a disease, almost like any other illness – that’s what they teach you anyway’ (129). As will be argued in the next chapter, addiction is not a disease or an illness, and it cannot “happen to anybody”. Indeed, only a few pages earlier Myers has herself acknowledged ‘It is while at Brown I realise I am not a happy and well-adjusted young woman, but

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there is so much shame and guilt attached to this revelation that there is not a chance in hell I would ever share it with anyone’ (126). In Dela Galton’s novel Ice and a Slice, the protagonist’s sister informs everybody at the family Christmas dinner that her sister is an alcoholic ‘“There’s no shame in being an alcoholic,” Alison went on breezily. “It can happen to anyone. It’s an illness…It’s exactly the same as being born diabetic – or asthmatic…”’ (Galton 2013: 326–327). The mother of the heroin addict Ben then joins the exculpatory chorus that dominates dozens of addiction narratives—a chorus easily loud enough to drown out Tennyson’s in “The Lotus Eaters”—when she says ‘Addiction can happen to anyone and in any socio-economic class’ (155). As will be seen in subsequent chapters, her assumption is another comforting egalitarian delusion. Alcoholism, like opioid addiction, cannot “happen to anybody”; only the maladjusted take such pleasure in these substances that they become dependent on them. In Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic, Sarah Benton opens a chapter with a quotation from asocial worker “We often define “at-risk” youth as those who are falling out of school, but alcoholism and addiction do not discriminate” (Benton 2010: 28. My emphasis). In My Fair Junkie, Amy Dresner writes “The rehab where I will spend my next seven months is beautiful: three separate houses and two pools all nestled in the woody hills of L.A. Rumor has it that it used to be Rock Hudson’s estate. What really stands out to me is the grittiness of addiction set against this posh background. Drugs do not discriminate” (Dresner 2017: 21. My emphasis). In Liz Moore’s novel, Long Bright River, the narrator sees a group of prostitutes ‘The large majority are Caucasian, although addiction doesn’t discriminate, and all races and creeds can be found here’ (8. My emphasis). The belief that addiction does not discriminate is connected to the delusion that addiction can happen to anybody and is a canard that has run through addiction narratives for decades. In 1976 Weiner writes as a guest in a clinic for alcoholic priests ‘I know that alcoholism is no respecter of occupation, ethnic background, sex, or what have you…no grouping of persons is more or less susceptible to the illness’ (182). In 2016, Amanda Prowse’s alcoholic protagonist in Another Love is informed by the clinic’s doctor about the diversity of her fellow patients in a rehab clinic ‘Wilhelm is a leading academic surgeon in Stuttgart. Do you think he understands the brain and the body? Or what about Markus? He was a test pilot – intelligent and with super-fast reactions. Sam was an interior designer. Lotte, a concert pianist. I could go on. The point I’m making

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is no one is immune from this disease. Alcoholism’ (Prowse 2016: 230). Here, again, the insistence is upon the personification of addiction, as representing it as actually possessing a human quality such as the ability to discriminate. In James Brown’s chapter in The Cocaine Chronicles, he not only takes for granted that addiction does not discriminate but, in a woolly endorsement of the modern obsession with equality, he sees this as emphatically laudable ‘If addiction has one redeeming value it’s that it does not discriminate, crossing all ethnic, economic, and social barriers. In this group of BMC patients, we have a doctor who used to prescribe his own morphine sulfate, a paramedic who couldn’t keep his hands out of the med kit, a housewife strung out on wine and antianxiety pills, and a Beverly Hills building contractor hooked on OxyContin’ (Phillips and Tervalon, eds. 2011: 93). Of course, drugs and alcohol themselves, not just addiction, share this modern disinclination to discriminate; Macy writes of OxyContin that it ‘moved seamlessly across city and county lines with zero regard for politics, race, neighborhood, or class’ (137). What is particularly striking here is Macy’s representation of the drug itself possessing sufficient agency to move “seamlessly” without human participation, or indeed without very long queues of people, from all walks of life, eager to buy and consume OxyContin. Moore also ascribes agency to an inert substance ‘Potent, deadly fentanyl has found its way into most of the heroin for sale around here, and its killing even the most experienced users of the drug’ (210). Moore’s narrator, like Macy and many other writers, not only attributes human agency to drugs but also makes them specifically purposive, as though they have the intent to kill hapless addicts. It is certainly true that “drugs do not discriminate”, but that is because they do not have the ability to do so. Drugs do not direct traffic, walk the dog, or cook dinner either. This balefully ubiquitous assertion, that drugs and alcohol do not discriminate, will be seen again; it has its origins in the reliance on personification that was noted earlier in this chapter. I suggest that the reason that drug addicts and alcoholics will be found in every level of society has nothing to do with this thoughtless act of personification, or this conception of substances as possessing universally malevolent and destructive intentions; it has everything to do with the deeply flawed characters of those who become dependent on drugs and alcohol. The narrator of Swann’s Way observes of the obsequious hotel manager at Balbec ‘It is true that even within its walls there were people who did not pay very much and yet had not forfeited the manager’s

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esteem, provided he was assured that they were watching their expenditure not from poverty so much as avarice. For this could in no way lower their standing since it is a vice and may consequently be found at every grade of social position’ (Proust: 237. My emphasis.) This is the only reason that addiction to alcohol and drugs will be found in all classes and at every level of society, not because drugs and alcohol “do not discriminate”, but because drug addicts and alcoholics have succumbed to what used to be commonly known as vices.

Savage Usury The phrase “Savage Usury”, which provides my subtitle, is taken from Jack London’s ‘Alcoholic Memoir’ John Barleycorn (1913), in which London comments on the ruthless economy of addiction: Ah! - And I say it now, after the years – could John Barleycorn keep one at such a height, I would never draw a sober breath again. But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule – for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad, magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times, with savage usury added. (London, 1989: 31)

Addicts pay, with savage usury added, for their addictions, and they always have done. Alethea Hayter writes in her introduction to Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater ‘The effort needed for this strenuous job was only summoned up by renewed recourse to opium. He found that by suddenly increasing his doses for a few days running, he enjoyed a glow of mental energy, “preter-natural paroxysms of intermitting power” in which he could write brilliantly; but he paid for it by heavy suffering when the paroxysm was over’ (De Quincey 1986: 16). De Quincey himself writes in the opening pages of Confessions that his book might be justified on the grounds that the ‘benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule’ (30). In Timothy Shay Arthur’s Six Nights With the Washingtonians (1842), he recounts the story of a publican who, having signed the Temperance

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pledge himself, estimates the value of the alcohol he has in his bar at $200 ‘“There must be some mistake in your calculation,” the President said. “You have forgotten the sighs and tears of abused and neglected wives and children. The money that bought your liquor cost all these, and more”’ (Crowley, 58). As will be seen throughout Savage Usury, alcoholics and drug addicts typically refuse to accept, until it’s too late, that the price they pay for their preferred substances is not limited to the financial transaction. The alcoholic philosophy lecturer, Eddie Coffin, who narrates Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang, understands that the bill for alcohol and drugs always carries a surcharge ‘You always have to pay the bill, for knowledge or pleasure, and I don’t think I can afford the bill that’s coming’ (Fischer 1995: 181). Eventually, some other drug addicts and alcoholics see it too. Jack Sutherland writes in Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth of what is available on Santa Monica Boulevard “Do what you will with it – if you can pay the price (sometimes, as I would soon find out, that price could be a little while arriving and it wasn’t always money)” (Sutherland 2016: 64). Nor, crucially, is the price limited to the hangover, blackout or “come down”, however painful, disorientating, or shameful. In Christopher Sykes’ What Did I Do Last Night? he writes “I woke up the next morning remembering nothing, feeling just panic and pain. Judging by my hangover, it had been quite a night. Whatever I had done – and I was pretty certain I had done something – it had obviously involved a prodigious amount of alcohol. I had a monstrous, seething abomination of a hangover. I tried to lie still because my head hurt whenever I moved it, my dehydrated brain bruising as it banged against the sides of my skull” (Sykes 2006: 166). Alcoholics, particularly, come to see such consequences as just; Heather King writes in Parched “Later still, I insulted everyone, got sick, and blacked out; the next morning I woke with such a pounding headache I thought I was going to die…But somehow that all seemed a paltry price to pay” (King 2006: 66). Sarah Hepola writes ‘It’s weird how a woman frightened by her own blackouts becomes a woman who shrugs them off like an unpaid cable bill. But any heavy drinker understands the constant redistricting and gerrymandering of what constitutes an actual “problem”. I’d come to see blackouts as a surcharge for the grand spectacle of drinking’ (14). Such incidents, and they are legion throughout addiction narratives, do seem a relatively small price to pay, but that is because addicts are incorrect in their understanding that blackouts and hangovers are the full price paid for excessive consumption. The real bill, of course, is their eventual dependency, and

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its often ruinous, even fatal, consequences. When comparing the after effects of cocaine abuse with excessive alcohol consumption the notorious English ‘black magician’ Aleister Crowley writes in his 1922 novel Diary of a Drug Fiend “If one goes on the bust in the ordinary way on alcohol, one gets what the Americans call “the morning after the night before”. “Nature warns us that we have been breaking the rules; and Nature has given us common sense enough to know that although we can borrow a bit, we have to pay back” (Crowley 1999: 48). It is the nature of this “pay back” that confuses drug addicts and alcoholics. As will be seen throughout Savage Usury, the belief that you can get something of great value without paying a commensurately high price for it is the mistake made by all drug addicts and alcoholics. As a narrator observes in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting “Julie looked really good when she started oan smack. Most lassies dae. It seems tae bring out the best in them. It always seems tae gie, before it takes back, wi interest” (Welsh 1994: 78–79). This “interest” is the “savage usury” of my subtitle. In Gerard Woodward’s novel I’ll go To Bed at Noon an alcoholic character notes of another alcoholic ‘His neck had thickened. He had the beginnings of a double chin and a beer belly. The drink had taken its toll’ (Woodward 2004: 300). Although it is in very common usage, the phrase “the drink (or drugs) had taken their toll” is rarely analysed, but in such a context it is being used metaphorically, meaning a surcharge. Myers writes of her passion for crystal meth ‘You get high energy, adrenaline and happiness, almost for free, or so it insidiously appears, before the crash and burn cycle has ingrained itself upon my brain receptors and taken over my soul’ (64). As Myers comes to realize, drugs and alcohol give nothing for free. Jamison makes the same error ‘These were the nights – on the balcony, in the pub, by the bonfire – I carried as proof, saying See, it can be perfect, wanting so badly to believe that the drinking could electrify everything without price’ (160. Author’s emphasis.) There is always a surcharge which goes beyond the purchase price. But only a few of the addicts discussed in these chapters ever come to understand not only the inevitability of this transaction, but its naturalness, its obviousness, and its understanding of life’s moral economy. Crucial to the price that must be paid by the addict is that of value. In his introduction to American Junkie, Beaudoin makes a remarkable claim about heroin ‘Booze can make you giddy or furious, weed full of creative notions or dumb epiphanies, coke an unwarranted sense of self-worth. Only heroin can give you nothing. Pure, cold squat’

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(Hansen, vi). Obviously, this is not true, and, equally obviously, those who become dependent on heroin and alcohol find considerable value in these substances. Eddie Coffin, the alcoholic philosophy lecturer, knows better than Beaudoin ‘I suspect that most addicts don’t really want to give up (because you’re unlikely to be addicted to something you don’t like or which doesn’t throw some value at you)’ (110). The nature of this value, and how it is actually evaluated and measured by addicts, is an important aspect of this book. So, too, is the issue of what it costs the addict, and how they pay. Although the word “usury” has not been in frequent use since the second half of the twentieth century, it remains as a process at the very centre of capitalism. The few references to the actual practice of usury in addiction narratives do, though, address its two principal aspects. St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, perhaps the most literate of drug addicts and alcoholics to be found within addiction narratives, remembers that ‘usurers were consigned to the seventh circle of Hell. Under a rain of fire, their perpetually restless hands were a punishment for hands that had made nothing useful or good in their lifetime, just exploited the labour of others’ (769). Although rarely in a position to lend money, and far more often encountered borrowing it, or stealing it, a failure to create anything themselves, a debasing consumption without any form of production characterizes the lives of active drug addicts and alcoholics. The focus on its illegality, or its rapacious dimension, can be seen in Hans Fallada’s The Drinker (1944; pub.1950), in which the alcoholic narrator complains that his landlord cheats him when he pawns his goods to buy alcohol ‘But it did not help in the least to keep reproaching him for the usurious prices at which he availed himself of my belongings, giving me little, almost nothing, in return’ (Fallada 1990: 76). The word “usury” has connotations of rapacity, even extortion, as well as those of parasitical financial activity, which the more neutral word “interest” does not possess, and, therefore is more appropriate when discussing drug addiction and alcoholism. Money, work, debt, repayment, interest, assets, earnings, and capital play a large, pragmatic part in any addict’s life. Drugs and alcohol must be paid for, in some way, and the need to buy them operates across societal boundaries, from addicts begging in the streets to collect enough small change for a wrap or two of heroin, or a bottle, to seriously big spenders like Patrick Melrose, of whom St Aubyn writes, in 1992 ‘Patrick had never spent less than five thousand dollars a week on heroin’ (87).

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However, the “unearned”, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘Not earned by merit or desert’, also plays a very large part in addiction narratives. The unearned includes such monetary issues as begging, stealing, tax fraud, benefit theft, and street “taxation”, but I argue that, more importantly, it also incorporates the linguistic strategies, the actual chicanery of much addiction imagery: in particular, the similes, analogies, metaphors, and euphemisms which “earn” a desirable obfuscation, or, more frequently, an undeserved elevation, for the drug addict or the alcoholic. In his thoroughly risible Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, Bernard Hare writes of the titular, 12-year-old Grimshaw ‘He was wise beyond his years. He had an air of Socrates about him’ (Hare 2006: 21). Iris Murdoch gives some examples of the historical Socrates’ interests ‘How does intellect relate to will, and human wills to the Will? What are Platonic Ideas, how do they relate to the particular ideas which ‘copy’ them? At Parmenides 130 Plato portrays the youthful Socrates struggling with some similar problems’ (58). Grimshaw’s principal interests, however, involve shop lifting, smoking weed, sniffing glue and nail varnish, and avoiding school. Later Hare complains about the care system, lazily accusing it of a ‘Kafkaesque-top-heavy bureaucracy’ (49). He is seemingly unaware that not all bureaucracies are entitled to the adjective “Kafkaesque”. For that to be deserved, a sense of menace and even possible injury must emanate. Throughout addiction narratives, bureaucracies are actually portrayed as quite willing to endorse and even flatter addicts’ exaggerated sense of their own perspicuity; as in White Rabbit, when a medical doctor writes in his report on the drug-addicted narrator, ‘She is a street junkie with the wisdom resulting from many years of drug use, drug abuse, and drug addiction’ (166). That destitute drug addicts and alcoholics who barely manage to scratch a subsistence living on the streets are lazily, and often, described as “wise” or “street smart” beggars belief, and is an issue that will be further discussed in the chapter “The Streets”. The word “alcoholism” itself, first coined in 1849 by the Swedish doctor Magnus Huss in his essay “Alcoholismus Chronicus”, can also be considered an unearned elevation; from an uncomplicated maladaptive behavioural disorder to an “ism”. For thousands of years perceived a flaw, or failing, the bestowal of this single word created a complex condition, even a disease, which necessarily requires the intervention of the medical profession. Emotions, too, can be earned or unearned. The cheap, whisky tears so easily elicited from alcoholics by sad songs on a jukebox in a bar,

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or by the sobbing memories of a long lost love whose photograph is routinely drenched in the same whisky tears, have not been earned; sentimentality is just a form of sloth. The issue of “low self-esteem”, and its variants, is a persistent presence in addiction discourse. However, unlike peer-esteem, which is awarded (or not) by others, self-esteem can only be earned by individuals themselves. This may seem obvious, but as Murdoch writes ‘Philosophy is partly a matter of finding appropriate places in which to say the obvious’ (183). In my view, her statement here need not be confined to philosophy. The psychoanalyst Jerome Levin writes of the addict’s weakened sense of self ‘Closely related to this impoverishment of the self-concept is low self-esteem. This is also a consistent finding in a wide range of alcoholic populations’ (62). This view is extremely common, but surely it could equally be argued that alcoholics and drug addicts have quite enough self-esteem to refuse to live life like the huge majority of people manage to do. Addicts have a sense of entitlement; one that, for them, justifies an abdication from life as it is commonly experienced. Low self-esteem is almost always offered as a cause of addiction, but as will be seen in later chapters it is invariably a consequence of addiction. Raising one’s self-esteem requires effort, but overindulgence in opioids or alcohol is just not compatible with the kind of energy required to build up self-esteem. The heroin addict Ben constantly refers to his low “self-worth”, and so does his mother, referring to his ‘very low selfesteem’ (46). However, she also informs us that Ben’s final job only lasted three weeks before his addictions to heroin and alcohol rendered him incapable of continuing to work ‘He never tried to find a job after this, concentrating his efforts on improving his benefits’ (68). Ben does nothing but steal from the state, drink excessively, shoot up heroin, lie, steal, and cheat. Of course his self-esteem is low; it is quite impossible to see how it could be anything but low. Elizabeth Burton-Phillips’ Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid? shares a similar structure to that of Ben: both are narratives in which the accounts of the long-suffering mothers and those of their drugaddicted children alternate. Burton-Phillips writes of one of her sons, in a phrase that is endemic within addiction narratives ‘Heroin had robbed him of everything; all he thought about was his next fix. He had lost his self-respect’ (Burton-Phillips 2007: 95). The truth is that heroin, like alcohol, is an inert substance; heroin is not capable of “robbing” anybody. Ben gave heroin everything; heroin did not take it from him. Like Ben’s mother, Burton-Phillips also notes his reliance on the state

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benefit system ‘He had been claiming about £500 a month rent from various government departments such as the DSS. Such handouts were invariably spent on heroin’ (95). The two brothers, both heavily addicted to heroin, are thieves, drug dealers, fraudsters, and compulsive liars; not only do they willingly give all the money they have to buy heroin, they also give as much of their mother’s money as they can steal from her, or swindle out of her, to buy it. Like Ben, and like countless other drug addicts and alcoholics, they have not earned any self-esteem, self-worth, or self-respect. The most objectionable occurrence of the ‘unearned’ in addiction discourse is the misappropriation of martial imagery. Cat Marnell, in How to Murder Your Own Life, writes of her amphetamine addiction ‘Sometimes I couldn’t conk out no matter how many downers I took, so I’d just stay awake taking three Adderall at a time, vigilant, like a soldier in Vietnam on Dexedrine looking for Charlie’ (Marnell 2017: 151). When Macy asks her drug-addicted daughter, who has recently become a prostitute, whether she is in danger, her daughter replies “I’m a soldier, Mom. I’ll be fine”’ (330). Sadly Tess, like innumerable other addicts, was demonstrably not a soldier. She was later murdered and left inside a dumpster in Las Vegas. She was, like all other drug addicts and alcoholics, actually a deserter. Patrick Melrose is particularly keen on martial imagery, and he has a historical awareness other addicts do not possess ‘Unlike Pierre he preferred to take coke on its own until the tension and fear were unbearable, then he would send in the Praetorian Guard of heroin to save the day from insanity and defeat’ (199). Within minutes, Melrose again employs the imagery of war ‘Thank God he had found a vein. His heart rate increased like the drumbeat of a galley rowing into battle’ (200). There is considerable, authoritative support for such gratuitous martial analogies. McGreal writes in American Overdose ‘Opioids now kill more people in the United States than AIDS at its most destructive, and more in a single year than all the American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War’ (xiii). In Tightrope, Kristoff and Wuddun weigh in ‘Some 68,000 Americans now die annually from drug overdoses, another 88,000 from alcohol abuse and 47,000 from suicide. More Americans die from these causes every two weeks than died during eighteen years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq’ (11). Such invidious references to soldiers’ deaths in Vietnam and Iraq encourage the belief, noted earlier, that drug addicts and alcoholics are, somehow, warriors. The narrator of Even the Dogs revels in

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such imagery ‘Like rubbing at your skin till the vein comes up, easing the needle in, slowly pushing home the gear. Like in a war film when someone lifts a drink to the lips of a wounded and dying soldier, cradling his head in one hand and letting the cold water trickle into the desperate mouth. Wait all day for that’ (73). This inappropriate martial imagery is so pervasive within addiction narratives that it continues even after the addict has stopped drinking or using drugs. St Aubyn writes, for example, of the now abstinent Melrose ‘he had been weaned from his drug addiction in several clinics, leaving promiscuity and party-going to soldier on uncertainly, like troops which have lost their commander’ (305). Drug addicts and alcoholics have not been in any kind of war, not even with themselves; they are getting what they want: drugs and alcohol. It would be far more appropriate if the martial imagery so often employed in addiction narratives was derived not from the battlefield but solely from military hospitals and military prisons; specifically, the wards and cells which house the deserters and the malingerers, and those who used their weapons to blow off their own fingers and toes to avoid having to fight. In The Thought Gang, Fischer’s alcoholic philosophy lecturer sobers up sufficiently to list a number of important errors made by earlier philosophers, including Aristotle, Voltaire, and Hobbes, and then he asks ‘Which of our beliefs or practices will split their sides in the future?’ (149). If in the future there are historians of addiction they would be most unlikely to “split their sides”; the damage and the deaths which were directly attributable to alcoholism and drug addiction would be no laughing matter. It is to be hoped that such future historians will be aware, as we clearly are not, of the crucial difference between “judging” and “criticising”. They will not judge us, but certainly they will criticize us. The word “judging” is used constantly throughout modern addiction discourse as a synonym for “criticising”. Pooley uses the word in this modern manner ‘I used to buy wine on rotation from several different shops because I was worried that the cashiers would clock how much I was buying and judge me’ (35. Author’s emphasis). Later, she acknowledges ‘I suspect that the only person ever judging me was myself’ (36). However, without authority nobody can actually judge. The judge of a suburban flower show, for example, has the authority to award or to withhold prizes. If you have no authority you are merely a spectator, not a judge. The word “judgement” has for us, particularly in terms of people’s behaviour, connotations of superiority; anathema in a modern democracy. As a result we are careful not to judge but, crucially, neither do we criticize as we can

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no longer tell the difference between the two words. Anybody, though, is entitled to criticize, and future addiction historians will certainly criticize us for the ways in which we have addressed the enormous problems of drug addiction and alcoholism. Future addiction historians will certainly criticize us for our extraordinary faith in science, or, more specifically in Scientism. In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein goes on the attack: Scientism is the dogma of our day. It’s the sacred superstition of the smart set that savors its scepticism. It’s the product of the deification of the stolid men of science, so that the arrogance of the illiterati knows no bounds. More particularly, it’s the view that science is the final arbiter on all questions, on even the question of what are the questions. Science has wrested the questions of the deepest meaning of humanity out of the humanities and is delivering pat little answers to all our quandaries. (Goldstein 2011: 81)

Many modern experts and authorities in the field of addiction are as convinced of the boundless powers of science to unlock the mysteries of addiction as any group of medieval peasants were convinced of God’s omnipotence. Science does not have an answer for everything and when the issue is, specifically, the causes of drug addiction and alcoholism, not their consequences, then science, like medicine, has little useful to offer. Connectedly, these future historians of addiction will certainly criticize us for our smugness and vanity; for being so enamoured with our science and our sophisticated technology that we believed our views on addiction must be superior to those of our unfortunate predecessors who lacked access to all these fine instruments and who believed for thousands of years that addiction was the result of individual human frailties. In Cowardice, Chris Walsh describes the trial of Samuel Clements, a Union soldier in the American Civil War who was charged with desertion and cowardice. In his defence, Clements claimed as mitigating circumstances ‘being at times addicted to intemperance, I, was (at an evil hour) while under the influence of excessive drinking, decoyed into the service by speculators’ (Walsh 2014: 136). We might note that he does not claim to be addicted to alcohol itself, but to the act of drinking too much of it. Henry Chadwick notes in his biography of Augustine (AD 354–430) that he was often required, as bishop of Hippo, to rebuke ‘delinquent or

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weak clergy who fiddled the accounts of the church chest, or who found that their duty of hospitality disclosed in them a fatal weakness for the bottle’ (Chadwick 1986: 61). History is full of examples of thinking about drug addiction and alcoholism, all of which we have ignored because we were so vain we believed that there was nothing to be learned from our ancestors on this issue. Considerably more recently, in an article entitled ‘Death from a Salesman: Graham Greene’s Bottled Ontology’, Christopher Hitchens writes ‘To speak generally, if not absolutely, one may say that dependence on booze is a symptom of weakness’ (Hitchens 2011: 308). Yes, “one may say” that, but we don’t! Again, the suggestion that alcoholism and drug addiction are the result of individual, human weakness and vices is anathema to the modern age which insists that addicts carry no responsibility at all, none, for their dependencies. Then again, the cold-eyed scrutineers from the future I am positing may also note that we gave no place in our thinking about addiction to individual human choice. They may write scholarly articles and academic books which detail our grim, stubborn determinism and our concomitant refusal to acknowledge the role of free will in human affairs, however ruinous some of those decisions and choices are for drug addicts and alcoholics. There is, of course, a bleak comfort to be taken in determinism; events have been removed from our control. Murdoch, however, has some hortatory words for us ‘If we allow ourselves to be intimidated by new technological determinism, based on scientific or metaphysical ideas, we may also weaken our faith in morality, rationality and our ability to discern truth, and this weakness has political consequences too’…( 214). Perhaps our most egregious failure in the field of drug addiction and alcoholism, although in all other areas too, has been our inability to separate morality from religion. Murdoch writes ‘we cannot, in considering the ‘place’ of imagination in morals, avoid considering how and whether we are to separate morality from religion. This is indeed a main question posed by the diverse philosophies of Plato and Kant’ (335). Separating the two was less a question to be answered than it was a challenge to resolve for one of the most important and influential German philosophers. The theologian Rice Broocks is not quite correct when he states ‘Friedrich Nietzsche, who heralded the phrase “God is dead,” also asserted that with the death of God came the death of morality’ (Broocks 2013: 50). Nietzsche, writing in 1883, was confident that the West could live comfortably enough without a transcendental, supernatural deity, and indeed Protestants had been moving towards that goal since the Reformation, but he

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had observed how tightly religion, particularly Christianity, and morality were now connected. Nietzsche was concerned about the future of, and indeed the very nature of, Western morality once God had largely ceased to exist. History since Nietzsche suggests that he had every reason to be concerned. He was not especially interested in the disappearing deity, he was not a metaphysician, he was a moralist. One of his biographers stresses his interest in ‘the rationalist French moralists Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyere, Stendhal and Voltaire’ (Prideaux 2018: 160). Nietzsche was a moralist who detested Christianity. He envisaged a clear, unsentimental morality which was completely disconnected from religion. Many modern contributors to addiction discourse, who are themselves unable to separate religion from morality, are probably unaware that Nietzsche rejected both religion and alcohol. In The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain De Botton deftly summarizes the philosopher’s argument ‘Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfilment’ (De Botton 2000: 237). As will be seen in later chapters, many counsellors, therapists, and medical professionals, as well as very large numbers of addicts, are incapable of distinguishing religion from morality, even though there is nothing but anachronistic thinking and habit to link them in the twenty-first century. Moreover, this is just one of a very large number of failures to discriminate between words and their meanings that permeate addiction discourse. The word “discriminate” is a victim itself of this failure to separate; it is now understood solely in a pejorative sense. The word now only invokes images of suppression, of superiority (like judgement); it now has only the connotations of establishing unjust racial, class, and gender divisions. The first definition offered by the OED, though, is ‘Distinguished from others; perceived as distinct; differentiated’. It is important and valuable to separate, as examples, weak from weak-willed, a disease from a disorder, judgement from criticism, metaphor from reality, and medicine from morality. The various ways in which even very basic aspects of morality are persistently treated with contempt or derision, or totally ignored, will be an aspect of the next chapter.

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Works Cited Anders, Jim. All Drinking Aside: The Destruction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of an Alcoholic Animal. USA: CreateSpace, 2013. Barnes, Jordan. One Hit Away. Hawaii: Island Time Press, 2020. Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. London: Vintage. 2011. Benton, Sarah. Understanding the High Functioning Alcoholic. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Bowen, James. A Street Cat Named Bob. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012. Broocks, Rice. God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2013. Brown, James. The L.A. Diaries. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Browne, Stuart. Dangerous Parking. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Burton, Sarah. A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb. London: Viking, 2013. Burgess, Melvin. Junk. England: Penguin, 1997. Burroughs, Augusten. Dry. New York: Picador, 2004. Burroughs, William S. Junky: The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’. London: Penguin, 2008. Burton-Phillips, Elizabeth. Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid? London: Piatkus Books, 2007. Chadwick, Henry. Augustine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Clegg, Bill. Ninety Days. London: Johnathan Cape, 2012. Cocteau, Jean. Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure. Trans. Margaret Crossland. London: Peter Owen, 1990. Crowley, John, ed. Drunkards Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair and Recovery. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. De Botton, Alain. Religion for Atheists. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. The Consolations of Philosophy. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. London: Penguin, 1986. Diamond, Jonathan. Narrative Means to Sober Ends: Treating Addiction and Its Aftermath. New York: Guildford Press, 2000 Dodes, Lance. The Heart of Addiction. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Letters from the Underworld. Trans. C.J. Hogarth. London: J.M. Dent, 1937. Douglas, Cameron. Long Way Home. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Dresner, Amy. My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean. New York, Hachetter, 2017. Dupont, Robert L. MD. Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic. Maryland: Institute for Behaviour and Health, Inc., 2018.

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Eastman, Clive. Drink and Drinking Problems. London/New York: Longman, 1984. Erdmann, Jack. Whiskey’s Children. New York: Kensington Books, 1994. Fallada, Hans. The Drinker. Trans. Charlotte and A. Lloyd. Vermont: The Marlboro Press, 1990. Fischer, Tibor. The Thought Gang. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995. Forseth, Roger. Alcoholite at the Altar: The Writer and Addiction. USA: Cassandra Press, 2018. Galton, Della. Ice and a Slice. Great Britain: Soundhaven Books, 2013 Gill, A.A. Pour Me: A Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2016 Goldman, Albert.. Ladies and Gentlemen—LENNY BRUCE!!. London: W. H. Allen, 1975. Goldstein, Rebecca. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. London: Atlantic Books, 2011. Hansen, Tom. American Junkie. California: Soft Skull Press, 2017. Hare, Bernard. Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Harris, James. Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: CUP, 2015. Hart, Dr Carl. High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. Hepola, Sarah. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. London: Two Roads, 2015. Hitchens, Christopher. Arguably. London: Signal Press, 2011. Jenkins, Tiffany. High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2017. Johnstone, Nick. A Head Full of Blue. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. King, Heather. Parched: A Memoir. London: Penguin, 2006. ———. Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity and the Peace That Passes All Understanding. London: Penguin, 2009. Kristof, Nicholas D. and Sheryl Wuddun. Tightrope. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2020. Kucera, Dina. Everything I Never Wanted to Be. Dream of Things Media. 2010. Lanegan, Mark. Sing Backwards and Weep. London: White Rabbit, 2020. Levin, Jerome D. Ph.D. Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Addictions: A SelfPsychology Approach. New York: Jason Aronson Inc, 1987. London, Jack. John Barleycorn: ‘Alcoholic Memoirs’. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 Macy, Beth. Dopesick. New York: Head of Zeus, 2019. MacGraw, Ali. Moving Pictures. London: Bantam, 1991 Magee, Bryan. Confessions of a Philosopher. London: Phoenix, 1998. Markel, Howard. An Anatomy of Addiction. USA: Pantheon Books, 2011

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Marlowe, Ann. How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z . London: Virago, 1999. Marnell, Cat. How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir. London: Ebury Press, 2017. Max, D.T. Every Love Story is a Ghost’s Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. London: Granta, 2013. McCully, Chris. Goodbye Mr Wonderful. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2004. McGreal, Chris. American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts. London: Faber & Faber, 2018 McGregor, Jon. Even the Dogs. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Miller, Joe. US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Addiction. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019. Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Johnathan Cape, 1990. Moore, Liz. Long Bright River. London: Hutchinson, 2020 Morrison, Martha. White Rabbit: A Doctor’s Own Story of Addiction, Survival & Recovery. New York: Berkley Books, 1991. Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Nietzsche, Frederick. The Gay Science. Trans. Thomas Common. New York: Minerva, 2006. Novak, Brandon. Dreamseller. New York: Kensington Publishing, 2008. Olney, James ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980. O’Toole, Julie. Heroin: A True Story of Drug Addiction, Hope and Triumph… Ireland: Maverick House. 2005. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. London: Penguin, 1989. Phillips, Gary and Jervey Tervalon, eds. The Cocaine Chronicles. New York: Akashic Books, 2011. Pooley, Clare. The Sober Diaries. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017. Prideaux, Sue. I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. London: Faber & Faber, 2018. Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. Prowse, Amanda. Another Love. St Ives: Head of Zeus, 2016. Reynolds, David S. and Debra J. Rosenthal. The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. USA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Robinson, Jason with Malcom Folley. Finding My Feet: My Autobiography. UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003. Rogers, Anne. Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict—A Mother’s Fight. Milton Keyes: Lightning Source, 2016. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A Poe. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992. Slate, Steven and Scheeren, Mark, with Michelle Dunbar. The Freedom Model for Addictions. New York: BRI Publishing, 2017.

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Smith, Robert. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. Smith Steven. Addict: A True Life Story. London: Westworld, 1997. St Aubyn, Edward. The Patrick Melrose Novels. London: Picador, 2014. Stahl, Jerry. Permanent Midnight. London: Abacus, 1996 Storm, Jennifer. Blackout Girl. Minnesota: Hazelden, 2008. Storr, Anthony. Freud. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 Stringer, Lee. Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998 Sturrock, John. The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the first person singular. New York: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1993. Sutherland, Jack. Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth. London: Faber & Faber, 2016. Swenson, Sandra. The Joey Song: A Mother’s Story of Her Son’s Addiction. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2014. Sykes, Tom. What Did I Do Last Night: A Drunkard’s Tale. New York: Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006. Tennyson, Alfred. The Collected Poems. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994. Torday, Paul. The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce. London: Phoenix, 2008. Travis, Trish. The Language of the Heart. USA: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Vargas, Elizabeth. Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. USA: Grand Central Publishing, 2016. Vivian, Nicola. My Will: A Portrait of Love and Addiction. London: Zuleika Books, 2019. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1996. Wallace, W. Life of Arthur Schopenhauer. Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2003. Walsh, Chris. Cowardice: A Brief History. USA: Princetown University Press, 2014. Warner, Nicholas. Spirits of America: Intoxication in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Weiner, Jack. Drinking. New York: WW Norton and Company, 1976. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. Great Britain: Minerva, 1994. West, Robert. Theory of Addiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010. Wheen, Francis. Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate, 1999. Wilde, Oscar. Lady Windermere’s Fan. London: Prince Classics, 2019. ———. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin, 1985. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Sweden: Chiron Academic Press, 2016. Woodward, Gerard. I’ll Go to Bed at Noon. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004.

Language and Addiction

Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. Which treatment? Purging, leeches? —Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind, 1992 Except where a word is patently ambiguous, it is natural for us to assume that the different situations, or types of situation, to which it applies have a distinctive common feature. For otherwise why should we use the same word to refer t them? —A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, 1956 Charity, n. An amiable quality of the heart which moves us to condone in others the sins and vices to which we are addicted. —Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, 1887

It is common in addiction discourse to insist on the complexity of drug addiction and alcoholism. In My Will, Vivian writes, for example ‘the state of addiction is multi-layered, mobile and mysterious’ (xi). The pleonasm is characteristic of addiction discourse; her use of “the state of” before the word “addiction” is designed to impart a gravitas which enables her to make this totally untrue assertion. Addiction is not multi-layered (what could actually be in those layers?) Addiction is not mysterious either. Campbell writes ‘In my work as an addiction counsellor I’m still learning—learning about the complex world of alcoholism’ (14), and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_2

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later describes alcoholism as a “complex illness…” (33 So alcoholism, for Campbell, is both a world and an illness—two totally distinct categories of being which even John Donne would baulk at merging. Alcoholism, surely, like drug addiction, is not a world nor complex nor an illness. David Carr, in Night of the Gun—by no means alone in his endeavours—attempts to promote an unfathomable, impenetrable dimension to addiction. ‘There is a Delphic component to addiction. Anyone who denies that has no idea what he is talking about’ (Carr 2008: 351). I deny it, and I know what I’m talking about. We must assume that by “Delphic”, Carr is claiming that addiction is obscure, ambivalent, and ambiguous, yet he is himself totally committed to the belief that his alcoholism is a disease “Apart from the progression of the disease, if you wake up in that kind of hell, you might start looking for something to take the edge off” (91). Diseases are thoroughly unpleasant of course— indeed often fatal—but there is nothing ambiguous or obscure about them. Moreover it does not occur to Carr that his “disease” is only “progressing” because he drinks even more alcohol upon awakening in order to stave off the deeply unpleasant experience of withdrawal. Vivian, this time writing about her alcoholic father, offers the same insupportable understanding of alcoholism, and so joins the very loud chorus of voices throughout addiction narratives which claim that addiction is mysterious and complex ‘As a small child I couldn’t have known that there was no ‘simple’ way not to drink. That being dependent on it was complicated and dark to anyone who didn’t share the same addiction’ (296). This is nonsense, of course, but it is useful nonsense for drug addicts and alcoholics and their enablers. Dr. DuPont is literally stupefied when he thinks about the awesome mystery of addiction ‘To set the stage, addiction is both ancient and stunningly new. Addiction confounds understanding and humble efforts to solve it’ (vi). The first sentence makes no sense at all, unless, charitably, we assume that he means we are now capable of being addicted to a great many more substances and activities than ever before. Even if that is the case, though, that would not justify the claim that addiction itself is “stunningly new”; only that our predecessors did not have Netflix or many other modern goods and activities to which they could become addicted. Addiction is as old as human history and there is nothing in the slightest new about it. There is no other way of understanding DuPont’s second sentence: he means that addiction is a problem that is beyond human understanding. It is not. In Roaring Drunk, John T. Newton begins ‘The mind of the alcoholic is a

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complex beast and sometimes it can be very frightening’ (9). He offers no support for his assertion that there is something especially complex about the mind of an alcoholic, and fear itself is usually an uncomplicated response. These beliefs are characteristically self-aggrandising. There is nothing complicated about alcoholism or drug addiction; they are straightforward behavioural disorders. It is only the often tragic consequences of these maladaptive behaviours, the lives lost, the expense, that have created the urge to perceive the causes of them as mysterious, dark, and complex: even indescribable. Jamison comments of Stringer’s In Grand Central Winter ‘Stories of addiction are full of this insistence that addiction can’t be fully explained. It’s a trope of the genre’ (121). We have lost the earlier meaning of the word “trope”. The inability of addicts to describe fully their addictions is not a trope of the genre but a topos. A trope is (or was) a rhetorical device, like a metaphor, while a topos is the persistent appearance of a subject, or a narrative convention within a text. The indescribability of the addictive experience is indeed a topos of addiction discourse, precisely because it works so well with the connected belief that addiction is complex and mysterious. Candia McWilliam writes in her memoir of alcoholism and blindness What to look For in Winter “The world of addiction and recovery from it is full of necessarily approximate language” (McWilliam 2010: xiii). McWilliam is a gifted writer, often drawing attention to her own fondness for arcane and recherché words and phrases, yet she too subscribes to the belief that the language of addiction must be ‘necessarily approximate’. Such views further the belief that addiction is deeply complex, certainly too mysterious to be hemmed in by any language, no matter how precise and focused. In fairness to addicts and those who write about them, it should be acknowledged that it is of course possible that there are complex mysteries beyond our comprehension, limited as we are by our five senses. Many philosophers believe that such unknown, and quite possibly unknowable, areas of speculation are worth further philosophical investigation. This was the attitude of the philosopher Karl Popper when in 1946 he was a guest speaker at the University of Cambridge’s Moral Science Club. It is unlikely that modern readers would see the name of the club as anything other than oxymoronic; indeed in Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis, one of the characters says of a Professor who has written a text book on history and moral science ‘I said it was fine with me as long as he didn’t call himself a historian and moral scientist’ (Thayil 2012:15). The belief that

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research into morality could be conducted along scientific lines was the subject of lively philosophical debate at that time. The assembled philosophers and their students, familiar with the writings of Immanuel Kant (specifically the ‘categorical imperative’), as well as the writings of John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and, perhaps more importantly to them, G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), were looking forward to hearing Popper’s paper. Fischer’s alcoholic philosopher refers to the history of human thought and its greatest thinkers as ‘a few thousand years of highclass thinking from the hottest domes’ (110). There were certainly some “hot domes” in the audience that night at Cambridge. Wittgenstein, at that time a member of the faculty, could not have held a more oppositional position to that of Popper. His view is famously expressed in the 7th Proposition from the Tractatus ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (Wittgenstein 2016: 90). Fischer’s narrator is not particularly complimentary about his own profession ‘the history of philosophy is a series of brainroom brawls, a grotesque daisy chain of jaws fastened onto the legs of predecessors, like linked piranha. This is a profession where the knives come out quick’ (234). Coffin speaks metaphorically, of course, but in their droll book Wittgenstein’s Poker, David Edmonds and John Eidinow collect a number of first-hand testimonies from those who were at the meeting of the Moral Science Club, and there is universal agreement that Wittgenstein became so agitated, even angry, at Popper’s views that he took, not a knife, but a poker from the fireplace and brandished it at his fellow philosopher. This dramatic incident was discussed by philosophers for decades, and the reason for its longevity & resonance, according to the authors of Wittgenstein’s Poker, was that ‘it is the story of the schism in twentieth century over the significance of language: a division between those who diagnosed traditional philosophical problems as purely linguistic entanglements and those who believed that these problems transcended language’ (Edmonds and Eidinow 2001: 4). In the field of addiction studies, there is no evidence at all to suggest that the “problem” of addiction is one that transcends language. On the contrary, all the evidence from the evaluation of addiction discourse in this book indicates that addiction as a problem is made up almost entirely of “linguistic entanglements”. Crucially, I suggest, within addiction discourse there is an inability to understand metaphors, or even recognize them as metaphors. Nicholas Warner writes on early understandings of alcoholism as a disease ‘The metaphor “Physician of Souls” may remind us of another fact that adds

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to the complexity of the disease concept – its inescapable metaphorical dimension. To speak of alcoholism as a disease is to speak, in part, metaphorically…’ (Reynolds and Rosenthal, eds. 1997: 139). William White writes of Dr. William Silkworth’s influence on the early founders of Alcoholics Anonymous ‘In spite of its lack of substantiating scientific evidence, Silkworth’s concept of alcoholism as allergy was the first modern medical concept successfully used by large numbers of alcoholics as a metaphor to understand what had happened to them and to explain why they could no longer drink’ (258). The literary critic is likely to argue that it is considerably more useful to see the disease theory of addiction as a metaphor, as a trope that can be interpreted, rather than a genetically transmitted disease, as an inescapable part of the addict’s genetic makeup; as a code that cannot be interpreted but just is. Travis is correct when she writes ‘More so than cancer or tuberculosis, the disease concept of addiction is a literary construction…various individuals and groups articulated and promoted a coherent (though, again, not completely unified) philosophy of disease and recovery, sometimes in original ways, sometimes by reference to a host of preexisting cultural assumptions, stereotypes, and historical and aesthetic traditions’ (58). Addiction discourse is permeated with metaphors, virtually all of which go unrecognized as figures of speech and so, therefore, are rarely challenged, or even queried. “Demons” and “Disease” are the two most powerful metaphors to be found in addiction discourse. Their pervasive presence and their exculpatory strength have been, and continue to be, sufficiently significant for them to be more closely assessed separately: the former in the next chapter “The Streets” and the latter in the chapter “The Clinics”. In his illuminating introduction to James Lee’s memoir The Underworld of the East (1935), Mike Jay writes of the end of the nineteenth century ‘During this period a new pejorative vocabulary “opium den”, “dope fiend” was coined by a combination of Temperance Leaguers and anti-Chinese xenophobes, and with it a new metaphor for drug use: - “plague” or “contagion” – which was all too often taken literally’ (Lee 2000: x). As we shall see throughout Savage Usury, such words as disease, plague, contagion, and epidemic, which are actually metaphors, are still all too often taken literally. Iris Murdoch understands metaphor very well indeed. Serious discussion of states of consciousness, thinking, moral reflection, quality of being tends to use imagery and resort to art. ‘Seeing as’ is

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everywhere and is the stuff of metaphors. Metaphors are not rhetorical speech-aids occasionally resorted to. They are fundamental modes of understanding. We are exceedingly used to imagery and are continually employing it…Often we do not notice metaphors. (‘High’ and ‘low’ for instance). (306)

In the specific case of alcoholism and drug addiction the modern age is guilty of far worse than simply “not noticing” metaphors; we have, disastrously, mistaken metaphors for the real, the literal. Among the numerous charges levelled at us by future generations will certainly be our failure to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical. Chris Baldick offers the following definition of metaphor ‘the most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some quality shared by the two’ (Baldick 1990: 134). Susan Sontag begins her essay ‘Aids and its Metaphors’ (now published in the same volume with her influential book Illness as Metaphor), by invoking one of the most venerable of literary critics ‘By metaphor I mean nothing more or less than the earliest and most succinct definition I know, which is Aristotle’s in his Poetics (1457b). ‘Metaphor’, Aristotle wrote, ‘consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’. Saying a thing is or is like something-it-is-not is a mental operation as old as poetry and philosophy, and the spawning ground of most kinds of understanding, including scientific understanding, and expressiveness’ (Sontag 1991:91). In his novel Underworld, one of Don DeLillo’s characters looks out at the desert and thinks ‘It was all distance. It was hardpan and sky and a wafer trace of mountain, low and crouched out there, mountain or cloud, cat-shaped, catamount – how human it is to see a thing as something else’ (DeLillo 1997: 64). Yes it is human, all too human, to “see a thing as something else”, but it is important to remain aware that a thing is, actually, not something else. Sometimes, indeed, we must go one step further, and resist metaphors: recognize, as Orwell does in ‘Politics & the English Language’, what he calls “dying metaphors”. A newly−invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes

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there is a huge dump of worn−out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves’. (16)

There are numerous examples of ‘dead metaphors’ throughout Savage Usury; indeed I suggest throughout the book that contemporary addiction discourse is primarily composed of inappropriate, worn out, and lethally dangerous figures of speech. It is in evaluating the specific literary language of addiction that the literary critic may have a role to play in a field that has been dominated, as noted earlier, by sociologists, psychologists, and medical doctors. We should take the approach of the influential literary critic Northrop Frye who, according to one of his biographers, believed that ‘the study of literature purifies our experience of the private and irrelevant associations of stock responses’ (Ayre 1989: 280). In his 1973 novel Recovery, John Berryman writes that his alcoholic, symbolically named protagonist Alan Severance ‘enjoyed statistics but he believed narrative, what you had seen happen’ (Berryman 1973: 147. Author’s emphasis). Savage Usury is a work of literary criticism so the focus throughout is on the language of addiction, particularly on its selfserving metaphors and disingenuous euphemisms. We have undoubtedly also become too easily satisfied by the presentation of statistics, irrespective of the deadly tale they tell, because at least we are collecting data. However, we have become far less capable of analyzing the language within which the statistics are embedded. Heilig writes ‘Alcohol alone ranks as the third most common preventable cause of death in the United States’ (5). It is noticeable here that it is “alcohol alone”—only the substance—which is so deadly, while the actual consumers, who are drinking so much alcohol that they are killing themselves, have been removed entirely from this ostensibly neutral observation. McGreal writes ‘A crude calculation is that prescription pain killers have claimed more than quarter of a million American lives’ (xiii). Again, we see that the drugs have “claimed” lives; no mention is made of those who actually took the drugs. DuPont writes ‘An estimated 8 to 10 percent of Americans suffer from addiction to alcohol or other drugs’ (9). This ostensibly neutral, factual statement is really masking an ideological position which has enormous influence on American understandings of addiction. Just as I argued earlier that nobody “battles” an addiction, I suggest here that nobody “suffers from addiction”; they suffer, if they do suffer, because

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of their addiction, not from it. Addiction is not an illness, it is a consequence. It is grimly ironic to see that the reporters themselves are actually contributing to the lamentable statistics which are rolled out annually for our horrified inspection. Paul Armstrong writes in Conflicting Readings, a study of hermeneutics, ‘Metaphor is crucial to understanding and communication in the sciences as well as the humanities’ (Armstrong 1990: x). However, many modern writers on addiction seem to have forgotten they are using metaphor and have deluded themselves into thinking that they are writing objectively. It will be suggested throughout Savage Usury that we have paid far too little attention over the last century to the language routinely employed in discussing addiction, and, moreover, that ostensibly scientific language is not in the least transparent. When McCaffery writes, for example ‘This slow-rolling epidemic killed 500,000 people in the past fifteen years’ (ii), his use of the word “epidemic” is not a neutral description of an unfolding event, but a loaded word, and indeed a very dangerous metaphor. Sontag writes “My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor” (Sontag 1991: 3). Sontag is insistent that illness should not be used as a metaphor, because a disease is a fact and not a figure of speech. Equally, therefore, I am arguing that it should be recognized that a figure of speech, such as a metaphor, should not be employed as though it were a fact. Nevertheless, over the past century, this is precisely what we have done—and indeed are still doing. The first definition of the word “epidemic” in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘Of a disease: Prevalent among a people or a community at a special time, and produced by some special causes not generally present in the affected locality’. The danger in using the word in the context of drug abuse and alcoholism lies in its avoidance of individual agency: nobody who dies in an epidemic has done anything wrong, they have merely been unfortunate enough to be killed by it. The persistent use of the word “epidemic” furthers the belief that addiction to heroin, and alcohol, is somehow contagious, and occurs without the active, even eager participation of the addict. The word “plague” is now also increasingly used to describe the cause of the increasing number of dead addicts. DuPont writes, in a chapter entitled “How to stop the drug epidemic”, of the necessary steps we need to take to achieve this goal: ‘Defining the drug epidemic as a modern plague prioritises the need for a massive new effort to create and evaluate effective strategies to control, contain, and eventually eradicate it’ (115). A crucial feature of “diseases”, “epidemics”, and

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“plagues”, in the context of addiction, is that they do not discriminate. They carry off anybody in the way, not just addicts. Cyprian, Christian bishop of Carthage in AD 251, wrote an enthusiastic celebration of the plague which was killing Christians as well as everybody else in the region ‘As to the fact that without any discrimination in the human race the just are dying with the unjust, it is not for you to think that the destruction is a common one for both the evil and the good’ (McNeil 2018: 137). I suggest that the use of medical metaphors is yet another way in which agency and culpability are removed from the addict and transferred to, in this case, a malevolent outside force; indeed not dissimilar to addiction itself. It is another way of ensuring the absence of moral criticism. These carefully chosen words imply that nobody is to blame. Sontag writes of Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague ‘His use of plague, more epitome than metaphor, is detached, stoic, aware – it is not about bringing judgement’ (145). This is precisely what the ostensibly descriptive word “epidemic” does in addiction discourse: it actively seeks to ‘not bring about judgement’. The word “disease” serves the same function: to eradicate any criticism of the actions of the addict. DuPont works tirelessly to absolve addicts of any personal blame for their addictions ‘Although addicted people, like other sick people, are not responsible for their diseases…’ (24), and he later claims ‘Addiction to alcohol and other drugs is a malignant disease of the entire self’ (137). As was seen earlier, DuPont, like so many other writers on this subject, is fully committed to the personification of addiction ‘We have much to learn from the tragedy of addiction, a powerful, pitiless, and ultimately effective teacher’ (2). Such personification is pervasive throughout addiction narratives; indeed a number of classic rhetorical devices will be seen throughout Savage Usury, including persona, the adoption of an assumed character or role, anagnorisis (the eventual recognition of identity), peripeteia (the sudden reversal of fortune), aphonia (the assumption of meaning perceived by establishing connections), prosopopoeia (an inanimate object, in this case alcohol or drugs, or bottles and syringes, is ascribed human characteristics or is spoken of in anthropomorphic language), and epiphany (the comprehension of a life changing revelation). The most ubiquitous, however, and also the most dangerous of them all, is personification. What is being promoted through this disingenuous trope is the myth that addiction is a dangerous, external force which enables the writer to avoid attaching any agency or responsibility to addicts themselves.

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The principal problem with words such as “disease”, “epidemic”, and “plague” is not so much that they are incorrect, but that they encourage, and indeed help to create, the already powerful desire of alcoholics and drug addicts to abandon their own individual agency, to minimize their sense of free will, in accounting for their own addictions. These words, especially in the context of addiction, contain strong connotations of contagion, of an absence of choice on the part of the alcoholic or drug addict. Intimations of infection and contagion, and accompanying external attribution, are rife in addiction discourse. In Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, for example, Hare writes of his protagonist ‘Germs are the least of his problems. A number of quaint, old-fashioned viruses have already infected him: Ignorance, Destitution, Addiction and Want, to name but four’ (13). That addiction is a “virus”, one which Grimshaw has caught in a purely passive manner, is a characteristic addiction trope. What will be seen as a complementary, and equally egregious, characteristic of contemporary understandings of addiction can also be seen in Helig’s clearly deliberate passive structures. As well as the sentence quoted earlier, he writes ‘Addictive disorders kill and debilitate countless people’ (5). Yes, countless people who have drunk a great deal of alcohol, or who have used a lot of drugs, which is the reason they have “addictive disorders”, not the other way around. Helig’s phrasing, and he is far from alone in this, implies that these “addictive disorders” are entirely outside the addict’s control. What is striking here is the scientific (and medical) rejection of the individual addict’s participation in their own potentially fatal dependencies on alcohol or drugs. Rhetorically, metaphors are more powerful than similes; metaphors announce a transformation while similes claim a resemblance. St Aubyn is the author of some of the most beautiful and convincing similes to be found in addiction narratives ‘Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm’ (171). He can be equally impressive on the dark night of the soul moments that most addicts experience ‘all the harm he’s ever done crowded in like a troupe of fallen angels in a medieval painting, goading him towards hell with red hot pitchforks, their sniggering and malicious faces surrounding him with ugliness and despair’ (96). The reader understands that the similes pervading the Patrick Melrose novels are being used to complement the state of being

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heavily addicted to alcohol and drugs. These substances occlude what actually is; everything, everything, is only like something else. Similes are easy to identify but, like metaphors, can offer interpretive challenges, as when Pooley, for example, begins her book by explaining that she has never managed to go without alcohol for long ‘Each time I manage a short stretch without alcohol, I swear that I have now ‘recalibrated’, that I’ve seen the light and completely changed my relationship with booze. From now on we will have a perfectly healthy and functional relationship. But, like an abusive partner, the booze comes back fighting, and within a few weeks I am back to where I started, only more so’ (7–8). This passage incorporates simile and personification to present alcohol as capable of inflicting violence in the manner of an “an abusive partner”. We are not obliged to accept any figure of speech, although it is very unusual to see any of those used within addiction narratives, however rebarbative, actually challenged. Some readers may find alcohol being likened to some brute inflicting violence on a woman acceptable, even clever, other readers will demur. Metaphors metamorphose, similes claim a resemblance, but euphemisms are merely new names for something that was already present. The word ‘euphemism’ is taken from the Greek, and means both ‘sounding good’ and ‘used in speech’. Euphemisms soften blunter truths, so they are very commonly employed in addiction discourse. Frank Skinner, the English stand-up comedian, employs one of the more common euphemisms for alcoholism, and his use of inverted commas indicates that he is aware that he is using one ‘Of course, whether I actually was or, indeed am, an alkie, I don’t know, but I think it’s fair to say that I had what you might call a ‘drink problem’’ (Skinner 2001: 203). The variant phrases “a problem with alcohol” (or “a problem with drugs”) are also very commonly encountered. The compulsory use of the indefinite article is on its own very tactful; it implies that there could be other problems associated with alcohol other than drinking too much of it at every opportunity—and then invariably passing out unconscious. Alcoholics and drug addicts only have one “problem” with alcohol and drugs, and that “problem” is emphatically not that they are not using enough of them. Hugh Rawson takes euphemisms very seriously ‘Euphemisms are society’s basic lingua non Franca. As such, they are outward and visible signs of our inward anxieties, conflicts, fears, and shames. They are like radioactive isotopes. By tracing them it is possible to see what has been and is

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going on in our language, our minds and our culture’ Rawson (1981: 1). As his title Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk indicates, Rawson is particularly interested in their duplicitous nature. Euphemisms can be divided into two general types – positive and negative. The positive ones inflate and magnify, making the euphemised items seem altogether grander and more important than they really are. The negative euphemisms deflate and diminish. They are defensive in nature, offsetting the power of tabooed terms and otherwise eradicating from the language everything that people prefer not to deal with directly’. (1)

Normally, euphemisms are used to soften speech around such delicate and often taboo issues as bodily excretions, sex, and death. But within addiction discourse the most taboo subject of all is the willing participation of alcoholics and drug addicts in their own dependencies, and so we see a remarkable number of euphemisms designed to eradicate from any discussions about addiction “everything that people prefer not to deal with directly”. We have been too cowardly to acknowledge that addictions to drugs and alcohol are the result of individual moral flaws, so addiction discourse is heavily reliant on euphemisms which either exonerate the addict, or which obscure, even completely hide, the actual existence of the addict. Rawson’s division into two, very broad, categories is tenable, but with specific reference to addiction discourse, the names he gives to them: positive and negative, are unsatisfactory. His phrase “positive euphemisms” seems a wildly inappropriate term when the euphemisms of addiction are so deceitful and so dangerous. His “negative euphemisms” category is insufficiently specific for an evaluation of them. It would be more apposite to use the words “elevatory” and “obfuscatory”. I suggest that most, if not all, medical terms when applied to alcoholism and drug addiction are elevatory euphemisms, derived from the initial metaphor of addiction as disease. These include relapse, recovery, self-medicate, rehabilitation, and many others which appear frequently throughout addiction discourse. Their function is to deceive: to claim medical status for the self-indulgences of alcoholics and drug addicts. All words derived from a medical lexicon need to be carefully scrutinized. Like the word ‘disease’, they are really figures of speech, but now, through carelessness, laziness, and mendacity, they have attained a scientific, medical gravitas; a solemnity they have not earned.

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A nice example of the ‘elevatory’ euphemism appears in Crash and Burn, a memoir written by the stand-up comedian Artie Lange ‘By the time I began to relapse, she [his girlfriend] and I were so connected and so serious that she didn’t run away’ (Lange 2013: 270). This very popular euphemism “relapse” does here what it does everywhere; it obscures the reality of the situation, which is that the addict is, yet again, using drugs or alcohol. Writing of the difficulties in “treating” addicts, the authors of Tightrope employ two euphemisms to arrive at a cliché, a mantra; one which is repeated endlessly throughout addiction discourse ‘Another impediment is the perception that drug treatment is a Sisyphean task that usually fails, and that even after enormous investments of time and money most people will relapse. Yes, relapses are often part of recovery’ (134). Sisyphus does not “usually” fail, but if the goal of recovery is to avoid using drugs or alcohol then using drugs or alcohol can only be viewed as failures. The word “treatment” is itself misleading; it implies a medical condition which must, therefore, receive appropriate medical attention. But addicts are not ill, unless they have made themselves ill through their excesses; they are not entitled to use the word “relapse”. The alcoholic’s desire to engage and the drug addict’s urge to remain at a distance are not remotely symptomatic of any kind of disease or illness. The phrases “recovering alcoholic” and “recovering drug addict” should also be re-evaluated as both imply a disease, an illness, a sickness, where none actually exists. A “recovering” alcoholic is somebody whose life has been affected adversely in important ways over time by drinking alcohol, and will almost certainly be again if they resume drinking alcohol. The same holds true for the recovering drug addict. “Recovering” alcoholics are just people who remember where the bars are, people who remember fondly how pleasurable it was to drink alcohol; how much confidence and strength alcohol offered them, and, perhaps above all, they remember how immediately the glorious, often euphoric, effects of alcohol were experienced. Newton is frankly nostalgic about his drinking days ‘Sometimes when I’m sitting here in my flat on a winter evening, watching some mindless crap on the television, and I know that just down the road the pubs are full with people drinking beer, laughing, having fun, and I can’t be there with them, I miss it…It’s not really good for a recovered alcoholic to admit this but it’s true. I suspect it’s true for many others too’ (9). Of course it is. Jon Moriarty is similarly honest in Liquid Lover ‘I miss the hit, the swoosh of being light-headed, the sensation of liquidity, the rush of intoxication, the release of tension…I

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focus on the sense of flying after the first three or four drinks, when the reason I wanted to drink was momentarily extinguished; the fear deflated, the anxiety quieted, the self-hatred seduced, the void filled’ (21–22). The same is true of recovering drug addicts; they miss the solitary, blissful, isolated feeling; the one that is particularly generated by heroin. Addicts miss these feelings so much indeed that they almost invariably “relapse”. The word “relapse” is not at all descriptive; it is prescriptive. As will be seen throughout Savage Usury, alcoholic or narcotic “relapse” is not driven by thoughts, but by ungovernable emotions—usually impatience and fear—and is driven primarily by nostalgia. The obfuscatory euphemism is as widely employed as the Elevatory euphemism throughout addiction discourse. The prison doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple writes in Junk Medicine ‘Falling in with the wrong crowd as an explanation of misconduct has a superficial plausibility. I have heard it many times offered, with every appearance of conviction, by the parents, social workers, and doctors of drug addicts as an explanation of why a young man becomes an addict’ (Dalrymple 2007: 15. My emphasis). It is such a useful, exculpatory euphemism that it is used very widely. Kristof and Wuddun use a variation when they write of a young man who shot a woman during a robbery ‘Ian regularly missed school and, to Peggye’s despair, fell in with a rough crowd of older boys. He began shoplifting, accumulating his arrest record, and to the authorities he seemed incorrigible’ (176). The dishonesty and feebleness of the absolutely essential “falling” or “fell” are designed to stress utter passivity; it rejects any suggestion of volition on their part. “Falling” stresses the unsuspecting nature of the event, it implies that bad luck played a part and, in an infinitely more benign parallel universe, the addict could have fallen in with the Debating Society or the Chess Club. I suggest that in the entire history of drug addiction and alcoholism, i.e. in the whole of human history, nobody has ever “fallen in with the wrong crowd”. If that crowd was using drugs or drinking alcohol, or both, the future addicts made their way to them, deliberately and consciously. There is much involved in “falling in with the wrong crowd”: dissatisfaction with self, awareness of the wrong crowd’s existence, attraction to them, reconnaissance of them, infiltration of the group, and, eventually, acceptance. If the “wrong crowd” is using highly illegal drugs like heroin, common sense alone suggests that it will be sensibly wary of newcomers and so it always takes time and a lot of effort to be accepted. This phrase, infinitely valuable to alcoholics, addicts and those that collude with them, is another

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rhetorical device used to deny the active participation of the individual in causing their own dependency. There is, however, a striking lack of depictions of the “wrong crowd” within addiction narratives. Academics are rightly wary of the ‘argument from absence’, but it is striking that no addict has ever recounted the experience of ‘falling in with the wrong crowd’, or described the people of which the “crowd” is composed. What did they do with their lives, if anything? Moreover, the crowd is never envisaged as large enough to actually warrant the term “crowd”; estimates rarely rise above ten people, usually fewer. “Crowd” itself is actually understood as a metaphor, even by the people who use the phrase. The “wrongness” of this crowd is also less uncomplicated than might first be apparent. We might assume that it is “wrong” only in a teleological sense; that these people were certainly wrong for the individual addict who is being discussed. On the other hand, it could be a more universal descriptor; they were the wrong crowd in every conceivable way. Alternatively it could be that ‘the wrong crowd’ simply does not exist, and this is why they are not depicted in addiction narratives. If so, the ‘wrong crowd is actually more fable, or myth, than it is a figure of speech. No longer a literary technique it has become a narrative form itself. Addiction discourse is all too often so careless, dishonest, pleased with itself, jaw-droppingly illogical, lacking in intellectual curiosity, and so smugly enslaved to the past that, of course, it seethes with clichés. The function of the cliché is to prevent further thought; a statement, irrespective of its unoriginality, or its inappropriateness, ossifies over time to become a fact. In 2015, a team of researchers published an article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology unambiguously, if lengthily, entitled ‘Fifty psychological terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases’. The authors state their intentions clearly in the opening sentence ‘The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats’ (Front. Psychol. 6: 1100: 1). This laudable enterprise would be of enormous benefit to researchers of drug addiction and alcoholics. As an example of their approach we might consider their entry on “hard-wired”, a phrase which is pervasive in addiction narratives:

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The term “hard-wired” has become enormously popular in press accounts and academic writings in reference to human psychological capacities that are presumed by some scholars to be partially innate, such as religion, cognitive biases, prejudice, or aggression…Nevertheless, growing data on neural plasticity suggest that, with the possible exception of inborn reflexes, remarkably few psychological capacities in humans are genuinely hard-wired, that is, inflexible in their behavioural expression. (4)

Similarly, as one further example of their valuable work, the authors write of a word which is very commonly misused by those who discuss alcoholism ‘Denial, a psychodynamic defence mechanism popularized by Freud (1937), is an ostensibly unconscious refusal to acknowledge obvious facts of reality, such as the death of a loved one in an automobile accident…thanks largely to the popular psychology industry, the term has been widely misappropriated to refer to the tendency of individuals with a psychological condition, such as alcohol use disorder (formerly called alcoholism) to minimize the extent of their pathology’ (8). The authors group their list of 50 terms ‘into five overarching and partly overlapping categories for expository purposes: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. Terms in all five categories, we contend, have frequently sown the seeds of confusion in psychology, psychiatry, and related fields…’ (2). There is enormous, deadly, confusion in the field of addiction discourse too; virtually all of it attributable to the language employed to describe, evaluate, and theorize addiction. In Alcoholism: Genetic Culpability or Social Irresponsibility?, Ronald Marshall writes ‘The reason alcohol abuse remains a “confusing” issue is because science is combined with traditional beliefs, feelings, and expectations’ (Marshall 2001: 22), and, similarly, Stanton Peele writes in his seminal text The Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control ‘I marvelled at the strange amalgam of religion and pseudoscience that constitutes the current dogma about alcoholism and other addictions’ (Peele 1989: vii). Peele was writing in 1989, but the situation is now much worse. Addiction discourse is a Tower of Babel; permeated with contradictions, misnomers, myths, mistakes, and misconceptions. The psychology researchers employ five “overarching and partly overlapping categories” to evaluate 50 terms. I suggest that in the field of drug addiction and alcoholism it would be equally beneficial to reconsider the use of as many as 120 terms. These are not words and phrases

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which are used specifically by professionals—on the contrary they are all in widespread, popular use, and here lies the problem. McWilliam writes ‘Plain words are always under threat. The languages of severely systematised untruth and imprecision, that exactly mean what they don’t say, don’t say what they mean, rejig it how you will…’ (477–480). The “plain” words which bear closer scrutiny in addiction discourse can be placed into four specialist lexicons: the medical, the supernatural, the spatial, and the martial. Into the first category we can place many words and phrases used ubiquitously throughout addiction discourse: disease, epidemic, dual diagnosis, serotonin, dopamine, trauma, pandemic, neural pathways, symptom, nursing, allergy, illness, sick, pain, cure, condition, self-medicate, chemical imbalance, genetic predisposition, relapse, recovery, get well, dope sick, relapse, numb the pain, treatment, and rehabilitation. In the supernatural category we see another list of phrases and words pervasively used throughout narratives of addiction: these include magic, sin, God, Higher Power, hell, Hell, living hell, soul, limbo, purgatory, worship, rites, ritual, religion, alchemy, mystical, spirituality, spirits, cult, spell, satanic, salvation, heaven, nirvana, cursed, voodoo, possession, absolution, haunted, penance, rebirth, blessings, epiphany, miracle, resurrection, redemption, crucifixion, demons, curse, luck, chance, fate, destiny, demon, angel, and dope fiend. The third category is spatial: high, low, Higher Power, rock bottom, hit up, spiral down, full-blown, low self-esteem, void, pit, hole, absence, deep inside myself, boundaries, downhill, depths of addiction, downward spiral, high bottom, down in dumps, low bottom, and uphill struggle. The fourth category is comprised of completely inappropriate warrior imagery: battle, war, trenches, courage, civilian, war stories, mine field, soldier, warrior, and survivor. This last category includes all phrases which disingenuously claim some form of epic personal battle with addiction: battling with, cope with, deal with, struggling with, in the grip of, and wrestling with. It will be maintained throughout Savage Usury that drug addicts and alcoholics are not entitled to apply the imagery of warfare to themselves. They have not earned it; addiction to drugs and alcohol is a squalid surrender. What is emphatically not another category—indeed what we will not see at all in contemporary addiction narratives (unless as terms of ridicule and contempt)—is a collection of words derived from a common, pejorative moral vocabulary: envy, pride, anger, avarice, selfishness, impatience, vanity, lust, greed, sloth, and cowardice. As was suggested above, addiction is not a complicated matter, and addicts are

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not particularly complex people. It is the language we use to discuss addiction, that is confused and therefore confusing. Rather than complementing one another, these competing discourses invariably contradict one another. And the result, sadly, is chaos. In their evaluation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), Edmonds and Eidinow summarize one of his principal interests ‘If we examine how language is actually used, we will notice something else: that most terms have not just one use but a multiplicity of uses, and that these various applications do not necessarily have a single component in common’ (180). I suggest that within addiction discourse the four groupings of words listed above do indeed have a “multiplicity of uses” but, nevertheless, they also all have in common the connected function of eliminating, or at least obscuring, the willing, zealous consumption of alcohol and drugs by those who eventually become dependent on these substances. Sontag writes ‘Of course one cannot think without metaphors. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire. As, of course, all thinking is interpretation. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t correct sometimes to be ‘against’ interpretation’ (91). One of the major concerns of Savage Usury is to show that many, if not all, of the predominant metaphors, similes, euphemisms, clichés, and a number of other worn out figures of speech which permeate addiction discourse, are so inapposite, so misguided, so dangerous, and so wrong, that they should not just be abstained from, or even retired, but entirely eliminated.

Works Cited Armstrong, Paul B. Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation. Chapel Hill, NC, USA: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Ayre, John. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Vintage, 1989. Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: OUP, 1990. Berryman, John. Recovery. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Carr, David. The Night of the Gun. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Dalrymple, Theodore. Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. UK: Harriman House, 2007. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. London: Picador, 1997. Edmonds, David and John Edinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Lange, Artie. Crash and Burn. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

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Lee, James S, The Underworld of the East. London: Green Magic, 2000. Marshall, Ronald. Alcoholism: Genetic Culpability or social Irresponsibility? The Challenge of Innovative Methods to Determine Final Outcomes. Maryland: University Press of America, Inc, 2001. McNeil, William. Plagues and People. New York: Random House, 2018. McWilliam, Candia. What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness. London: Johnathan Cape, 2010. Peele, Stanton. Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Rawson, Hugh. A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk. New York: Crown Publishers, 1981 Reynolds, David S & Debra J. Rosenthal. The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. Amherst, MA, USA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Skinner, Frank. Frank Skinner. London: Century, 2001. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor & Aids and its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. Thayil, Jeet. Narcopolis. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus , Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Sweden: Chiron Academic Press, 2016.

Morality and Addiction

Physicians are like kings; they brook no opposition. —John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1613) Man has created new worlds – of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of moral demands —Karl Popper, The Open society and its Enemies, 1945. Debauchee, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it. —Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, 1887

Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls opens with the heavily compromised memory of a drug addict in a rehab clinic ‘The last time I saw Russell and Corrine together was the weekend of the final softball game between the addicts and the depressives. The quality of play was erratic, the recovering addicts being depressed from lack of their chosen medications and the depressives heavily dosed with exotic chemical bullets aimed at their elusive despair. Being myself among the clinically numb, I don’t remember the outcome of the game now…’ (McInerney 1992: 1). While many of the characters in Brightness Falls are “clinically numb”, those in McInerney’s collection of stories How it Ended, published eight years later, could be better described as “morally numb”. In ‘My Public Service’ the narrator, who with his colleagues is planning a practical joke which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_3

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could ruin a Senator’s career, is struck by an absence ‘We all raised a dozen practical objections, somehow unwilling to voice the moral ones…If one of us had raised his voice in indignation the others would surely have followed, but no one wanted to seem priggish’ (McInerney 2000: 55). While it is certainly difficult to discuss morality in any sphere of modern life, it is quite impossible within the discourse of addiction. Dalrymple is at first fascinated by the medical services set up in prisons to assist drug-addicted prisoners which largely involved ‘the prescription of a drug rather like the one the addicts were addicted to. And there was a strenuous, almost outraged, rejection of the idea that addiction was, at bottom, a moral problem, or even that it raised any moral questions at all (5). The removal of any considerations of conventional morality from discussions of alcohol or drug dependency has been sustained, persistent, and highly effective over the past century, so, yes, there would be “outrage”. In modern discourse addiction is not perceived in moral terms. Shoplifting, for example, is an especially attractive form of stealing to drug addicts, and many addiction narratives endorse and promote the view that it is not in any way an immoral act, even though it is inconveniently illegal, if the thief is an addict. Terrence Shulman, who describes himself in Something for Nothing as a “recovering shoplifter” writes ‘The simplistic notion that shoplifting and stealing are merely legal or moral issues is wrong…Stealing, particularly shoplifting, can and often does become addictive’ (Shulman 2004: vi –vii). Many think of shoplifting as a cowardly, parasitical crime, and who is Shulman to suggest that view is “simplistic”, just because he has designated it “addictive”? Because shoplifting can become “addictive”, then it is “simplistic” to think of this crime as a moral issue. Addiction now has its own weltanschauung; addiction is above the law, beyond morality; addiction is immune to judgement or even to criticism. The ignorant belief that morality is a “simplistic” issue can be found expressed in numerous addiction narratives. The truth is while drug addiction and alcoholism are simple maladaptive behavioural disorders, morality is a very complex matter and has been considered in that light for thousands of years. The OED offers fifteen comprehensive, mostly full page, definitions of the word “morality”. There are only four entries for stealing, and two of them refer to the word’s meaning with reference to motion. In The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there are almost one hundred entries under the general heading of “Morality”, and we should note that this is

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the “concise” edition. There are no entries at all for “thief”, or “stealing”. Of course, it’s always possible that someone stole the other entries. The issue of morality has been dismissed from any serious discussion about addiction for almost a hundred years. Even those writers who reject the disease theory of addiction, and who are dismissive of attempts to minimize the addict’s personal responsibility by reference to it, speak vaguely and euphemistically of the “behaviour” of addicts. Gene Hayman writes in his promisingly titled Addiction: A Disorder of Choice ‘…differences in social circumstances include differences in ideas, values, and attitudes. Thus it is reasonable to suppose that the relationship between social setting and addiction rate reflects the influence of ideas, values, and attitudes on the likelihood that drug use turns into drug abuse’ (Heyman 2010: 39). There is no reference here to individual choices, bad choices, to take drugs or drink excessively. Marshall accounts for adult alcoholism by suggesting ‘The social abandonment of principles could start in one’s early years and with custom, habit and modelling could leave teenagers without strong social and coping mechanisms themselves making them vulnerable to the condition called alcoholism’ (192). A literary critic or a philosopher might well ask what is a “social principle” in this case if it is not, firstly, a moral one? West writes ‘The study of addiction needs to be based on a theory of maturation. Addiction is a disorder of maturation’ (3). It might be more helpful to think of the qualities we associate with immaturity: perhaps impetuosity, selfishness, greed, and vanity. In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen mocks a dangerously euphemistic vocabulary which essentially medicalizes moral deviance when he notes of the bullying, thieving, stealing Billy ‘There was probably a good diagnostic label for Billy, corresponding to abnormal EEG waveforms or troubled red nodules or black lacunae on his CAT scan and to hypothetical causes like severe neglect or cerebral trauma in his preadoptive infancy; but his sisters, Robin especially, knew him simply as a terror’ (394). Only the indefatigable Peele is insistent on the culpability of addicts themselves ‘People are active agents in – not passive victims of – their addictions’ (Peele 1991: xiv). Peele too, though, is reluctant to use the vocabulary of morality ‘Drug abuse is a social response rather than a psychological disturbance’ (263). We need to go back almost one hundred years to find addiction being discussed in specific terms of morality, and then many modern readers recoil from the perceived harshness of the rhetoric.

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White cites Dr. Dana Hubbard of the New York City Department of Public Health in 1924, speaking at the prompting of the now muchderided Harry Anslinger ‘drug addiction isn’t a mysterious disease…drug addiction is simply a degrading, debasing habit, and it is not necessary to consider this indulgence in any light than an antisocial one’ (White: 1998: 158). White observes of Hubbard’s declaration here that he sounds ‘more like a law-enforcement official than a public-health official’ (158). He would do; Hubbard, like the much-derided commissioner of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger, is unsuccessfully resisting the increasing desire to medicalize anti- social behaviour. It is instructive to compare Hubbard’s comments on addiction, speaking as a leader of the medical community, with those of a modern medical doctor of equal status in that community. In late 2016 the then American Surgeon General, Vivek H. Murthy, announced in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had sent an email to two and a half million doctors, nurses, dentists, and other clinicians. In this email he insists ‘we can use our positions as leaders in society to help change how our country sees addiction — not as a personal failing but as a chronic disease of the brain that requires compassion and care. Eradicating the bias against addiction that too many people — including some clinicians — still harbour will be essential to creating an environment where people feel comfortable coming forward and asking for help’ (NEJM 2015, 375:25). The American surgeon general is appointed by presidential nomination and is the operational head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC). The post holder is, therefore, the leading spokesperson on issues concerning public health in America at federal level. The title of this prestigious office is sufficiently strange to English ears for one of St Aubyn’s characters to joke about it ‘Time to light a lethal, cancer-causing cigarette, time to fly in the face of the Surgeon General’s advice – as if you could trust a man who was a surgeon and a general at the same time. She called that working both sides of the street’ (158). Millions of Americans, however, do trust the surgeon general. Although the OxyContin crisis dented their reputation a little, Americans have always trusted, even venerated, their medical doctors. In Washington Square (1880), Henry James writes sardonically of the way in which the profession of medical doctor is viewed by Americans:

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This profession in America has constantly been held in honor, and more successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the epithet of ‘liberal’. In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two recognized sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science – a merit appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by leisure and opportunity.” (James 1986: 27)

These perceptive comments of James’ are even more appropriate today than when they were written. Medicine and science, as controlling discourses, have grown even more powerful since 1880, and the reasons have not changed. Medicine is no longer, in James’ subtle phrasing, “touched by the light of science” but instead is aggressively inseparable from science. Absolutely crucial to Murthy’s position above is the belief, much loved by the recovery industry but never proven or even capable of being proven, that drug addicts and alcoholics fear seeking treatment because of the “stigma” that is still associated with addiction. What is also very much in evidence in Murthy’s statement is his refusal to acknowledge any moral criticism of the addict: “…not as a personal failing but as a chronic disease of the brain that requires compassion and care”. Buried within this problematic belief lies another contemporary addiction fiction: it is taken for granted that any rejection of the disease theory, any emphasis upon an addict’s “personal failings” must, ipso facto, lack “compassion and care”. Murthy’s lofty, ostensibly caring and compassionate and scientific pronouncement typifies and solidifies the official position that drug addicts and alcoholics are in no way morally flawed, they are helpless victims. Finally, we might observe of Murthy’s statement that it is wondrously arrogant. The skills of the doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health professionals to whom he has written are much appreciated, of course, but we are entitled to wonder if they are really “leaders of society”. Olivia Laing is very impressed by medical credentials ‘Alcoholism is not a simple condition to define’. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, its essential features are ‘impaired control over drinking, preoccupation with the drug alcohol, use of alcohol despite adverse consequences and distortions in thinking, most notably denial’

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(6–7). It does not occur to Laing, or to other writers on addiction, to query the appropriateness of the compound phrase “Addiction Medicine”; she takes for granted that the treatment of addiction and indeed its very causes are medical concerns. DuPont is almost comically self-assured on this issue ‘Putting addiction into a medical context (always a good idea) is helpful in thinking about the question of personal responsibility for the disease of addiction’ (24). Surely it is not at all unreasonable to observe that putting addiction into a medical context is what we have been doing for at least a century, and the problem gets worse and worse. I suggest that medicine, including psychiatry and neuroscience, has nothing to offer in terms of explaining the aetiology of addiction. Murthy’s lack of perspective, his insistence on the importance of doctors, and concomitantly on the importance of science, is, of course, part of the problem. The blanket refusal of addiction discourse to evaluate drug addiction and alcoholism from a moral perspective is driven from the very top of the medical profession. As noted earlier, it has been almost a hundred years since those in any position of authority subscribed to the view that addiction is a moral issue. The insistence that drug addiction and alcoholism are not moral failings is shared by the most powerful and influential organizations in the West: the World Health Organisation (WHO), the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and, in the UK, the National Health Service (NHS). All the major funding bodies, all the enormous research grants, all the specialized equipment, all the power, everything that counts, are in the hands of these organizations, and they all insist that morality has no part to play in drug addiction or alcoholism. These bodies, which are deeply entrenched in Western society, reject as a matter of policy any suggestion that addicts are willing participants in their own dependencies. All of these powerful players, and many more, who present themselves as on the front line in the disastrous “War on Drugs” testify to the truth spoken by one of Don DeLillo’s characters in Underworld ‘You can’t fight a war without acronyms’ (DeLillo 1998: 606). There is an unpleasant greed discernible, too, in the depiction of the beleaguered scientific attitude to addiction being under constant attack from lamentably out of date moralists. They have all the pleasure of presenting themselves as valiantly advancing unpopular truths, all the while enjoying the immense privileges that accompany total control.

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Lance Dodes also insists upon the ubiquity of contemporary moral condemnation: All too often people suffering with addictions feel that they are bad or weak because of their addictions. Moreover, we live in a culture that frequently treats people with addictions as if their problem were caused by a moral deficiency. The idea that addiction is a physical problem may, then, provide some relief from guilt and shame. Understandably, this serves as a powerful reason to hold on to this idea, even though, like the idea that addiction is a moral deficiency, it is not true. (79)

There is no evidence provided to support this view that addiction is not “a moral deficiency”; all that can be found here is the belief that it just can’t be true. Dodes provides no evidence to support the view that addiction is not a moral deficiency. Like Murthy above, he blindly subscribes to the belief that it can’t be one. When Diamond claims that ‘moralism & addiction have not achieved anything like a satisfactory divorce’ (327), he is expressing the same view. It does not occur to him to wonder whether actually the divorce between morality and addiction might be “unsatisfactory” because, despite a lengthy estrangement caused by the interference of people who have accepted others’ conclusions without thought, they are—and indeed should be—inseparable. Morality and addiction are destined to be together; it’s time to reconcile them”. The neuroscientist Marcus Helig is adamant on what addiction is ‘I will offer a personal take on what addiction is: a malfunction of some of the most fundamental brain circuits that make us tick, and a disease that is not much different from other, chronic, relapsing medical conditions’. He is just as emphatic as Murthy on what it is not ‘I trust it will be clear what addiction is not: a moral failing, a simple inability to say no, or a condition that can cured by mystic incantations’ (8.) There is no reason for anybody to trust Helig’s claim that addiction is not a moral failing when he has not produced a plausible argument to support the claim. Naturally, a benign view of addicts’ morality has always found enthusiastic support among addicts themselves and by those who are paid to support them. In You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, her memoir of the classical musician Robin Lockhart, Louisa Young writes, in phrasing that could have been taken directly from Murthy’s article, ‘Alcoholism is a primary chronic disease of unknown cause and a slow onset,

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with genetic, psychosocial, cultural and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations…It isn’t a moral failing; an act of aggression; lack of willpower; personal. Nobody fills in a form saying”I’d like to be an alcoholic please so I can destroy myself and ruin the lives of everyone who loves me’ (Young 2018: 107, my emphasis). Jamison writes of the use of buprenorphine in so-called Medically Assisted Treatment ‘medication is importantly different from still using, which isn’t a moral failure anyway’ (449, author’s emphasis), while in Galton’s Ice and a Slice, a character insists that there is no shame in being an alcoholic because ‘It’s an illness, not a moral failing’ (326). Similarly, in Lisa Smith’s Girl Walks Out of a Bar her doctor tells her she should declare her alcoholism to her colleagues because ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a disease, not a personal failing’ (219). This can only get worse, and it does. In Grand Central Station, Stringer writes ‘Sure a druggie may mug you for a fix. A boozer might even kill you in a drunken rage. But this has little to do with their morality. It’s a clinically proven fact that psychoactive chemicals, such as alcohol and drugs, actually shut down the brain’s moral center. Be it a priest or a child molester, the effect is always the same, to put you beyond the rule of conscience, and it gets progressively worse over time’ (221). Naturally, like so many other addicts, Stringer is eager to accept the existence of this “clinically proven fact” and relies on it for his extraordinary assertion that mugging and even murder are not moral issues, as long as, of course, the thief or the killer is an alcoholic or a drug addict. That the brain has a “moral center” is an apriori assumption for Stringer, and his depiction of it as a sort of department within the brain, one of many departments, possibly painted white, is echoed by numerous drug addicts and alcoholics, as will be seen in later chapters. In such naïve constructions addicts’ morality is represented as a separate part of them and, like a CD player when wine is spilled into it, this moral part will be “shut down” by alcohol or drugs; almost as though these substances knew exactly how to navigate the brain’s circuitry and temporarily dismantle the unfortunate addict’s entire Department of Morality. We have no way of knowing what Murthy and Young (and innumerable other writers) might mean by their insistence that addiction is not a “moral failing”. No attempts by the proponents of this view have been made to define what they understand by such terms. They have simply and aggressively told us that addiction to heroin or alcohol is not a moral

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failing. So, for almost a century now, the public has been misled. We have been loudly informed, even bullied, by voices that emanate from impeccably authoritarian sources, without a scrap of persuasive evidence, that addiction to drugs and alcohol is a disease, which it is not, and so therefore cannot be a moral failing, which it is. In 1776 Rousseau writes in what was to be his last book ‘I wondered at the art with which human ingenuity manages to turn white into black’ (Rousseau 1979: 138). Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract, would surely see the total abandonment of morality on this issue as abhorrent and dangerous, while simultaneously noting what an excellent example it was of his observation. If being dependent on alcohol or heroin is not evidence of moral or personal failings, then we might justifiably ask what is a “moral failing”. The claim that alcoholism and drug addiction are not moral failings is predicated on the unproven belief that addiction to these substances is a disease. The assertion contains within it what we might think of as the elided “therefore”, the absent “ipso facto”. It is nothing short of remarkable that thousands and thousands of lives, and billions and billions of dollars, pounds, and euros, have been lost to a logical fallacy—the argumentum ad verecundiam—in which the speaker claims an authority in an area outside their expertise, based solely on their undisputed authority in an entirely unrelated field. In my view, a very good example of the fallacy can be seen in Murthy’s comment that we must view addiction “not as a personal failing but as a chronic disease of the brain”. Medical doctors, even those of Dr Murthy’s eminence, have no right at all to pronounce publically on moral issues. Murthy’s pronouncements, like DuPont’s, are an intriguing version of the Argumentum ad Verecundiam fallacy because these doctors cannot even claim to have authority in the field of addiction. The doctors here have exceeded their area of expertise and are declaiming on issues about which they have no special knowledge and therefore possess no authority. Indeed, this is worse than most examples of this common fallacy because the rigorous training of medical doctors involves the resolute suppression of making moral judgements or criticisms. The rest of society—the massive majority—are not specifically trained to avoid making moral evaluations and criticisms and are, therefore, under no obligation to accept this incorrect and damaging assertion. We are in great need of skilled medical doctors, but we should not forget that they treat the consequences of alcoholism and drug addiction. They have no, or very little, understanding of

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the causes of these disorders. Why should they? Why should we think that they do? I suggest that medical doctors have no more understanding of the causes of drug addiction and alcoholism than the nurses holding the hand of a dying alcoholic who is drowning in his own cirrhotic blood, or a morgue attendant who registers the arrival of a nineteen-year-old female who has overdosed on a mixture of heroin and fentanyl. Given that addiction is not a disease, of any kind, the medical profession has no right at all to impose its professional views onto a trusting public. Nevertheless, clearly, it has been remarkably successful at doing just that. The collusion of various governments with the medical profession over the past century on this issue amounts to an interminable trahison des clercs . Medicine has been the most powerful official voice on alcoholism and drug addiction for a hundred years, but the profession has not always had it their way. The Harrison Act was passed by the US Congress in 1914 with the aim of reducing public access to narcotics, especially opium and morphine. In American Overdose, McGreal writes of the financial implications of this of this far-reaching act ‘Because the law involved taxation, the Treasury Department was left to enforce it. Drawing on its absolute lack of medical expertise, the Treasury made a moral judgement that addiction was not a disease but a human failing’ (19). McGreal’s sarcastic reference to the Treasury’s lack of medical expertise, which he underlines with “absolute”, does not acknowledge that the belief addiction is a disease, and not a human failing, is also to make a moral judgement. Nobody who subscribes to this view, however, makes any effort to support the claim. There is no need—medicine’s battle over morality was won a long time ago. Moreover McGreal’s view is so characteristically modern—so thoroughly convinced that we are right, and that our unfortunate, primitive predecessors were wrong—that it does not occur to him that someone who thinks addiction is a moral issue has every right to think so. There is “absolutely” no need for that person to possess even the slightest scrap of medical knowledge. Our inability to separate religion from morality has made too many people too frightened to use terms of robust moral condemnation in public in case it appears that they are still enmeshed in anachronistic, illogical superstitions. Alain de Botton is surely correct when he writes in Religion for Atheists ‘Looking back upon centuries of religious selfassurance, libertarians stand transfixed by the dangers of conviction. An abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the

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public sphere. The impulse to question the behaviour of others trembles before the likely answer: ‘who are you to tell me what to do?’ (De Botton, 2012: 74–75). In his introduction to Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, the medical doctor Norman Doidge also notes the increasing power of “moral relativism”, suggesting it is now widely believed that ‘one group’s morality is nothing but its attempt to exercise power over another group. So, the decent thing to do – once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s “moral values” are – is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come from different (diverse) backgrounds. That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgemental” (Petersen 2018: xix). De Botton starkly claims ‘We have grown frightened of the word morality’ (14). The title alone of Kathleen Fitzgerald’s Alcoholism: the Genetic Inheritance indicates that the author is unlikely to criticize, or “judge”, the unfortunate alcoholics who have “inherited” alcoholism through no fault of their own. Her attitude to moral judgements of alcoholism is particularly vehement ‘For over thirty years, the American Medical Association has recognized alcoholism as a disease with identifiable and progressive symptoms that, if untreated, lead to mental damage, physical incapacity, and early death. Yet we still don’t treat alcoholism as a disease, but as a sin, a social stigma, a moral aberration’ (Fitzgerald 1988: xv). The major flaw in her reasoning here is that it is untrue. “We” do not treat alcoholism, or drug addiction, as sins, social stigmas, or moral aberrations. Huge numbers of people may believe alcoholism and drug addictions are sins, social stigmas, or moral aberrations, but they are not ‘treating’ any addicts. Fitzgerald also writes in similar fashion ‘The myth of alcoholism is that its victims are weak-willed, sinful, and selfish’ (xiv). No, the allpowerful myth of alcoholism and drug addiction is that addicts are not weak-willed and selfish. We note in Fitzgerald’s triple sequences of despicable perspectives from which to view alcoholism that she uses the words “sin” and “sinful”. She uses words which have a very specific religious connotation as though they were synonymous with words that have long been a part of a strictly moral vocabulary; one which has no connection at all with religion. The conflation, though, works throughout addiction discourse to promote the erroneous belief that any moral criticism of alcoholics is inseparable from a religious perspective, thereby contributing to the increasing contemporary reluctance to discuss morality in the context of addiction.

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It seems clear that the urge to reject the moral aspects of addiction has its roots in the increasing secularization of Western culture and its subsequent failure to separate morality from religion. Perhaps this is because most people have no comprehension at all of Christianity’s supernatural aspect, the actual core of it, and indeed the very point of it. Instead, it is perceived, when it is considered at all, as mainly in existence to supply outdated moral guidance, and so increasingly, and inevitably, as a mere adjunct to Government Social Services. It is difficult for even intelligent people now to hear the word “morality”, particularly in the context of drug addiction and alcoholism, without connecting it to religion, usually Christianity, even when the original comment was without religious content. In Matthew Raphael’s biography of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill W. and Mr Wilson, Raphael criticizes comments I made in an article entitled ‘Spiritus contra spiritum’ published in the journal Dionysos: Journal of Literature and Addiction. I argued there that AA is not a religious organization, although it has very successfully appropriated some significant religious terminology. AA actually replaces religion with a very vaguely defined and so highly flexible use of the catchall word “spirituality”. Raphael was not pleased with me ‘These are the very qualities, as Kevin McCarron argues from a strictly Christian perspective, that serve to distinguish A.A.’s flexible idea of “spirituality” from the doctrinal rigor of true religion’ (Raphael 2000: 86). I have never argued any point at all, academic or otherwise, from a “strictly Christian perspective”. I may be a drug addict and an alcoholic, but I’m not a Christian. However, in the Dionysos article I was discussing morality and alcoholism. In his preface to Christopher Cook’s Alcohol, Addiction, and Christian Ethics, Robin Gill warns the reader that Cook ‘is critical of simplistic moralistic approaches to alcoholism’ (Cook 2006: ix). Well, who is not? My own argument, though, as expressed earlier, is that there is nothing “simplistic” about morality. The subject has interested some of the “hottest domes” in human history, many of them not in the slightest religious. A priest as well as a psychiatrist, Cook certainly is critical of what he refers to throughout this exemplary book as “the moral model” of addiction. He writes ‘the so-called ‘moral model’ of addiction was widely dismissed by secular discourse as being unhelpful’ (133). He opposes the “moral model” with “secular discourse” making an implicit claim that the moral model has a religious base. That secular discourse found the moral model “unhelpful” tells us only what we would expect to hear because, I contend, the secular discourse to which he refers is itself incapable of

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separating religion from morality. Cook also writes ‘The moral model of addiction is now unpopular, and those who subscribe to the disease model would argue that it is not primarily a matter of moral culpability that one suffers from the disease of addiction’ (129). Well, yes; they would, wouldn’t they? In his concluding chapter, Cook recapitulates his principal arguments “It has been proposed here that the Christian concepts of sin and grace provide a theological framework within which alcohol, drunkenness and addiction might be understood without reverting to what is popularly thought of as being the outmoded ‘moral model’ (197). So, in his book Cook has described modern understandings of the moral model as ‘unhelpful’, ‘unpopular’, and now ‘outmoded’. These words, though, are merely descriptions; they fall well short of a rebuttal”. The reason Cook fails to refute the “moral model”, as it pertains to addiction, is that it does not actually exist in any context other than the religious. In this work of exemplary scholarship Cook does not refer to, or quote from, any authored text which argues specifically for a secular, moral approach to drug addiction and alcoholism. The fact is that what is commonly thought of, and routinely dismissed, as the moral model is nothing of the kind. The secular moral model has never been codified. When morality or the moral model is rejected or mocked in addiction discourse, it is actually a moral model that is being responded to in this manner; a subjective, often confused, individual understanding of morality. The moral model of addiction is really just a highly subjective melange of individual misunderstandings based on vaguely remembered church services or media-generated depictions of stern, heavily bearded, sombrely dressed, unforgiving-looking men always bellowing admonitions, imprecations, warnings, rules, and prohibitions. Roger Forseth, who wrote extensively about addiction, also cannot divorce morality from religion. In an article which focuses on Ernest Hemingway’s depiction of alcoholism in several of his short stories, Forseth explains the views on alcoholism offered by behavioural psychology and by disease theory advocates and then writes ‘The moralists judge that both these groups deny the devil’s work’ (92). No, moralists do not necessarily do that. Once religion is separated from morality, the “devil’s work’ and indeed God’s work are quite irrelevant to any moral assessment of alcoholism and drug addiction. A moral model, one without benefit of clergy, could be created. Unlike addiction, however, morality is a complex issue. The secular moral model might even be entitled to the description “multi-layered”, which we saw used, erroneously, of addiction itself in an earlier chapter. It is certainly

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possible to envisage at least three types of secular moralists, all of whom believe that drug addicts and alcoholics are behaving immorally. The first group could be called “local moralists”. They are less likely to think of drug addiction and alcoholism, and far more inclined to see drug addicts and alcoholics; they see individual human beings behaving immorally. They condemn the persistent drunkenness which leads to their neighbour’s nose being broken by her alcoholic husband. They harshly criticize the young addict who steals money to buy drugs from her brothers and sisters and parents. They employ their common sense to reject any suggestion by “experts” that alcoholics and drug addicts are suffering from any kind of disease or malfunction, except morally. They object to needle exchanges and safe injection sites in their neighbourhoods on the grounds that such collusion only enables drug addicts to continue a dangerous, immoral, and actually illegal practice. Additionally, such sponsored sites, they believe, encourage a criminal element, as well as begging and prostitution, and also lead to damage to local parks and gardens. They object to broken glass, carelessly discarded needles, public vomiting and urination, and worse. The second group of secular moralists could be called “national moralists”. This group share the same criticisms as the first group but they are likely to think more abstractly. Their criticisms also focus on the damage caused by such self-indulgence, but they evaluate it across the entire country. They deplore the cost to the taxpayer of alcoholism and drug addiction. They object to what they see as the squandering of money on useless rehab clinics, counselling, and therapy for people who suffer from nothing more than greed and laziness. They reject arguments that unfavourable socioeconomic conditions facilitate addiction by pointing out that even in what are considered to be extremely deprived areas the huge majority of people do not become alcoholics or drug addicts. The addictions, therefore, must be caused by individual, moral failure. They are incensed by the unemployability of alcoholics and drug addicts, who must then receive state benefits. They point to the number of children who are in state care because their feckless, selfish parents much preferred drinking or shooting up heroin to looking after them. They criticize absurd government policies and attitudes to addiction which put immense strain on the police, the courts, the probation services, the prisons, and the hospitals.

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Both these groups of secular moralists could be called “consequentialist moralists”. The third group, which could be called “speculative moralists”, agrees completely with the criticisms levelled at drug addicts and alcoholics by the other two groups. However, this third group is less interested in the visible results of these addictions as they are in what they view as the actual immorality of being a drug addict or an alcoholic. A major difference, then, between this third group and the other two is that they start their criticisms earlier. This group is appalled at the sense of entitlement that all alcoholics and drug addicts possess; they view the voluntary enslavement of addicts to substances that persuade them that the world is other than it is as profoundly immoral. They believe that becoming dependent on substances which have no truth in them, which only offer deceit and lies, is a continuous act of bad faith. There is no authenticity in being a drug addict or an alcoholic. There is no truth. There is no freedom. This third group believes that it is cowardly and vain to be an alcoholic or a drug addict. They argue that these dependencies indicate the presence of an abominable sense of entitlement; to continuously seek to abandon reality, which is where everybody else must live, is an immoral existence. Within addiction discourse, however, it is conventional to associate references to morality—even when unaccompanied by any religious terminology or even religious connotations—as stultifying, oppressive and ultimately damaging to the drug addict or alcoholic. While also promoting the common addict belief that addicts are their brains, “recovering” drug addict and addiction counsellor, Jody, explains to Denizet-Lewis that because addiction is a disease, morality can’t possibly play any part in it ‘When drugs like Vicodin enter my system, all bets are off. And my brain doesn’t differentiate between legal drugs and illegal drugs. My brain doesn’t go ‘don’t be addicted to this, Jody, because it came from a doctor’. My brain goes ‘I need more of this, and I will do whatever I have to do to get it’. We need to start treating this like the disease it is. Man, we’ve got way too much morality around all of this. It’s adding to the shame that fuels the addiction. And it’s killing people’ (268–269). Charitably (that great virtue) we could assume that it is only Jody’s brain, and not the entire Jody, that speaks so ignorantly. For Jody, as for so many others, morality only adds to the “shame” of addiction. As it is this shame which Jody believes “fuels” the addiction, then morality, far from being capable of ending this abject state, is a causal agent in maintaining it. There is no understanding at all of morality as valuable, or liberating,

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or life-affirming—or, in the context of drug addiction and alcoholism, life-saving. In the previous chapter, I referred to Nietzsche’s dismissal of Christianity as a source of genuine morality and in this, as in much else, he was strongly influenced by the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was no less condemnatory than Nietzsche of what he saw as Christianity’s corrupt understanding of morality, but he was more amusing in his criticisms. He writes, for example, in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). Theism indeed gives morality a support, albeit one of the roughest kind, one indeed by which the true and pure morality of conduct is fundamentally abolished, inasmuch as every disinterested action is at once transformed into an interested one by means of a very long dated but assured bill of exchange which is received as payment for it. The God, viz, who was in the beginning the Creator, appears in the end as an avenger and paymaster. (Schopenhauer 1938: 266)

His phrase “the true and pure morality” anticipates Nietzsche’s vision of a clear unsentimental morality, completely severed from Christianity. Both philosophers were very well read in pre-Christian Greek and Roman writings and were influenced in their thinking about morality, inter alia, by intellectual speculation which preceded Christianity by almost a thousand years. ‘Both of them confronted the eternal problem of the basis of morality if one does not believe in God’, Olivier Todd writes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus (156). Just so, morality is not the handmaid of religion. Iris Murdoch offers a concise summary of the views of Plato and Aristotle on the issue of morality ‘These reflections have led us to high matters and to a lofty conception of Aristotle’s purging of the emotions. Let us review the argument using more sober terms. Morality, as virtue, involves a particular acceptance of the human condition and the suffering therein, combined with a concomitant checking of selfish desires’ (Murdoch 1992: 109). Alcoholics and drug addicts are among the most selfish of people and are quite incapable of accepting the human condition; they are preoccupied, on the contrary, only with the amendment, alteration, and enhancement of it. Murdoch clearly understands morality and virtue as synonymous. However, the word “virtue” is as difficult to employ in relation to drug addiction and alcoholism as the word “vice”. Doidge summarizes his

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excoriation of “moral relativists” by arguing ‘the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears anachronistically moralistic and self-righteous’ (xix). Yes, this is undoubtedly true. The word ‘virtue’ is now virtually obsolete—a word itself defined by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary ‘Obsolete: no longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer’ (233). De Botton writes of the fourteenth-century Florentine artist Giotto’s work in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua ‘On the right hand side of the church nearest the nave, Giotto painted the so-called cardinal virtues, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice, followed by the Christian virtues of Faith, Charity and Hope. Directly opposite these were arrayed a matching configuration of vices: Folly, Inconstancy, Anger, Injustice, Infidelity, Envy and Despair’ (85). Giotto was, of course, being paid by the Church for his work and no doubt was compelled to include the specifically Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. However, all the vices that Giotto painted were well known to the pre-Christians, and Christian writers simply, and sensibly, incorporated them into Christian teachings about morality. For almost a century we have been told to believe that drug addiction and alcoholism are not indebted to any of the vices allegorically represented by Giotto; not a single one. It is well past time to consider carefully the actual logic that underlies the completely unsubstantiated yet pervasive assertion that addiction to drugs and alcohol are not evidence of “moral failure”. Today, a more contemporary taxonomy recognizes that the most ruinous of the vices are Anger, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony. We are not under any obligation to think of these vices in any theologically inflected manner; we need not call them ‘sins’. Graham Tomlin, writing as Dean of St Mellitus College, London, suggests in his book The Seven Deadly Sins ‘So it is perhaps best to see sin, or sins, not so much as breaking the rules, but rather as destructive habits. This book sees the seven deadly sins as “seven habits of highly destructive people”’ (Tomlin 2014: 11–12). Few people are as destructive, and indeed as self-destructive, as drug addicts and alcoholics. Perhaps we don’t need to refer to them as “vices”, either. Perhaps alcoholism and drug addiction are not vices. The subtitle of Greg Hurst’s biography of Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat politician, and leader of the party from 1999 to 2006, is ‘A Tragic Flaw’. The “flaw” is Kennedy’s

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alcoholism. In his preface, Hurst explains his reasons for writing the biography ‘Charles Kennedy always struck me as a likeable and fundamentally decent man, not a conventional politician but an obviously human one in his strengths and weaknesses’ (Hurst, 2015: ix). Hurst’s impressive biography is no hagiography; he refers to Kennedy’s alcoholism as a “flaw” and a “weakness”, while acknowledging that in having them he was “human”. Yes, human. All of us humans are as plentifully stocked with flaws, weaknesses, and failings as Jack London’s bar was stocked with booze. The French aphorist La Rochefoucauld, who wrote considerably more on vice than he did on virtue, was convinced of the essential role that vice plays in creating the individual character of all human beings. This view, as uncommon in France in the seventeenth century as it is now, is best expressed in one of his aphorisms, published in Maximes in 1665 ‘Vices have a place in the composition of virtues just as poisons in that of medicines: prudence blends and tempers them, utilizing them against the ills of life’ (La Rochefoucauld 1959: 60). Although he mocks vanity (especially) and romance (nearly as often), one of his translators suggests that La Rochefoucauld believed that the most damaging of all the vices was ‘la paresse, just simple laziness, apathy, the physical and moral inertia which lies at the bottom not only of all the evils but of most of the apparent virtues, since the truth is that people often cannot be bothered to do anything, good or evil’ (15). It is time to consider carefully the logic that underlies the completely unsubstantiated yet pervasive assertion that addiction to drugs and alcohol are not evidence of “moral failure”. Among the many deleterious consequences of the ongoing Trahison des clercs in the West on the issue of addiction is that we have been bullied into accepting the vain and deluded belief that transforming flaws and weaknesses into illnesses, even diseases, is indicative of progress, is even a triumph. Moreover, we have subsequently acquiesced in one of the great sophistries of our age: that there is always a reality underlying the appearance. We think we have become a society increasingly beguiled by appearances, but that is not at all true. On the contrary, we reject appearances, particularly on important social issues, in favour of an unqueried assumption that lying beneath, or behind, appearances, lies the truth. We now believe we know what our predecessors did not. We are capable today, immensely aided by our superior technology, of perceiving the reality of addiction; our ancestors were only able to focus on its appearances. It has been assumed that the issue

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of addiction is a “complex” one, and yet the only evidence provided for the ‘complexity’ is that we have not been able to prevent it. It has been assumed that the issue of addiction is a complex one; the only evidence for this is, of course, that we have not been able to prevent the death toll rising year after year. This failure, though, is not at all proof that the issue is complex. Believing that we can now see through the appearances of addictive behaviour to the realities that underlie addiction is nothing more than vanity. Alcoholism and drug addiction are just what they appear to be and for thousands of years have appeared to be: dangerous, antisocial, and self-indulgent. We have paid far too much attention to the medical profession, and we have been hectored by numerous powerful and authoritative organizations into accepting that alcoholism and drug addiction are not moral failings. We have listened far too much to alcoholics and drug addicts themselves. Above all, we have been very careless and lazy with our language. We have continued to see the problem as inherent in the substances of alcohol and heroin. But the problem is not the substances. It is the consumers who find the substances so agreeable that they become dependent on them who are the problem. The language of addiction is the problem. Macy describes the strenuous attempts of a medical doctor, formerly addicted to opioids, to persuade a very sceptical group of local residents of the value of Medical Assisted Treatment (MAT), the major treatment model used in a rehab clinic which was situated near their town. Too near their town for many of the residents ‘He tried to appeal to the group’s humanity…pointing out that addiction already was in their neighbourhood’ (320, author’s emphasis). Cant of this nature is a big part of the problem. “Addiction” is not already in their neighbourhood—drug addicts are already there. Heroin is not the problem; heroin addicts are the problem. Alcohol is not the problem; alcoholics are the problem. Macy cites a Baltimore therapist working with homeless heroin addicts who insists ‘the more we talk about the epidemic as an individual disease phenomenon, or a moral failing…’ (315). Because of the very low bar set by addiction discourse for logic, the therapist can safely assume that nobody will query his claim that an “epidemic” is an “individual disease phenomenon”. The second clause is testimony to the argumentum ad verecundiam which, as I have argued, is immovable in addiction discourse. No person, or organization—or not one with any authority anyway—does call addiction a “moral failing”.

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When Jay, the drug counsellor quoted above, says above “we’ve got way too much morality around all of this” his comment can only refer to what is actually a very large number of people who are highly sceptical of the notion that the addict is always a vulnerable victim of some sort or the other, but whose own sense of morality is completely and arrogantly disregarded or derided by all those who have power. The truth, as so often is the case when assessing the language of addiction discourse, is the opposite: there is far too little discussion about morality around the subject of addiction. Actually, almost inevitably, there is none. In less enlightened time than our own it was quite acceptable to refer to drug addiction and alcoholism as “vices”. Charles Woodman writes in A Reformed Inebriate (1843) ‘The story of his degradation, as dark as it has fallen from the reformed inebriate’s lips, was never equal to the reality. No reformed man from this slavish vice, I believe, is so lost to modesty as to tell all the disgusting reality’ (Crowley: 91 Author’s emphasis.). Our predecessors were wrong to use this word to describe alcoholism and drug addiction, and so were their predecessors and so were their predecessors…They were not wrong, though, for the cowardly modern reason that the word “vice” would upset the sensibilities of drug addicts and alcoholics, and, in addition, could not be applied to the victims of a disease, or of poor housing, or uninspiring teachers. I suggest that they were wrong for a better and more truthful reason—because they were incorrect. Alcoholism and drug addiction are not diseases, or illnesses, or disorders, or even conditions; but they are not vices either, and never have been. They are, rather, the result, or consequence, of vices. Alcoholism and drug addiction are the articulation or dramatization of vices of which we have always been aware: sloth, anger, greed, lust, envy, and pride. And the reason we have always been aware of these vices is that we have all succumbed to them. We are, after all, only human. Nowhere in addiction narratives do we encounter psychologists asking addicts (or even one addict) what they have done, recently, themselves, to acquire more self-esteem, or courage; or what have they done to reduce their vanity and their idleness. Nor do we find counsellors or therapists asking addicts what they have done, what effort have they put in, to acquire such old school virtues as honesty, humility, or patience. It takes time and effort, of course, to acquire such qualities, and alcoholics and drug addicts find time and effort hugely problematic. The former requires patience, and the latter needs energy and motivation, and addicts have no patience at all. They like speed, ease, and instant transformation, so their narratives do all

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they can to suppress the passing of time. A very large part of the appeal of alcohol and opioids, for those who become dependent on them, is that they work their magic immediatel y and effortlessly. Jonathan Franzen captures this beautifully in The Corrections ‘ After the nightmare of the previous day and nights she again had a concrete thing to look forward to; and how sweet the optimism of the person carrying a newly scored drug that she believed would change her head; how universal the craving to escape the givens of the self. No exertion more strenuous than raising hand to mouth, no act more violent than swallowing, no religious feeling, no faith in anything more mystical than cause and effect was required to experience a pill’s transformative blessings’ (186). However, the biggest hindrance to addicts acquiring old school virtues is economic. Alcoholics are used to paying good money to feel confident, attractive, and a welcome addition to the group, while drug addicts are used to paying even more money for the feeling of being isolated, totally protected, and completely free from any worries or anxieties. The harsh truth, though, which only some addicts come to understand, is that while all the so-called vices must be paid for (alcoholism, gambling, drug addiction, as examples) usually at usurious prices, the old school virtues can’t be bought. Rawson offers this definition of a well-known euphemism ‘Dutch courage (false courage, induced by brandy or other spirits)… (82, author’s emphasis)’. Similarly, in Underworld of the East, Lee writes of the cocaine addict: He hardly ever sleeps because cocaine banishes sleep, neither does he ever feel hungry, because one of the attributes of the drug is to banish hunger. He soon becomes like a living skeleton, although appearing to be full of life and energy to the last, but it is false energy; just the effort of the cocaine, using up his nervous energy at a greater rate than his system is making it. Soon a complete collapse must occur. (Lee 2000: 23)

Neither alcohol nor drugs can provide the consumer with an authentic, honest experience: cocaine gives only “false energy” and alcohol offers only “false courage”. In his essay ‘On Ethics’, Schopenhauer, always keen to disconnect what he sees as “genuine” morality from Christianity, writes ‘The ancients reckoned courage among the virtues and cowardice among the vices; but the Christian moral sense, which is directed towards well-wishing and suffering, and whose doctrine forbids all enmity, properly indeed all

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resistance, does not involve this, and hence it has disappeared with the moderns’ (269). Secular moralists would have no difficulty in dismissing Christianity’s neglect of courage and reinstating it as one of the principal virtues. The moralist would then see that when courage is reinstated as a virtue, its absence must be seen as a vice, or as a failing, or a weakness. It is inauthentic and untruthful for an alcoholic to buy courage over the counter of a bar, or from an off licence. Courage is a virtue and virtues cannot be bought. It is inauthentic and untruthful, too, for an opioid addict to buy serenity, detachment, and tranquillity down a dark alley, or in a crack house. These states of mind cannot be bought; they must be earned. To buy these illusions in such quantities, and to become so entranced and spell-bound by the immediacy of the transformations that dependency ensues, is immoral. Alcoholics are not doing anything to increase their confidence and courage. Instead of making the effort required to participate in the community without the protection and stimulation alcohol provides, slothfully, they drink. Drug addicts, too, although driven more by vanity than fear, buy substances which facilitate a highly pleasurable detachment from the dreary world of the quotidian. Their belief that they are somehow entitled to continuous narcotic release from reality is immoral, as is their selfish refusal to participate in the wider world that they are too vain even to acknowledge, let alone respect. These former addicts recognize that their lives were not “ruined” by impoverished childhoods, or malevolent genetic inheritances, or even “evil heroin” or “demon drink”. It was their flaws, failings, and weaknesses that drove their addictions, and now it is their virtues that could save them. Schopenhauer was so convinced of the importance of a secular morality that he restated the concluding sentence of his essay ‘Some Words on Pantheism’ in even stronger terms in the second paragraph of ‘On Ethics’: ‘That the world has merely a physical, and no moral significance, is the greatest, the most pernicious, the fundamental error, the true perversity of opinion…’ (266). The relationship between philosophy, particularly epistemology, morality, literary criticism, and language is central to the next chapter of this book.

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Works Cited Bierce, Ambrose. The Extended Devil’s Dictionary. London: Penguin, 2001. Cook, Christopher C.H. Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Crowley, John. ed. Drunkards Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair and Recovery. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Dalrymple, Theodore. Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. Petersfield: Harriman House, 2007. De Botton, Alain. Religion for Atheists. London: Penguin, 2012. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. London: Picador, 1998. Denizet-Lewis, Benoit. America Addicted. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. Diamond, Jonathan. Narrative Means to Sober Ends: Treating Addiction and Its Aftermath. New York: Guildford Press, 2000. Dodes, Lance. The Heart of Addiction. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Dupont, Robert L. MD. Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic. Maryland: Institute for Behaviour and Health, Inc, 2018. FitzGerald, Kathleen Whalen. Alcoholism: The Genetic Inheritance. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Forseth, Roger. Alcoholite at the Altar: The Writer and Addiction. Los Angeles: Cassandra Press, 2018. Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. London: Fourth Estate, 2001. Galton, Della. Ice and a Slice. Leigh on Sea: Soundhaven Books, 2013. Heilig, Markus. The Thirteenth Step: Addiction in the Age of Brain Science. New York: Columbus University Press, 2015. Heyman, Gene M. Addiction: A Disorder of Choice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Hurst, Greg. Charles Kennedy: A Tragic Flaw. York: Methuen, 2006. James, Henry. Washington Square. London: Penguin Classics, 1986. Jamison, Leslie. The Recovering. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2018. La Rochefoucauld, Francois. Maxims. Trans. Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin, 1959. Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. New York: Picador, 2013. Lee, James S, The Underworld of the East. London: Green Magic, 2000. Macy, Beth. Dopesick. New York: Head of Zeus, 2019. Marshall, Ronald. Alcoholism: Genetic Culpability or social Irresponsibility? The Challenge of Innovative Methods to Determine Final Outcomes. Maryland: University Press of America, 2001. McGreal, Chris. American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts. London: Faber & Faber, 2018. McInerney, Jay. Brightness Falls. London: Quality Paperbacks Direct, 1992.

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_______. How it Ended. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Murthy, Vivek. “Ending the Opioid Crisis—A Call for Action”. New England Journal of Medicine, 8, 2015. Peele, Stanton. Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Petersen, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. London: Allen Lane, 2018. Raphael, Matthew J. Bill W. and Mr. Wilson: The Legend and Life of A.A.’s Cofounder. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Rawson, Hugh. A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk. New York: Crown Publishers, 1981. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Trans. Peter France. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. London: Penguin, 1979. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Trans. Belfort Bay and Baliey Saunders. Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1938. Shulman, Terrence Daryl. Something for Nothing: Shoplifting Addiction & Recovery. Conshohocken: Infinity Publishing, 2004. Smith, Lisa F. Girl Walks Out of a Bar: A Memoir. New York: Select Books, 2016. St Aubyn, Edward. The Patrick Melrose Novels. London: Picador, 2014. Stringer, Lee. Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus: A Life. Trans by Benjamin Ivry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. Tomlin, Graham. The Seven Deadly Sins: How to Overcome Life’s Most Toxic Habits. London: Lion Press, 2014. West, Robert. Theory of Addiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. White, William. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. Bloomington: Chestnut Health Systems, 2014. Young, Louisa. You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol. London: Borough Press, 2018.

Philosophy and Addiction

Platitude, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snore in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. —Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, 1887 If we allow ourselves to be intimidated by new technological determinism, based on scientific or metaphysical ideas, we may also weaken our faith in morality, rationality and our ability to discern truth, and this weakness has political consequences too. —Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1992 Having been only an alcoholic for the last ten years I had some serious drug catching up to do. —Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, 2007

The body of work about addiction written by very literate addicts has been undervalued in terms of research by specialists in the field of addiction. This is itself connected to the belief that addiction is a medical matter, a scientific issue, and autobiographies and novels are not sufficiently scientific to merit serious attention from addiction specialists. Armstrong writes in Conflicted Readings ‘Literary criticism is presumed to encourage an inventive, metaphorical use of language analogous to

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its objects of study, whereas the sciences are said to employ a transparently referential, unambiguous notation’ (12). However, it is a mistake to insist that addiction itself is purely a scientific issue, given that the discourse of addiction is itself constructed out of fables and myths, and employs a variety of metaphors, similes, and many other literary tropes. Fitzgerald, for example, whose belief that alcoholism is a genetically transmitted disease is forcefully expressed in the very title of her influential book Alcoholism: The Genetic Inheritance, writes of four alcoholics she is using as case studies: Helen Paul, Allison and David are caught in the labyrinth blindly running from the mad monster alcohol who holds them hostage. If they pause, it hears their breathing; if they move, it hears their footsteps; if they look to the east, it comes from the west. Faster and faster, they must keep running down the convoluted corridors of rage, shame and insanity. The snorting monster at the very centre of the labyrinth of alcohol demands human sacrifice and greedily takes its toll from young and old, male and female. And the world laughs and points in judgement at those trapped inside, as if those inside freely chose to be there. (4)

Fitzgerald depends here upon exhausted and totally inappropriate imagery which invoke centuries old Cretan myths and metaphors into her ostensibly scientific interpretation of alcoholism. As so often occurs in addiction discourse, she personifies addiction, specifically here as a ‘monster’. This particular version of the monster actually “demands human sacrifice”. It is difficult to imagine a less scientific understanding of addiction. Her description stresses a “labyrinth” which is made up of endless “corridors”, both, of course, indicating a bewildering complexity. It is fascinating to observe the conflict inherent here in Fitzgerald’s images and her scientific methodology. One of the principal reasons that we have struggled, and largely failed, to prevent so many alcohol and drug related deaths is not because addiction to these substances is so dark and complex, so full of demons and other chthonic forces, but because we have also failed to analyze, in particular, the imagery, similes, analogies, and metaphors so pervasively employed throughout addiction discourse. Currently, this discourse is composed of a noxious brew of science and snake oil, therapy and thiamine, religion and relapse. However, drug addiction and alcoholism are not complicated conditions and successfully addressing them is only

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hindered by the reckless and inappropriate use of such imagery as ancient underground topography intended to illustrate or dramatize addiction’s convoluted and labyrinthine pathways. The literary critic is almost certainly less likely than other readers to endorse such misleading and inapposite rhetoric as Fitzgerald’s above. Perhaps contrary to popular opinion, literary critics rarely spend their time swooning over the perfect metaphor or the ingeniously placed caesura; they are actually trained to detect the cumulative connotations of images and metaphors and subsequently to identify an agenda that may not be overt. Literary criticism is a broad church; there are, of course, many very different types of literary criticism but as Paul Ricoeur suggests in his essay “Existence and Hermeneutics” the hermeneutic field can be divided into two: the “archaeological methods” (including psychoanalysis, Marxism and structuralism) and “teleological” approaches (including phenomenology and the New Criticism). Armstrong summarizes his understanding of the former approach: ‘Archaeological interpretation is a hermeneutics of unmasking. For approaches of this kind, meaning is never on the surface; rather the surface is a disguise, a mask that must be demystified to uncover the meaning behind it. The rule for reading is suspicion’ (17). This is a particularly appropriate approach for the literary critic who has become deeply suspicious of the self-serving nature of the discourse of addiction. A suspicious, or sceptical, literary critic can assess writing about addiction, and writing by those who are, or were, addicted to heroin or alcohol in at least two significant, and so far relatively underused, ways. First, perhaps most obviously, there is analysis of the rhetoric of addiction: the rhythms of the prose or poetry, the euphony, the repetition, paraphrase, and ellipsis as well as numerous other literary stratagems. Jerry Stahl’s description of shooting heroin in a toilet stall, for example, is rich in rhetoric we might think of as “literary”. While I softly, lovingly, secretly, eased the needle into my throbbing vein, watched with awe and reverence as the blood from my own body flowed back and up the blessed needle. Then I pressed down gently, shoved the poppy nectar, now stained red, slow as glacial erosion into my bloodstream and off on its holy journey north to heart and upward, upward, to the waiting portals of my brain, where the high priest waited, welcoming the latest flagrant sacrifice to the God of Solitude, the God of Strangeness, the God of Sweet and Terrifying and Secret Ecstasy. (Stahl: 1996, 151)

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There is much of interest here in the opening adverbial sequence; “secretly” is divorced from the two preceding tactile adverbs. The simile “slow as glacial erosion into my bloodstream” is striking, with its surely quite inappropriate suggestion of extended temporality, along with concomitant images of whiteness, purity, and even death. It is impossible to ignore the high number of words and phrases that are quite specifically religious: “blessed”, “awe and reverence”, “holy journey”, “high priest”, and it is surely noticeable that these are followed by specific references to three Gods. The word “secret”, this time offered as an adjective with a capital letter, concludes Stahl’s rhapsodic account of shooting heroin. Cope Moyers, too, in Broken, when describing his first hit of crack cocaine emphatically rejects the quotidian: Then it was my turn. In seconds my brain exploded, and I fell to the floor on my knees. My heart felt as if it would explode with light, with love. Everything inside me became mixed up with everything outside me, all fear disappeared, and only the rapture of light and love remained. Pure bliss. Ten orgasms packed into one…”Oh God, oh-my-god, “I whispered, not to the God of my upbringing, but to this now magical god that I loved with a passion that exceeded anything I had ever experienced. For a few minutes the rush held me captive, and when it released me, I wanted more, needed more, had to have more. (Moyers, 2006: 102)

Unlike Stahl, who stressed the physicality of injecting the heroin, Moyers does not depict actually using the crack pipe. Without the benefit of a material instrument, he immediately falls to the ground on his knees, the perfect position from which to experience that which follows. His heart fills with “light and love”, the outside world merges with his own consciousness; the subsequent absence of fear is offered to the reader as causal. The two word sentence “Pure bliss” is immediately contradicted by a sexual referent, while the concluding sequence escalates impressively and persuasively: from “want”, to “need”, to “had to have”. Again, like Stahl’s account, Moyers’ contains specifically religious references, but the initial higher case “God” is very quickly replaced by the lower case “god” because now it has been merged, in an oxymoronic manner, with “magic”. There is much to admire in these rhetorically adroit accounts of the effects two different drugs have on two highly literate authors. In addition, I suggest that just these two ecstatic responses to using heroin and

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crack should disabuse anybody credulous enough to believe the pervasive addiction adage that addicts take no pleasure in the substances to which they are addicted. As is so often the case in addiction discourse, the opposite is true. It should be shoutingly obvious to everybody that this is pleasure of such extraordinary intensity that of course there are people who are willing to die for it. As will be seen in later chapters, there are, just as obviously, many addicts who value such pleasures so much that they will certainly risk death for them, while not at all actively seeking it. Most literary critics expect to find in the texts that they read some acknowledgement of human freedom; the possibility of choice, or choices, for the narrative’s principal characters, or, at the very least, one of them. When such choices are denied to the characters, the archeological critic might examine the omnipresent patriarchal discourse of the narrative and note the numerous occasions when the privileging of the male voice is endorsed by, for example, overt phallic imagery. Another literary critic, also noting a striking lack of human agency in another narrative, might attribute this absence to widespread poverty among the principal characters and analyze not only the ways in which money is distributed but also draw attention to the use of fiscal metaphors and imagery indebted to money. I suggest that even a seasoned literary critic, an archeological one; a literary critic who is familiar with the theories of Marx, Lucas, and Eagleton and who is well aware that all our lives are shaped by appallingly impersonal historical and socio-economic forces will nevertheless still be more alert than researchers from different disciplines to either specific moments of individual choice within any narrative, or to the absence of such choices. Dalrymple writes of his addicted patients ‘Their ideas make themselves manifest even in the language they use. The frequency of locutions of passivity is a striking example … a heroin addict, explaining his resort to the needle, will say “Heroin’s everywhere.”’(2001, ix). As I noted in an earlier chapter, further instances of the language that Dalrymple’s drug addicted and alcoholic patients habitually use will also be found within a great many addiction narratives. Phrases which refuse to acknowledge decisive moments of individual choice are frequent ‘I found myself back on the game and back into using heroin’ (Coombs, 33), and Gee also refuses to describe the moment at which she actively decided to start drinking again ‘I found myself drinking a bottle of whisky a day just as I’d done before rehab’ (Gee: 2013: 25). O’Rourke is especially passive, even for the heroin addicted narrator of an addiction narrative ‘I ended

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up getting a little bag of heroin every time I got ecstasy’, and ‘I needed money to pay for my habit so I ended up shoplifting and dealing’ and then, perhaps unsurprisingly ‘I found myself locked up for six months’ (O’Toole: 75, 98, 113). The literary critic who is committed to the “hermeneutics of unmasking” the language of addiction discourse is duty bound to suggest that these passive locutions are not just a particular, or even peculiar, mode of expression; they are deeply and dangerously misleading. In particular, they enable the addict to avoid taking any personal responsibility for their continuing dependencies on drugs and alcohol. The reason that individual addict agency, the possibility of choice, the possibility of freedom, is largely absent from addiction narratives is because alcohol and opioids, inert substances, have been given all the power and agency that has been taken away from the addicts. But there was no “battle” or “struggle” with the addicts when their agency was removed by their enablers. The addicts willingly surrender their individual autonomy in favour of being in the grip of a substance so powerful that there is no point in even attempting to stop drinking it or stop injecting it. The literary critic, teleological or architectural, can argue that addictions are chosen, by individuals who have agency, and who have made choices. The virtual absence of personal agency among drug addicts and alcoholics in a very large number of addiction narratives has implications for that relatively small group of literary critics who publish scholarly work on addiction narratives and prefer to adopt the more optimistic, teleological perspective. Joseph Roth, the author of The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) died a penniless alcoholic, and in his introduction Michael Hofmann celebrates the sheer versatility of alcohol in the novella ‘Drink in the book is a philosophy, almost a formal device (as in farce); it is certainly not content, still less milieu. A drinker’s blackouts, confusions, and carelessness – or liberality – are a way of experiencing the world’ (Roth, 1990: ii). I suggest that drink in the book is not a philosophy. I suggest, too, that the assertion “A drinker’s blackouts, confusions, and carelessness – or liberality – are a way of experiencing the world” is also not true. Once again, the opposite is true; they are all a way of not experiencing the world. Many literary critics write about addiction with reference to specific authors such as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Jackson, William Burroughs, Elizabeth Wurtzel, James Frey, and David Foster Wallace, and naturally they discuss the alcoholism or the

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drug addiction of such authors and the relationship these addictions have to their work. It is equally natural for literary scholars to argue that their perspective and their subject matter allow them unique insights into the nature of drug addiction and alcoholism. In their introduction to The Invisible Enemy: Alcoholism & The Modern Short Story, the editors, Miriam Dow and Jennifer Regan, write that their collection ‘presents stories which, through the artist’s vision, probe alcohol’s profound emotional effects’, and later they write ‘These stories invite the reader to participate in alcoholic situations, and thereby heighten his awareness and understanding of alcoholism’ (Dow and Regan, 1989: xi, xii). Again, yet again, the editors take for granted that there is something about alcoholism to understand. In the last phrase, the actual alcoholic, the human being who drinks too much alcohol, is, once more, replaced by the word “alcoholism”. This word was invented by a medical doctor. “Alcoholism” is not a scientific word, but it is a proprietorial one. It is self-aggrandisingly designed to claim for medicine all those who anaesthetize themselves against life, rather than engaging in the lengthy and difficult process of becoming part of it. Olivia Laing also begins from the unproven belief that addiction is complex. Her book is part autobiography, part critical analysis of the lives and work of six of America’s most alcoholic authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. Like so many other literary critics who write about drug addiction and alcoholism, Laing is committed to the belief that addiction possesses something to think about, something to understand, and that literature permits a unique access to it: There have been many books and articles that revel in describing exactly how grotesque and shameful the behaviour of alcoholic writers can be. That wasn’t my intention. What I wanted was to discover how each of these men – and, along the way, some of the many others who’d suffered from the disease – experienced and thought about their addiction. If anything, it was an expression of my faith in literature, and its power to map the more difficult regions of human experience and knowledge. (12)

She claims of her chosen authors ‘after all, it’s they, who by their very nature, describe the affliction best’ (9). Alcoholism here is described as both an “affliction” and as a “disease”, yet, simultaneously, she states that alcoholism is rightly placed among “the more difficult regions of human

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experience and knowledge”. While a disease could be called an affliction, neither a disease nor an affliction can then, also, “map the more difficult regions of human experience and knowledge”. Diseases and afflictions are even less likely to map these difficult regions than a drunk driver in a strange town. However, in a manner that is ubiquitous in addiction discourse, instead of querying her own contradictory descriptions, the author cheerfully conflates them and uses their collective weight to argue that the work of gifted creative writers can offer illuminating explanations of addiction, as well as unique insights into its complex depths. In Equivocal Spirits, Thomas Gilmore is also insistent on the value of literature to the field of addiction studies and, of course, he understands alcoholism and alcoholics as complex ‘I believe that literature can contribute much to the understanding of the complex nature and causes of heavy or alcoholic drinking, and perhaps even more to arousing and shaping our emotional responses to the problem…’ (8). When he refers to ‘literature’s ability to recognize and preserve the complex humanity of the alcoholic’ (8), he joins yet another large chorus which is committed to singing this pretty song. Gilmore also believes that creative writers have access to the all-important emotional dimension of alcoholism. More boldly, he argues that literature actually triumphs over science in its ability to add the spiritual dimension ‘Nevertheless, much of the literature about alcoholism achieves great value when it directs our attention to the duality or equivocality of the spiritual dimension of drinking. When Brideshead Revisited conveys the paradox that the disease of alcoholism can ultimately mean salvation, it is exploring territory far beyond the ken of science’ (13–14). The aristocratic alcoholic Sebastian Flyte features prominently in the early chapters of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, but Gilmore’s claim for the superiority of literature over science here is invalidated when he claims that Sebastian attains ‘salvation’. Just as Huck Finn’s father is the town drunk, Sebastian is merely the monastery drunk. The reader’s last glimpse of him is as a dissolute sot, granted permission to stay by a group of indulgent, worldly monks who tolerate his weakness for alcohol. It is the sober Charles Ryder, in the closing page of the novel, who finally loses his hostile atheism and finds a glimmer of religious hope in the chapel at Brideshead. It is Ryder who can best be described, certainly within the Roman Catholic context of Brideshead Revisited, as moving towards ‘salvation’. Literary critics, in general, have been too often beguiled into believing that alcoholism and drug addiction are so subtle, mysterious, and complex, with such “depths”, that only

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the literary artist can fully, faithfully, descend into these depths and return with insights unattainable to others. Of course, some literary critics understand and, in the traditional role of exegete, interpret and communicate these perceptions and insights to the general reader. In The Sixth Lamentation, William Broderick writes of a central character ‘like all men who have known grave dependence on alcohol, he had a certain clarity of mind that was sharpened when drunk’ (Broderick, 2004: 381). Unfortunately, Broderick gives no examples of this clarity of mind when drunk in this book, and, actually, even the most sympathetic and zealous reader looks in vain throughout a multitude of addiction narratives for any evidence of this drunken “clarity of mind” to which Broderick refers. Moreover, there is also little point in the literary critic attempting to evaluate the “emotional responses” of alcoholics and drug addicts as they do whatever they can to avoid dealing with their emotions, especially if they are unpleasant. John Moriarty writes of his early anxieties in sobriety ‘I greet my new life with inexorable apprehension. How will I survive without liquor? Can I handle the emotions I’ve frozen for years with alcohol?’ (91). Dresner speaks for multitudes of drug addicts when she observes of her own heroin addiction ‘Drugs worked for a while, insulating me against my feelings and the world, but it was a temporary and certainly artificial safety’ (14). Hepola writes in Blackout ‘ they say drinking arrests your emotional development at the age when you start using it to bypass discomfort, and nothing reminded me of that like sex’ (185). Koren Zailckas writes in Smashed: Growing up a Drunk Girl ‘It seems some women’s emotional development arrests as a result of alcohol. They stall at the age they were when they had their first drink’ (Zailckas, 2006: xx). Moreover, the dismal trajectory of alcoholism and drug addiction inevitably means a narrowing of experience, a shutting down of dramatic opportunities and potential engagement with others. Jamison writes ‘I interviewed a clinician who described addiction as a “narrowing of repertoire”. For me, that meant my whole life contracting around booze: not just the hours I spent drinking, but the hours I spent anticipating drinking, regretting drinking, apologizing for drinking, figuring out when and how to drink again’ (112). Levin writes of one of his patients ‘As happens to all addicts, his life became progressively narrower and emptier. His interests and ambitions fell by the wayside’ (121). Indeed, the necessity of finally beginning the painful process of developing emotionally and actually beginning to engage with life is at the centre of the rehab narrative. In William Seabrook’s Asylum (1935),

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his doctor tells him ‘I think I begin to see what it’s about, but for a man past forty-five you seem to have the emotional reactions if not the mind of a child’ (Seabrook, 2015: 130). Similarly, Lisa Smith writes in in Unschooled ‘ The first ninety days of sobriety were incredibly painful as I learned some hard truths about myself. Drinking and drugging at such an early age stunted my mental and emotional growth. I had the emotional age of a 12 year old’ (Smith, 2017: 128). Abraham Twerski writes in Addictive Thinking ‘Mood-altering drugs are essentially emotional anaesthetics: they numb feelings. When people stop using chemicals, those emotions that were primarily numbed by the chemical are going to be keenly felt’ (Twerski, 1997: 91). These emotions in sobriety may indeed be ‘keenly felt’ but they are, inevitably, basic, unsophisticated, almost adolescent emotions. There are no emotional or spiritual “complexities” in addiction narratives, and so almost nothing of this type for the literary critic to evaluate. In The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, Tom Dardis writes of the alcoholic novelist William Faulkner ‘Probably no novelist until Faulkner had so convincingly handled the eerie passage of time in the mind of a drinker, in which one moment is succeeded by another many minutes or hours later, with nothing between them’ (Dardis, 1990: 56). It is certainly possible that the question “So what”? is insufficiently asked by literary critics who discuss the work of alcoholic and drug addicted writers. Augusten Burroughs, among others, in Dry also writes well on temporal elision in the mind of an alcoholic. ‘One drink, I tell myself. Just to calm my nerves from today. After I finish the bottle, I decide it’s time for bed’ (Burroughs, 2003: 12. Author’s emphasis). Torbay, too, is so aware of this alcoholic topos that he prefaces his novel with a quotation from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) “Wilberforce’s eyes went up to the ceiling, so that he did not seem to know how his glass went up full to his mouth and came down empty”. Torbay later offers his own version “The other thing I noticed was that, despite having only taken a single sip from my glass of wine, the glass was quite empty and indeed the bottle was more than half empty. I didn’t remember drinking the rest of the first glass, let alone the second glass I must have consumed” (20). Arguably, such depictions, or lack of them, have a quasi-anthropological value, but they offer little for the literary critic to analyze, or to “deconstruct”. Gilmore, who loses few opportunities to argue for the superiority of literature over science in understanding alcoholism, writes ‘In realizing that literature is better than science at conveying what drunkenness or

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alcoholism feels like – its terror, its pitiableness, its degradation, its ludicrousness, occasionally even its glory – we are recognizing its ability to capture spiritual qualities’ (11). However, there is only so much that can be said about what alcoholism, or drug addiction, “feels like” and readers are surely entitled to query the actual value of the feelings described. Readers are also entitled to question the legitimacy of Gilmore’s use of the word “spiritual” with reference to alcoholism here; this word is also pervasive throughout addiction narratives and its numerous and usefully vague meanings will be assessed in later chapters. What often passes for complexity or depth or unique insights within addiction narratives can better be described as poisoned, or polluted, epiphanies; compromised, ruinously flawed, by the profoundly artificial means by which they were generated. Writing of Malcolm Lowry’s alcoholic protagonist, Gilmore argues ‘Another source of suspense or tension in Under the Volcano is our sense that the Consul is engaged in a struggle of almost epic significance against dark, demonic, terrifying forces that are in large part represented or bodied forth by hallucinations’ (19). Or, the consul has poisoned himself with alcohol. These grotesque, horrifying hallucinations are typically created by alcohol poisoning, and by nothing else. When writing of her time at the famous Iowa City Writers Programme, Jamison observes of a story in the collection Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson, one of the most famous of the programme’s alumni: It was like Johnson was drunk-dialling us from the end of time to tell us what they meant, these sweeping fields whose edges were beyond our sight. One of his characters looks at the giant screen of a drive- in cinema and mistakes it for a sacred vision: “The sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” Johnson had mistaken the ordinary Iowa around us for something sacred, and drugs and booze had helped him to do it”. (23)

Charles B. Towns, at whose clinic the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, was treated considered the notion that alcoholism was a disease totally absurd. White writes ‘In Towns’ view, alcoholism was the product, not of some underlying disease pathology, but of the body’s systematic poisoning by alcohol and other drugs. In Towns’ view, this poisoning of the alcoholic’s tissue “set up a craving that in its cumulative effect, sweeps him along like a piece of driftwood on the surface of a stream”. Towns called for treatment

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methods that could “unpoison him [the alcoholic] physiologically and thus set him free psychologically”. (White, 117)

The eminently scientific Towns freely avails himself of a useful simile. It is very difficult to see how modern notions that addiction is a disease constitute any form of progress beyond Towns’ robust observation here that people become addicted to a substance because they have enjoyed it and consequently relied upon it too heavily. In one of the more often-quoted passages from John Barleycorn, one which Jamison alludes to herself, and one which gives Donald Crowley the title for his book on modernism and alcoholism, London writes ‘John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact’ (188). This sterile vision is hardly a “fact”, as indeed London eventually acknowledges. These are the speculations of a body and brain soaked in alcohol; these are the results of truly bacchanalian drinking, which later killed him. Crowley argues in The White Logic that as a result of this bleak vision London ‘acknowledges an epistemological dilemma. Exactly how is the White Logic visited upon the “imaginative man”? Does alcohol merely unveil what is otherwise hidden from common view? Or, rather, does alcohol itself produce the “pitiless, spectral syllogisms?” (Crowley, 1994: 41). London acknowledges an “epistemological dilemma”, but it is not epistemological and it is not a dilemma. London can either believe that alcohol “unveils” the reality usually hidden from us, or that “alcohol itself” produces the cruel, disturbing visions. This is not a dilemma. Certainly the two alternatives are both unpleasant, but the second alternative can be dismissed. “Alcohol itself” can produce nothing. Like heroin, alcohol is a consumer product. Moreover, it is surely impossible that drinking alcohol or injecting opioids, substances whose sole function is to deceive the consumer, could generate, even in the “imaginative man”, profound, truthful understandings of reality. ‘Epistemology is the study of knowledge and the justification of belief’ (Dancy, 1985:1), the philosopher Jonathan Dancy writes in the opening paragraph of his book. Jonathan Diamond’s definition is a little more comprehensive ‘Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the origins, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge’ (4). I suggest that there can be no “knowledge” when it is produced by the

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effects of alcohol or opioids, and that therefore London’s “dilemma” is not of an epistemological nature. In his assessment of Gregory Bateson’s influential essay ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism’, Levin focuses on epistemology: Bateson says that the self as it is usually construed—is ‘reified’, experienced as a thing rather than a process, and set in opposition to a disjunctive world. He considers this an illusion or, as he would prefer to put it, an epistemological error. There is no substantial self apart from its world; rather, the self is interrelation, the pattern of its communications with the world. Bateson believes that Western culture makes this kind of cognitive, or epistemological, error in its understanding of self, world, and their interrelationship, and that the alcoholic is caught in a particularly intense form of this error. (87)

It is, though, quite possible to experience the self “as a thing rather than a process” and not be in “opposition to a disjunctive world”. Arguably, one of the most important and necessary parts of the maturation process for all human beings is learning how to maintain an individual sense of self within a world in which they are very much expected to participate and not merely observer. The word “intense” within the phrase “the alcoholic is caught in a particularly intense form of this error” obviously argues that the alcoholic experiences the Western epistemological error more strongly than everybody else. The word “form” implies that the alcoholic also apprehends this epistemological error in a different manner to everybody else. Bateson does not make it clear in what way the form of the epistemological error is instrumental in creating alcoholics. But the word in this fruitful phrase of most interest is “caught”. Alcoholics are “caught” in this intense form of the error—presumably unlike everybody else. How were they caught? Why was everybody else not caught in the epistemological error with the same intensity as that experienced by the alcoholics? Bateson argues that it is the intensity of the epistemological error that leads to alcoholism. However, it is not possible to know how many people experience this error with the same intensity as the addict, but who do not become alcoholics, or drug addicts. It can then be suggested that alcoholics are not “caught” in a particularly intense form of the error, but rather that what separates them from almost everybody else is their response to what Bateson himself believes is an error common within

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Western culture. In his essay ‘Personality, or what a man is’ Schopenhauer writes ‘To a man possessed of an ill-conditioned individuality, all pleasure is like delicate wine in a mouth made bitter with gall. Therefore, in the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends on what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met, that is, upon the kind and degree of our general susceptibility’ (12). I suggest that drug addicts and alcoholics “meet” whatever occurs to them inadequately. Bateson’s argument shifts responsibility from the alcoholic onto Western culture itself, which, as Bateson insists, endorses and promulgates the epistemological error. Even philosophically, the alcoholic is portrayed as being “caught”, as a victim, which is indeed invariably the case in addiction discourse. As was noted earlier, Helig’s passive phrasing when informing his readers of the massive costs, financial and human, of addictive disorders works to sublimate the individual agency of the addict, and so too does Levin’s analysis when he writes of the error that alcoholics are “caught in”. But when the focus shifts onto what I argue is the aberrant reaction or response of the alcoholic, then what Bateson perceives as an epistemological error can be seen as an ethical, or moral error. Murdoch writes ‘The connection between ethics and epistemology is something we grasp at all the time in our nonphilosophical lives’ (177). Alcoholics and drug addicts have found what is to them a highly agreeable way of not having to experience Bateson’s epistemological error at all, let alone experience it more intensely than everybody else. The Western world is undoubtedly teeming with people who know all there is to know about pain, loss, trauma, and all the other ills which are the common lot of us all, but who don’t drink themselves senseless every night and day, or who don’t escape into a blissful, narcotic cloud at any opportunity. Somehow, they cope. It is not necessary to be a thoroughly committed philosophical Idealist to believe that our perceptions of the external world are created by us as well as received by us. This is, of course, what William Wordsworth is suggesting in his 1798 poem ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’: of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, and what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense. (Wordsworth, 1976: 55)

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Similarly, McWilliam writes ‘that we each invent a world I do not deny’ (275). As was noted in an earlier chapter, alienation, isolation, and anxiety are ubiquitously described feelings throughout addiction narratives, and widely reported by addicts themselves and addiction professionals. These powerfully apprehended sensations of abandonment and fear are “corrected” for them by the enjoyment, particularly the pleasure of incorporation into the larger group that they receive from alcohol. However, strictly speaking, alcohol gives nothing to the drinker. Alcohol doesn’t even give “false courage”. What alcohol does do is reduce the drinker’s sense of alienation, and their subsequent fear, by reducing the perceived threat of the external world. This is the reason that very shy people who have a few drinks are then able to strut around a dance floor, or ask somebody out on a date. The drinkers’ courage has not increased, but the fear of being humiliated, or rejected, or ignored is diminished by their sense of being part of the larger group. This pleasure, this relief from isolation and fear, is so immensely desirable for some drinkers that they drink past intoxication and into blackout and insensibility, and even death. Numerous writers articulate the immediate effect that alcohol has upon them. John Cheever apostrophizes in his Journal, for example ‘Oh sweet elixir, killer of pain. Gently, gently the world reforms itself into interesting, intense, and natural arrangements’ (Cheever, 1991: 166). Nicola Barry, in Mother’s Ruin, writes “The thought of mixing with other people terrified me”. This lack of courage is followed by the alcoholic’s inevitable response to this perceived hostility and their inability to confront it ‘Although I hated vodka, loathed the way it hit the back of my throat leaving a faint taste of burnt cardboard, I loved the instant boost it gave, the warm feeling that filled me with the confidence I so craved’ (Barry, 2007: 195, 203). As noted earlier, alcoholics invariably describe themselves as alone and isolated, as alienated misfits; such comments make up one of the most striking and mordant refrains in addiction narratives. Lisa Smith writes in Girl Walks out of a Bar ‘Life hadn’t always been about the next drink for me, but it had always been about finding some escape from a world in which I never felt at ease’ (43). In I’ll Quit Tomorrow, Vernon Johnson is committed to the belief that alcoholism ‘swallows up all differences and creates a universal alcoholic profile’ (author’s emphasis). And of the typical alcoholic seeking treatment he writes “He has sensed himself as isolated, abandoned, or deserted; has felt apart, yet paradoxically has had a strong need to conceal the fact he feels so separated from

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others” (Johnson, 1980: 5, 69. Author’s emphasis). In The Girl behind the Painted Smile, Lockwood writes ‘By nature I was a fearful person but never with a drink inside me’ (94). Drug addicts and alcoholics are very different types of addicts. The principal desire of heroin addicts is to resist and reject the engagement with the external world that the alcoholic uses alcohol for the courage to access. In her memoir High on Arrival, the daughter of John Phillips, Mackenzie Phillips, a successful musician and actress in her own right, recounts the first time she shot up heroin ‘I went first and the feeling was so intense I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t speak I was so high…Once I started, once my brain experienced the engineered pleasure of opiates in my bloodstream, it did not want that feeling to go way. Ever…Nonetheless heroin was not my perfect drug. It made me too fucked up to do anything but sit in a blissed out daze’ (Phillips, 2009: 249). It is worth noting here Philipps’ shifting of responsibility for her choices onto her brain: “it did not want that feeling to go way”. Strikingly it is not her, but her brain who wants to retain the blissful feeling. This belief that we are our brains is a topos of modern addiction narratives. In Denis Cooper’s Try, the icily distant narrator records ‘Across town, Calhoun sits in his fake-antique desk chair injecting a huge dose of heroin…He unties his arm, blinks, and a subsequent rush, though it’s more like an ease – warm, slightly sensual, trancy – cross-fades the world around him into a vague distant backdrop as well as it can, for a few minutes anyway’ (Cooper, 1994: 2). Later, Calhoun thinks ‘It’s almost perfection how heroin nails other people and places generally at the distance he’d like them to halt’ (36). The alcoholic’s desire to engage and be a part of the bigger group and the drug addict’s urge to remain at a distance are not remotely symptomatic of any kind of disease or illness. The phrases “recovering alcoholic” and “recovering drug addict” should be re-evaluated as both imply a disease, an illness, a sickness, where none actually exists. Sutherland writes ‘As I say, I survived to suffer on. For what? And for how long, oh Lord. How long? There is no ‘why’ in addiction. Explaining it to a normal person is like putting a GPS on a horse. Different planets’ (257). Sutherland’s belief that it is not possible to explain addiction to a “normal” person is, as was noted earlier, a topos of addiction narratives. All the many writers who use it assume that it is the incommunicability of addiction that prevents them explaining it to a normal person. As usual, they flatter themselves. The addict and the normal person don’t, as

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Sutherland implies with the simile, live on different planets, but neither do they inhabit the same planet. With characteristic self-aggrandizement addicts take for granted that the impossibility of explaining addiction is a testament to its incommunicability, its mysteriousness, and its depths. This is a pleasant delusion. The principal reason that addicts can’t explain addiction to a normal person is because someone who has found the illusory appeal of heroin or alcohol so impossible to resist that they are dependent on it, and can now do nothing but try and get hold of it, is trying to explain this immature, inadequate behaviour to someone who can’t begin to comprehend such a selfish response to life. The lack of a common moral perspective means that they inhabit separate moral universes; they don’t speak the same language. Alcoholism and drug addiction are not in the slightest mysterious, complex disorders, or conditions. Far from being something beyond human comprehension or articulation, drug addiction and alcoholism are much closer to a thoroughly discredited cultural practice such as slavery. In his Autobiography of a Drunkard (1846), Gough writes ‘I was the slave of a habit which had completely become my master and which fastened its remorseless fangs in my very vitals…Such a slave was I to the bottle, that I resorted to it continually, and in vain was every effort which I occasionally made to conquer this debasing slavery’ (Crowley, 139). Similarly, De Quincey observes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that he ‘…was a slave to this potent drug [opium] no less abject than Caliban to Prospero’ (De Quincey, 1986: 112). Alcoholism and heroin addiction are indeed states of servitude, of subjection, of abjection. Addiction narratives like Lowy’s Under the Volcano (1947), Jack Weiner’s The Morning After (1973) and James Fry’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), as examples, certainly dramatize the horrors of alcoholism and drug addiction, but they explain nothing; they only recount. Although Du Pont’s book is called Chemical Slavery, his understanding of slavery itself is compromised by his belief that ‘some people have brain chemistries that predispose them to impaired control of their use along with meeting the other criteria for loss of control of their use…’ (12). For DuPont, and many other very influential people, the addicts have had their brains “hijacked” by a substance which has now enslaved them. That drug addicts and alcoholics have enslaved themselves, through weakness, fear, and sloth is now never raised as an etiological issue. It is very rare for an alcoholic or a drug addict to be described as a slave in contemporary addiction discourse; even Forsyth’s title Slave Girl refers considerably more to sexual slavery

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than it does to drug addiction. However, some writers, only once they are clean or sober, though, acknowledge that they have been ignobly enslaved to a substance. Erdman, in the conclusion of Whiskey’s Children, writes ‘I’m a middle aged man with hope. I’m a person, not an object, and I won’t drink anymore or be a slave anymore…’ (192). Moriarty employs the imagery of slavery when he describes his attempts in sobriety to be of use to other alcoholics ‘I help others by demonstrating that it is entirely possible to shake off the shackles of addiction – to substances, emotional duplicity, negative thinking, and the other obstacles that divert our eyes and hearts from the true beauty of a temperate life’. When describing his drinking days, he writes ‘I needed a companion, and alcohol was ready to serve. And enslave’ (171). Erdman and Moriarty are only able to recognize that their addiction is no more than abject slavery, however, when they become sober; many, if not most, alcoholics and drug addicts never understand the true nature of their relationship with alcohol and drugs. The opposite of slavery is freedom. In the introduction to Junky, Burroughs writes: I worked in factories and offices. I played around the edges of crime. But my hundred and fifty dollars per month was always there. I did not have to have money. It seemed a romantic extravagance to jeopardize my freedom by some token act of crime. It was at this time and under these circumstances that I came in contact with junk, became an addict, and thereby gained the motivation, the real need for money I had never had before. (xiv)

It is freedom which alcoholics and drug addicts are prepared to lose. They don’t want freedom; its demands are too onerous. They want to escape, merely. Alcoholics and drug addicts find freedom forbidding. In Trainspotting, Renton’s famous rant centres on some grim scenarios which are open to all in a free society: Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spiritcrushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life. (TS 187)

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Renton and his friends choose heroin instead, and Irvine Welsh stresses that they all do choose to use heroin; no dark, determinist forces drive any of them towards addiction. Gene Heyman’s Addiction: a disorder of choice (2009) and Jeffrey Schaler’s Addiction is a choice (2000) are admirable books: cogently argued and persuasive. Addicts do indeed choose their addictions, but they are the consequences of dozens of, even hundreds, of individual choices to pour another scotch or fill another pipe. A remarkable number of addicts are completely convinced that they didn’t choose to become addicted in the beginning ‘I didn’t choose to be an alcoholic’ (14) Anders insists, while Moyers, addressing the Rotary Club in St Paul’s, Minnesota, is no less insistent about the absence of choice in his addiction ‘” I didn’t grow up thinking I would become an alcoholic or an addict” I said. ‘My parents didn’t raise me for that to happen, no one expected it to happen but it did. I didn’t choose to be an addict. I had everything I could ever want in terms of love and being cared for, but I still became addicted to alcohol and drugs’ (324). The reason he became addicted, he claims, is that he has a disease. The disease of addiction. That loaded word “disease” effortlessly satisfies all those who believe that a word replaces an explanation. Anybody who is or was a drug addict or an alcoholic undoubtedly chose their addiction. The belief that we have the power to choose, to speak or act as we please, within well known limits, including those imposed by our corporeal state, is usually referred to as “free will”. Wittgenstein offers a beautifully compressed definition ‘freedom of will consists in the fact that future actions can’t be known now (Wittgenstein, or Murdoch? 24). The opposing belief is usually referred to as “determinism”, and is often preceded by a qualifier, such as “socio-economic determinism” or “biological determinism”. The attraction of all forms of determinism to alcoholics, drug addicts, and their enablers is that they not only support laziness and vanity, they actively encourage such weaknesses. Renton’s attitude to the wider world is nicely captured during a session in which he is being counselled for his heroin addiction: ‘So it goes back tae ma alienation from society. The problem is that Tom refuses tae accept ma view that society cannae be changed tae make it significantly better, or that ah cannae change tae accommodate it’ (186). Not only are addicts slaves to their substances, they are anachronistically wedded to an extravagant belief in the mind/body dichotomy. It is, essentially, a philosophical issue. The drug addict, especially, is ceaselessly preoccupied with gazing at himself; but there is, so to speak, two

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of him: a mind and a body. Thoroughly Cartesian, the addict sees the mind as clearly separate from the body, and incontestably superior to it. As a matter of daily routine drug addicts pierce their flesh with needles. Drug addicts typically treat their own bodies as though they were slaves to their minds. The mind is the master for opioid addicts, the body is the slave. The body is only there to service the constant demands for drugs, which are not coming from the brain of the addict, but from the urges and passions that constitute the person he has made of himself thus far. A large number of addicts who appear in these texts are convinced that they were born addicts, and that therefore addiction forms part of their essence. Laing quotes from a 1977 interview John Cheever gave to the Paris Review ‘If you want the truth, I’m prouder of that, that I’ve quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life. I’m a recovered alcoholic. I’ll always be an alcoholic, but I’m no longer a practicing alcoholic’ (275). Heather King writes at the conclusion of Parched ‘If I’ve made any “progress” it’s that now I know I’ll be an alcoholic till the day I die, and that is my greatest cross and my greatest blessing’ (272). This belief comes, of course, with scientific support, albeit of a slightly guarded nature; Heilig writes “‘It seems that once drug seeking and selfadministration have become established, the brain processes that underlie them never fully go away. In that sense there may be a degree of truth to the statement “once an addict, always an addict’ (109). This deep-rooted belief that alcoholism and drug addiction are essential, even defining, parts of the addict’s identity, sits uneasily with the simultaneous claims to existentialist thinking, which are also very noticeable in many of these texts. Morrison writes ‘Dealing and using – I didn’t think about it much. We’d just gather in peoples’ houses, listen to music, wallow in existential raps, get loaded, and trip out’ (67). King writes of her time spent as a waitress ‘… table wine was stored in green-glassed gallon bottles in the take-out room and we got to pour it ourselves. At the first twinge of despair, fatigue, or existential nausea, I learned to head back there, fill a paper cup to the brim, and drain it in a single gulp’ (137). Jamison writes ‘When my drinking passed a certain threshold – a threshold I imagined as an existential tunnel, hidden under the fifth or sixth drink – it plunged me into darkness that seemed like honesty. It was as if the bright surfaces of the world were all false, and the desperate drunk space underground was where the truth lived’ (30). Later she writes of Raymond Carver’s return to the writing programme:

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When he came back to Iowa City to give a reading before his first book came out, it should have been like the return of a conquering hero – but he was so drunk the audience could barely understand a word he said. This wasn’t reckless debauchery or existential knowledge plucked from the dark maw of some universal psychic void; this was just a human being pushed to the edge of its own poisoning. (354)

It is difficult to understand what Jamison might mean by “existential knowledge”, but Carver is certainly not alone in demonstrating that alcoholics possess none of it. In My Fair Junkie, Dresner writes, after listing all the reasons she should be content with her life ‘Still, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t pull off “happy”. I tried to explain it to myself. It was as if I was haunted by some deep existential sadness. It would come out of nowhere and knock me on my ass, leaving me bedbound and sobbing for days at a time. It felt like my wiring was off or there was some horrible chasm in me’ (160). These writers are content, even proud, to describe their thoughts as ‘existential’, but they contradict themselves. At the core of existentialist thinking is the belief that existence precedes essence; to embrace existentialist thought thoroughly is to demonstrate a stoicism and courage which no drug addict or alcoholic possesses. Murdoch writes, with admirable brevity ‘existentialism is close to stoicism’ (112) which means it is a totally inappropriate philosophy for addicts. Addicts are quite capable of enduring some situations inseparable from their chosen way of life with stoicism, of course. But their response to life itself, overall, is to alleviate its perceived dangers and banality. Addicts don’t care to suffer. Actually, they refuse to suffer; that’s why they drink and take drugs. The brutal, inescapable irony is that suffering becomes inevitable, just as it was before heroin or alcohol. Even before they started drinking or using drugs many addicts believe they were alcoholics and drug addicts, and even in sobriety, no matter how lengthy this period might be, they remain convinced that they are still alcoholics and addicts and that they will always be alcoholics and addicts. In Saint Genet (1952), his remarkable book on the work of the French novelist and dramatist Jean Genet, Jean Paul Sartre considers the manner in which society confers a destiny upon criminals. Yes, they are criminals. This means, in all good logic, that they have committed one or more crimes and that they are liable to punishments set down in the statute book. But by virtue of the ambiguity of the term,

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society convinces them – and they let themselves be convinced – that this objective definition actually applies to their hidden, subjective being. The criminal that they were to others is now ensconced deep within themselves, like a monster. They thus allow themselves to be governed by another, that is by a being who has reality only in the eyes of others. Their failings and errors are transformed into a permanent predisposition, that is, into a destiny’. (Sartre, 1988: 34. Author’s emphasis)

In Sartre’s eyes “their failings and errors”’ are emphatically not inevitably constitutive of their destinies. Sartre insists that society wishes to maintain its fictitious construct of the permanence of criminality ‘In order to perpetuate itself – for, like all passions, it tends to persevere in its being – it must change into a prophetic transport. It therefore postulates the eternity of its object’ (36). So, too, many drug addicts and alcoholics believe that their addictions are central to their identities; incapable of grasping that their addictive behaviour is simply a maladaptive response to an overwhelming external reality, they rewrite their perceptual distortions and flaws and weaknesses as permanent essences, inseparable from their individual identities. But alcoholics and drug addicts are not predisposed to addiction. They do not have the biology or the chemistry or the wiring or the ethnicity of addicts; they have instead only the flawed temperaments of all drug addicts and alcoholics.

Works Cited Barry, Nicola. Mother’s Ruin: The Extraordinary True Story of How Alcohol Destroys a Family. London: Headline, 2007. Brodrick, William. The Sixth Lamentation. London: Time Warner Paperbacks, 2004. Burroughs, Augusten. Dry. New York: Picador, 2003. Cheever, John. The Journals. London: Johnathan Cape, 1991. Cooper, Dennis. Try. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994. Crowley, John W. The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Dalrymple, Theodore. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Dancy, Jonathan. An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. USA: Blackwell Publishers, 1985. Dardis, Tom. The Thirsty Muse. London: Sphere Books, 1990. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. London: Penguin, 1986.

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Dow, Miriam and Jennifer Regan, eds. The Invisible Enemy: Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1989. Gee, Clare. Unhooked: The Rehab of a London Call Girl. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013. Johnson, Vernon. I’ll Quit Tomorrow. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980. Moyers, William Cope with Katherine Ketcham. Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption. USA: Viking, 2006. O’Toole, Julie. Heroin: A True Story of Drug Addiction, Hope and Triumph… Ireland: Maverick House. 2005. Phillips, Mackenzie. High on Arrival. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Trans. Bernard Frechtman, Saint Genet: Actor & Martyr. London: Heinemann, 1988. Smith, Lisa F. Girl Walks Out of a Bar: A Memoir. New York: Select Books, 2017. Roth, Joseph. The Legend of the Holy Drinker. Trans. Michael Hoffman. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1990. Seabrook, William. Asylum. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 2015. Stahl, Jerry. Permanent Midnight. London: Abacus, 1996 Twerski, Abraham J. MD. Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self Deception. Second Edition. Minnesota,: Hazelden, 1997. Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 1976. Zailckas, Koren. Smashed: Growing up a Drunk Girl. London: Ebury Press, 2006.

The Streets and Addiction

From high-cultural perspectives, and for much of the community of humanities scholars, the “purely clinical” problem of the alcoholic remains largely uninterpreted and culturally insignificant, in stark contrast to the penitent drunkards who were dear to the hearts of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and leading reformers and intellectuals of the nineteenth century. —Eoin F. Cannon, The Saloon and the Mission The coalition is also proposing to cut benefits to heroin addicts. Surely it would be better to send them to Afghanistan. If the Taliban are between them and those opium poppies we might just win. —Frankie Boyle, Work! Consume! Die! 2001 His story was that he’d left the army with shell shock and had lived on the streets as a drunk beggar, then he’d been rescued by a Christian woman whom he always referred to as Mrs Sinclair. —A.A. Gill, Pour Me, 2016

The events recounted in the narratives discussed in this chapter carry a clear intent: to demonstrate both the horrors of addiction and the eventual possibility of recovery. Canon writes in The Saloon and the Mission ‘If addiction is acting as a conceptual category for understanding national crisis, then recovery is once again a platform for rethinking the fundamental relationships of citizen, society and state’ (256–257). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_5

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The particular group of addiction narratives assessed in this chapter do invite speculation about precisely the relationship that Cannon establishes here, and they also raise important issues such as the role of religion in a welfare state, the virtual destruction of what is commonly referred to as the “work ethic”, the increasing abandonment of organized religion, the concomitant increase in secularization, and the nature of state assistance in dealing with drug addicts and alcoholics. Contemporary debates about alcoholism, drug addiction, and recovery are also often discussions about agency, social circumstances, state intervention, and personal responsibility. This chapter focuses on the depiction of drug addicts and alcoholics who drink and drug and drift through a world of chaos, of Social Services, courts, jails, shoplifting, petty crimes (and many major ones) of every description, massage parlours, brothels, prostitution, amputations, police, prison, gambling, truancy, illiteracy, innumeracy, probation, benefits, school exclusion, violence, hospitals, child neglect, poverty, domestic violence, fraud, tramps, vagrants, beggars, and rough sleepers. If, as is now commonly accepted in literary studies, narrative formulas index cultural obsessions, then cumulatively, the depiction of these characters and their environments has much to say on several issues of considerable cultural importance. Ian McEwan writes of an alcoholic character in his novel Sweet Tooth ‘Laura had fallen through every safety net the modern Liberal State could provide’ (McEwan, 208). Laura has “fallen through every safety net” the welfare state can offer; of course “falling” only goes in one direction: down. “Falling” is a metaphor. “Safety Net” is also a metaphor. Crucially, though, Laura has not fallen through the safety net of state provision; she has relentlessly drunk her way through it. Like Laura, the characters and narrators who feature in this section of Savage Usury have not fallen through society’s safety net, nor have they, in another ubiquitous phrase in addiction narratives, “fallen through the cracks” of the social security system, or indeed of anything. Instead, they have doused the safety net in 90 proof vodka and then set fire to it with the lighters they use for lighting their crack pipes, or heating up spoons heaped with heroin. This group of people has been described, in a phrase not without numerous critics, as an “underclass”. Although this word has been “reclaimed” to some extent, as can be seen in the subtitle of Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (2017) it remains problematic, even obnoxious, to many social commentators, especially sociologists and criminologists, and has been

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since the publication of the sociologist Charles Murray’s 1990 book The Emerging British Underclass. Some have argued that it does not actually exist. Alan Walker, for example, writes of Murry’s book “He fails to provide any scientific proof that an underclass exists” (Murray 1990: 49). In this highly contentious book, Murry notes himself that ‘Underclass’ is an ugly word, with its whiff of Marx and the lumpenproletariat. Perhaps because it is ugly, ‘underclass’ as used in Britain tends to be sanitized, a sort of synonym for people who are not just poor, but especially poor. So let us get it straight from the outset: ‘the “underclass” does not refer to a degree of poverty, but to a type of poverty’ (Murray 1990: 1). This important point is also raised by David G. Green in his introduction to Murray’s book ‘the essence of Murry’s approach is that a distinction should be made between low income as such and the behavioral poverty that results from conduct which is both anti-social and self-harming’ (xvii). Green observes that Murray ‘does not apply the term underclass to all the poor, only to those distinguished by their undesirable behavior, including drug-taking, crime, illegitimacy, failure to hold down a job, truancy from school and casual violence’ (vi). Walker calls his critique of Murry’s book ‘Blaming the Victims’ but Murray is sufficiently robust to query the conventional a priori assumption that they are victims; suggesting, on the contrary, they create victims. Murray writes, for example, ‘the habitual criminal is the classic member of an underclass. He lives off mainstream society without participating in it’ (13). Dalrymple writes of an incident that is reported to him ‘every aspect of the story seems familiar to the student of English underclass life: the easily inflamed ego, the quick loss of temper, the violence, the scattering of illegitimate children, the self-exculpation by use of impersonal language’ (Dalrymple 2001: 79). It is striking that while “underclass” is a much derided, and even a contemptible and deeply objectionable word to many people, nobody has any criticisms to make of clearly related words like “underground” or “underworld”. Dostoevsky’s 1865 novella is translated in English as both Notes from the Underground and as Letters from the Underworld, while Catherine Arnold’s book Underworld London: Crime and Punishment in the Capital City (2012) focuses, of course, on crime and punishment (like Dostoevsky’s great novel) in the city of London over several hundred years. So too does Fergus Linnane’s London’s Underworld (2003). Anybody even slightly familiar with American history will be aware of the “underground railway” which helped slaves to freedom from the antebellum Southern states. John Hoyles’ book The Literary

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Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience 1900–1950 is a study of dissident writers during this period. In Todd’s Camus: A Life he quotes from a letter Camus wrote in 1947, ‘I’m telling you that you have met the real underworld of this unfortunate country. I’ll try to get you into contact with more respectable people’ (192). When he covers the years of Camus’ participation in World War II, particularly as editor of the magazine Combat, Todd refers constantly to the “underground” press, which was, of course, resisting the German occupation of France. James Lee’s remarkable account of his drug addiction is entitled Underworld of the East. Nobody misunderstands the meaning of “underworld” or “underground”; nobody believes that such people and organizations referred to by these words are literally chthonic, i.e. living in or beneath the surface of the earth. They are understood in the way that they are offered: as metaphors. The literary underground or the criminal underworld, for example, are not thought to operate only in a literally subterranean manner; they are understood as figures of speech. It is certainly possible that the principal reason so many people object to the word “underclass” is because it is not metaphorical; it is actually too descriptive, too uncomfortably close to the truth. It is not necessarily egalitarianism that drives objections to the word. Although the appropriateness of the word is questionable to some, the existence of the group of people it attempts to categorize is not. In Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain, the journalist Nick Davies writes of one of his many interviewees: May has three children. She doesn’t know why she has three children. It was just the only thing there was to do when she was younger – get pregnant. She doesn’t have much to do with them. She drinks. Every day, she drinks. All May’s children are girls. The oldest is eighteen now and when she was about thirteen, she refused to go to school, she said there was no point, and no one could make her change her mind. Now she, too, has three children, all of them aged under four. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t have a partner – he’s in prison. She doesn’t have a home – she was evicted from a council house because she wouldn’t pay the rent – so she lives with May and, most days, she goes out and leaves the children behind. (Davies 1998: 100)

Copperfield offers details from his duty log ‘Went to a ‘family incident’ involving a recovering alcoholic mum (she was on one litre of vodka a

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day) and her heroin-addicted daughter who, in turn, has a four-monthold daughter by an absent father’ (170). The understandably jaundiced Copperfield is not fond of words like “vulnerable” and “victims”, at least not when applied to criminals and drug addicts ‘They live next door and they burgle and rob anyone they can, they batter old ladies for their pensions, steal benefit books from the mentally handicapped and extort money from kids’ (148). The connection between drug addiction and crime is obvious enough but Murray also connects the increase in illegitimacy to the welfare state and then suggests that displaced young men, especially, are likely to want to enjoy themselves ‘Without a job or family to give life meaning, drugs become that much more valuable as a means of distraction. The cost of drugs makes crime the only feasible way to make enough money to pay for them’ (31). Davies reported from some of Britain’s poorest areas. His investigations uncovered some appalling stories, and a number of the same issues that preoccupy Murray and Copperfield emerge here too, particularly truancy, illegitimacy, drug dependence, and alcoholism. The fragmented family is also one of his principal concerns. He writes of Nina ‘she was 12 when her stepfather who “had had a bit to drink” then “tied her to her bed and raped her”. Shelley was 12 when she was taken into care “because her parents drank too much and her mum kept cutting herself’ (15). Simone was only 11 when she became a ward of the state ‘While Simone was in the children’s home, she started doing a lot more robbing and other bits of law-breaking – criminal damage, assault, robbery, grievous bodily harm, assault with intent to rob. She was always in and out of court’ (105). Leona, a prostitute, was ‘a tall, slim girl the colour of milky coffee, aged fifteen and addicted to crack cocaine’ (21). Throughout Dark Heart, the behaviour of adult males is consistently reprehensible, although, strikingly, the majority of the book’s subjects seem unaware that there are other, better, ways to behave. Davies observes of two women he met that ‘both of them [were] deserted by one man after another, each of them finally left with five young children they loved and had no hope of caring for’ (392). Many of the children of these relationships go into care and then, like Simone, become drug addicts and criminals. Many of those who don’t go into care have no interest in education, with predictable results ‘He hadn’t gone to school every day, he confessed, and he had passed no exams. He had never worked. He had never done anything’ (73). Hart describes aimless groups of illiterate young men, invariably addicted to heroin ‘they had no money, no excitement, no status, no skills – except

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what twocking and burgling gave them. If they weren’t breaking the law, they could only sit inundated with inactivity, almost physically paralysed by their own boredom’ (83). Because they rarely go to school, they start using drugs early too. ‘A couple of weeks later, an eleven-year-old boy who matched Joey’s description was admitted to hospital suffering from a heroin overdose. He recovered and ran away before the social workers could get to him’ (158). Dalrymple also notes ‘There is one great psychological advantage to the white underclass in their disdain for education; it enables them to maintain the fiction that that the society around them is grossly, even grotesquely, unjust and that they themselves are the victims of this injustice’ (76). In Dark Heart, Davies writes ‘There are plenty of kids around here who have not been to school since they were ten or eleven. Why would they bother going to school? It’s better for them to get out there and get involved in some crime’ (164). In The Welfare Trait, Adam Perkins suggests ‘The welfare state might also reduce the effort that children put into their school work, since it guarantees them with an income in the event that their school grades are too low to gain them employment’ (Perkins 2016: 178). Even with the help of the taxpayer, however, many of these illiterate and innumerate young people find heroin, alcohol, and crime irresistible. The need for drugs, especially, inevitably, motivates an enormous amount of crime. Davies reports from a press conference and quotes the chief constable ‘He blamed illegal drugs – 50 per cent of robberies and burglaries, he said, were committed by young people trying to get money for drugs’ (66). ‘Copperfield refers to a series of photographs in his police station of ‘key criminals’, local to the area, all of them are male. They all, without exception, take heroin and/or crack cocaine, and their faces speak eloquently of years of drug abuse (it starts when they’re about 11 around here)’ (78). Later, he writes ‘Drugs certainly play a large part in the lives of acquisitive criminals, particularly, and young criminals generally. Drugs are fun and they make you feel good, and that’s the extent of it’ (147). Copperfield is scathing about the pervasive contemporary view that drug addicts and alcoholics commit crimes “only” because they are incapable of controlling themselves now that they are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Copperfield, quite rightly, points out ‘such a view is fundamentally flawed: crime is a moral problem, not a chemical one. Crimes like theft and the use of illegal drugs are committed by people who wish to break the law.

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They break the law because stealing is easier than working and taking drugs is fun’ (148. Author’s emphasis.) In America, the situation is no better; indeed, pro rata, it is certainly worse. In Dreamland, Quinones investigates the opioid “epidemic” which has claimed so many lives over the past decades. He observes of the drug which has caused such devastation in America’s rural heartlands ‘OxyContin is a simple pill. It contains only one drug: oxycodone, a painkiller that Germans synthesized in 1916 from thebaine, an opium derivative. Molecularly, oxycodone is similar to heroin’ (124). Quinones writes of the impact of this drug on the small town of Aberdeen, on the Ohio River ‘But things had gone far beyond pills. Many people in Aberdeen were on heroin. They wandered the small town half dead, proud of their needle marks…The area had spawned a generation of young people who had nothing to look forward to, whose families had been unemployed for years. Many of these kids grew addicted’ (247). Quinones here endorses the prevailing contemporary narrative of the OxyContin crisis: that medical doctors, through a combination of laziness, stupidity, and greed, over prescribed the pills, to anybody, and that when the prescriptions ran out hordes of innocents who had become dependent on the narcotic were forced to start using heroin illegally. Certainly, though, there were plenty of people who did not “graduate” to heroin, or “turn to” it when their prescriptions ran out but accepted the comparatively mild withdrawals with resignation, even stoicism. Instead of only attacking ‘Big Pharma’ (the giant drug companies) and the medical doctors who “over prescribed” the pills, considerably more attention should be paid to the type of people who then became dependent on heroin. Quinones hears directly, for example, from a drug addiction counsellor in Portsmouth, Ohio: Kids were coming to the center from across Ohio. Many, he said, grew up coddled, bored, and unprepared for life’s hazards and difficulties. They’d grown up amid the consumerist boom that began in the mid1990s. Parenting was changing then, too. Hughes believed “Spoiled rich kid” syndrome seeped into America’s middle classes. Parents shielded their kids from complications and hardships and praised them for minor accomplishments – all as they had less time for their kids”. (293)

The coda with which Quinones concludes Dreamland is stark, ‘The Aberdeen he knew was a sewer of pills and needles. Which was why

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little old Brown County had the highest rate of drug overdoses in Ohio. Jeremy could name a dozen towns like it along the mighty Ohio river, once a vital vein in the country’s industrial arm, now contaminated with heroin’ (333). Quinones here is confused over causation; the “sewer of pills and needles” is not the reason why “Brown County had the highest rate of drug overdoses in Ohio”. The pills and needles are only there because drug addicts are using them. Again we see the removal of the actual addicts themselves. McGreal writes ‘No other country prescribes narcotic painkillers at the level of the United States. Per capita daily consumption by the British and French is less than one fifth that of Americans. Life expectancy in both countries is higher than in the United States’ (269–270). His investigations focus on the states of Kentucky and West Virginia, where the problem of “over prescription” has been at its worst and he too, like the English writers referred to above, sees a connection between drug addiction and inadequate schooling, writing of the town of Beattyville, for example, ‘One-third of teenagers dropped out of high school or left without graduating. Few of the minority who made it to college moved back’ (106). He points out that ‘a white American whose education stopped at high school was six times more likely to die of drugs, alcohol, or suicide than a person who made it through college’ (111). Like his British counterparts, McGreal also suggests a connection between drug addiction and social security payments, noting for this reason, ‘the role of welfare in the plight of rural America remains a contested and raw issue’ (107). In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance also addresses the grim death toll caused by the extravagant consumption of opioids. Like Dalrymple, Perkins, and Hart, he also makes strong connections between absent fathers, poor schooling, and drug addiction. He writes of his small home town of Jackson, Kentucky ‘Nearly a third of the town live in poverty, a figure that includes about half of Jackson’s children. And that doesn’t count the large majority of Jacksonians who hover around the poverty line. An epidemic of prescription drug abuse has taken root’ (18). Vance is clear sighted about the employment prospects facing uneducated young men, in particular, in this part of America ‘if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small home town last year’ (2). He should know more than most about the opioid crisis as his own mother is a drug addict ‘Mom had begun using again. She’d stolen some family

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heirlooms from her fifth husband to buy drugs (prescription opiates, I think) and he’d kicked her out of the house in response. They were divorcing, and she had nowhere to go’ (237). Vance is considerably more alert to the individual failings of drug addicts than either McGreal or Quinones. He laments the absence of a cardinal virtue such as prudence ‘Thrift is inimical to our being’ (146). He is particularly interested in poor schooling, absent fathers, and the loss of any kind of work ethic among the young, unskilled men with whom he came into contact. He writes of his time working in a tile warehouse, a demanding physical job, that he saw ‘too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time’ (7). He also comments, like Dalrymple, on the inability of too many poor, unskilled drug addicts and alcoholics to assume any degree of responsibility and control over their own lives ‘there is a lack of agency here – a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America’ (7). Additionally, he is extremely critical of the welfare state: My sister’s friend lived in a small duplex with her mother (a welfare queen if one ever existed). She had seven siblings, most of them from the same father – which was, unfortunately, a rarity. Her mother had never had a job and seemed interested “only in breeding” as Mamaw put it. Her kids never had a chance. One ended up in an abusive relationship that produced a child before the mom was old enough to purchase cigarettes. The oldest overdosed on drugs and was arrested not long after he graduated from high school. (146)

This unnamed young man, along with Vance, is one of the very few people to graduate from high school in Hillbilly Elegy. He writes of one of his relatives ‘Lori struggled in school, mostly because she never attended class’ (45). After overdosing on PCP with her boyfriend at the family home, Lori’s adventures continued. ‘The next year, at sixteen, Lori dropped out of high school and married. She immediately found herself trapped in an abusive home just like the one she’d tried to escape’ (45). Unfortunately, for everybody, “escape” through drugs, alcohol, and crime is the only avenue open for many of those who will not participate in the social contract. As Copperfield writes above “crime is a moral problem, not a chemical one”. Crime is indeed a moral problem, but almost never

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acknowledged as such in addiction narratives. Those who are too incapacitated because of their dependencies on alcohol and drugs to steal usually start begging. It has been against the law to beg in England for almost two hundred years. The Vagrancy Act 1824 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that made it an offence to sleep rough or to beg. In Cannon’s Cardboard City, an interpretation of this Act is supplied by Pinko, who once studied at the London School of Economics. He informs his fellow alcoholic rough sleepers: It was passed in 1824, just after the Napoleonic wars. The poor bloody soldiers had been demobbed, they had no money and no homes, so they took to the streets, sleeping rough and begging for food. Jolly old George the fourth was on the throne. He didn’t like seeing these poor sods when he looked out of the windows of the palace so bingo! The act was passed, the ragged-arsed army was shoved into clink and that was that. (120)

These narratives are so essentially conservative that it is noticeable that even this rather restrained, if inaccurate and naïve, polemic is given to a character called “Pinko”. It may well be the case, as Horace Trauble claims, that ‘The slave of alcohol is all too often the slave of capitalism’ (Cannon, 172) but, nevertheless, capitalism, as an ideological and political system, is very rarely criticized in addiction narrative. The various reasons that are offered for addiction, hence begging, are invariably domestic, or psychological, never social or economic, and capitalism itself is very rarely blamed for rough sleeping, addiction, or begging. I suggest that, on the contrary, these narratives consistently endorse capitalism, while simultaneously rejecting the work ethic, by their strenuous attempts to portray begging and stealing as actual work. Pinko’s interpretation of the Act is that it was done by individual Royal Decree, rather than by an Act of Parliament, and was done, essentially, for reasons of aesthetics. In fact, the Vagrancy Act 1824 constructs those without money as criminals, which then invites a conflation of roles: victim and simultaneously criminal, a dualism which remains with us today and undoubtedly contributes substantially to the ambivalence with which rough sleepers are perceived, especially if they are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and homelessness are not just symbiotically linked in pragmatic terms, but the relationship between them also gives rise to persistent questions about culpability and personal agency.

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Within these modern texts, begging and homelessness are viewed as among the ugliest manifestations of the horrors of drink and drugs. It is striking that there is little begging in nineteenth-century temperance narratives; characters move from a first innocent sip, to alcoholism, insanity, and/or murder or suicide at a fearsome speed. Reynolds observes that in early temperance texts, ‘Such works tended to punish their drunkards, showing them being hit by trains or trampled by horses in the end’ (150). It is perhaps not at all surprising that in a prosperous, capitalist society like England, where home ownership is a national obsession, narratives which focus on those who have to beg to stay alive and who cannot even afford to rent a roof over their heads have a deep resonance for contemporary readers. While autobiography is the privileged genre in this chapter, London is the predominant setting. The connection between the city and addiction, both to alcohol and drugs, is made by a number of writers, English and American. In Writing London, Julian Wolfreys writes ‘London consumes, leaving absence, desire and anxiety in the trace of writing as the signs of its topography, and as its imprint on the anxious self. The city traces itself in the veins of the text as the signature of addiction and anxiety’ (111). In Shopping in Space, an appraisal of modern American writing, Elizabeth Young suggests ‘the relationship of junkie to city is not merely that of inhabitant to environment: it is the relationship of addiction itself’ (133). O’Reilly writes of American Temperance fiction ‘Intemperance is not merely grafted onto the enigmatic city as a symptom, but likewise unfolds as a trope: city and disease act metaphorically for one another’ (115). Yet, the city in the texts under discussion here is also a “real” city. Wolfreys writes ‘the London of this book is, if not a sublime site, then at least a hyperreality. The texts which are herein analysed are read in their efforts to inscribe a sense of the city, instead of merely recording a representation of it’ (4). In the London which is considered in this chapter, the city is emphatically not a “hyperreality”. Wolfreys continues ‘“London”, as considered in this book, is not necessarily the city which one can visit, walk through, inhabit’ (9). The London referred to in this chapter is that very London which one can “visit, walk through, inhabit”. Mark Billingham in Lifeless recounts the efforts of one of the alcoholic rough sleepers ‘He walked up Regent Street, then took a right, cutting through the side streets of Soho towards Tottenham Court Road’ and later ‘Walking around within that rough square bordered by Oxford Street, Regent street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road he’d

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noticed that more of the tramps were settling down in pairs’ (11, 81). Similarly, Johnson writes in Wasted, ‘Luca is an Italian junkie I’ve seen once before. So now we’re looking for Luca. Oxford Street, Dean Street, Old Compton Street, Frith Street. I’m rattling’, and, moments later, ‘I’m getting desperate. Frith Street, Manette Street, Charing Cross Road, Sutton Row…Carlisle Street, Wardour Street, Brewer Street, Glasshouse Street. And then we’re in the toilets in Picadilly Circus underground, Shaftesbury Avenue exit’ (186–187). It is worth noting here that the elision of verbs and indeed of everything that is not a street name emphasizes the compulsion to move—there is no sightseeing here. In Cardboard City, the alcoholic protagonist Tommy makes his weary way through central London, ‘he laboriously climbed the steps that led from Trafalgar Square to the pavement opposite the National Portrait Gallery…husbanding his physical resources by the simple expedient of putting one foot before the other and making frequent stops for rest, he made his way up Charing Cross Road toward Cambridge Circus’ (27). These streets are offered to the reader as “real” streets in a “real” London. However, the repetitious and relentless movement across London also stresses the compulsive need to move for the homeless vagrant. The word “tramp” is derived from Middle English as a verb meaning “to walk with heavy footsteps”. The continuous movement of the rough sleeper has nothing of freedom about it; it is decreed by the state. Begging is represented within Western culture generally in thoroughly equivocal terms. On the one hand harmless, in that it indicates failure for someone else, it is, on the other, a dramatization of the horrors of failure, an allegory of possible personal disaster. The issue of causation is of particular importance when assessing representations of drug addicted or alcoholic beggars. Masters observes in Stuart: A Life Backwards that ‘there are numerous types of homeless person’ (4). He notes that there are those who have suffered a temporary setback, as well as those who are homeless because of ‘illiteracy or social ineptness or what are politely called “learning disabilities” There are young people who have argued with their parents, or who have come out of care homes’. There are also ‘ex-convicts and ex-army – take away the format of their lives and all they can do is crumple downwards’ (4). Then there are those with whom this chapter is preoccupied with—the addicted homeless. The causal relationship between homelessness and addiction is not as straightforward as might initially be assumed. Masters writes ‘among the few staples in a chaotic person’s life are heroin and alcohol. For some their habit is what

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has brought them low, while for others addiction is like a hobby taken up since arriving’ (4). Similarly, Billingham writes: Thorne settled back against the door of the theatre and thought about a couple of boys he’d seen in a narrow side street when he’d left the day centre: their skinny fingers cradled around the smoking rock; a flattened a gouged-out coke can used as a crack pipe. He had come to understand just why so many of those with drink and drug problems had turned in desperation to such comforts after they’d begun sleeping rough. If anything – bottled or burned – could numb the pain of hours that spread like tumours, or speed up the ticking steps, then Thorne saw clearly that it was something to be clutched at and cherished. (204)

This issue also plays a large part in the chapter to follow on heroinaddicted prostitutes. It is certainly in the interests of addicts to claim that their addictions began on the streets, and this assumption satisfies a lot of other people too, but it is not necessarily true. The simple relationship between alcoholism, drug addiction, and begging, which have always gone hand in outstretched hand, is eloquently put by John Healy in his autobiography The Grass Arena: Winos usually have another string to their bow such as shop-lifting, thieving, mugging, prostitution - all these acts committed later in the day when you’ve got some wine down. But begging is the drunk’s stock-intrade. It starts you off. It’s got many aspects: it gets your courage up, gets you communicating with normal people - perhaps the only communication many winos have. But, most importantly, it gets the first drink of the day with which to cure the shakes. The day always begins with the shakes, sickness, fear, paranoia, constipation, dry retch and complete loss of memory, which only a drink will cure. (58)

In the modern welfare state, it certainly appears that the beggar has fallen very far from grace indeed. In these narratives, begging and addiction are connected at the most basic level—it is taken for granted that the beggar will use any money received for alcohol or drugs ‘Someone stooped and dropped a coin; another person threw across a box of matches. A third declared he would buy a sandwich but “I won’t donate money. You’ll only spend it on drink and drugs”. Stuart opted for bacon and cheese’ (12). In only one of these books, Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel Ripley Bogle does a central character attempt to justify begging on any grounds

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other than personal survival ‘I service the rich. Wealth is, of course, merely a gauge of one’s distance from poverty. It is how much you are not poor. A Croesus only knows he is Croesus when he can see a vagabond like me schlepping about outside his mansion. He needs me. What would his riches be without me?’ (16) This consideration of begging is not far removed from Wordsworth’s depiction in ‘The Cumberland Beggar’ of the man who links the community through individual acts of generosity to him. It is also linked to Max Weber’s observation ‘Medieval ethics not only tolerated begging but actually glorified it in the mendicant orders. Even secular beggars, since they gave the person of means opportunity for good works through giving alms, were sometimes considered an estate and treated as such’ (177). However, one of the most striking aspects of the depictions of begging in these narratives is the persistent way that they all represent begging, not in terms of passive acceptance of aid, but as very virile and masculine work, and, moreover, as highly skilled, complex, and demanding work. Bromby recounts one of his lessons “There are three basic types of begging”, Spike said. “There’s a couple of other odd ones, there’s the specialized varieties, like, but at the end of the day you’ve got your three main types. I’m not talking about getting cash – there’s loads of ways to do that. I’m talking about just asking for it, right? There’s your simple hungry-and-homeless style…Then there’s the hassle approach, which involves a bit more spiel…or you can just go for the straight-up, in-your-face way of doing things”. (92–93)

George Orwell also wrote of the complexity of begging in Down and Out in Paris and London ‘While I was with Bozo he taught me something about the technique of London begging. There is more to it than one might suppose. Beggars vary greatly, and there is a sharp social line between those who merely cadge and those who attempt to give some value for money’ (50). For the alcoholic or drug-addicted rough sleeper, the rewards of begging can be, if not considerable, then a very decent economic return for very little effort Billingham writes ‘Thorne had spent most of the morning begging. Sitting against a wall at the top end of Regent Street, with a blanket across his legs and his rucksack laid out in front to catch the coins. He’d picked a spot nice and close to a cashpoint, and while he wasn’t expecting too many banknotes to come his way, people did already have their wallets out so he’d done fairly well’

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(145). Masters writes, in a book published in 2005 ‘On Christmas Eve a beggar can earn £70 – 120 in Cambridge’ (12). Clearly, one of the central issues emerging from any consideration of begging will be the concomitant concept of work—a practice actually so erased and elided within these narratives that it virtually disappears as an alternative to begging. These narratives’ determination to construct begging as work testifies to the virtual disappearance of the work ethic in contemporary society. Cindy Weinstein writes The ideal of self-sufficiency through meaningful work is dramatically articulated in the following passage from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: There is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works...a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things”. When he proclaims “Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself”, the power of work not only to produce objects but to construct selves is made manifest. (15)

Emerson’s focus in this celebrated essay is in demonstrating that work is not only productive of objects or services, but that the doing of it as well as it can be done plays a vital part in forming our “selves”. Work, for Emerson, is a transformative experience, a concept itself central to the work ethic. I suggest that for an activity to legitimately be described as “work”, there must be some degree of reciprocity involved. The corruption of the work ethic in these narratives is powerfully demonstrated by the pervasive use of the words “earn” and “work” in relation to the activities of begging and stealing. These are excellent examples of the “unearned elevations” which I referred to in an earlier chapter. The act of asking strangers for money, often silently, by means of a cardboard sign, even speech now eradicated from the act, is transformed into “work”. In this, the books are absolutely representative of their age. Indeed, the invariably unchallenged, contemporary belief that begging is work can be found in as early a work as Down and Out in Paris and London, in which Orwell writes ‘Beggars do not work, it is said, but what then is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless’ (154). Orwell is in error here. Begging is not a “trade like any other”; beggars do not work. Prostitutes work, drug dealers work; both

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offer something in return for the money they receive. But beggars, like thieves, with whom they are often linked in these texts, just take and give nothing in return; there is no reciprocity. Begging is viewed as work in these texts solely because it requires some effort, however, minimal. Naturally, when the individually transformative and the communal dimensions of work have been totally eroded, and work is defined solely as what one does to obtain money, then begging will be seen as work, as will stealing. Begging and stealing are often linked within addiction narratives; work becomes less an activity which both enriches the community and the self, and more one during which individuals exchange labour, or effort, in return for money—and for nothing else. Indeed, only an extensive use of quotation can satisfactorily demonstrate the ubiquity of the misapplied words “work” and “earn” in the context of stealing and begging. Johnson writes ‘I couldn’t earn enough money from begging to support my habit, which is so immense it feels bigger than Soho, bigger than London…Even with blagging my habit costs at least £300 a day and often a lot more, and there’s only one way to make that sort of money: stealing’ (191). He begins stealing DVDs ‘The shop value of each DVD is £20 to £39 and when I get to Simon’s I find there are ten in my bag. Without questions or even checking what they are, Simon hands over £70. I am rich. I have just earned more in ten minutes than I could in a day of turning in bankcards or begging on the tube or stealing nail varnish for prostitutes’ (205). In a manner absolutely characteristic of addiction narratives, he then depicts himself as a businessman ‘I have a job, like Ben on the tube and Dave at Picadilly [both beggars]. I steal DVDs for a living. I earn about £400 a day. I set about it in a professional, systematic, way’ (205). Later, he writes ‘My activity is frantic: stealing, shoplifting, taxing, dealing a little…But I’m earning enough to support my habit’ (214). Towards the end of his narrative, his vocabulary begins to incorporate the entire business lexicon: ‘The shoppers and businessmen who’ve been stepping over my body all morning think I’m a lazy layabout. They don’t realize I’ve collapsed because I’m working harder than they’ve ever worked in their lives, and probably earning more too. After all, I’m on £100, 000 per annum, no, nearer £200,000. But that doesn’t include a pension or sick pay, of course’ (214). The agreeable fantasy that approaching begging and stealing in a “professional, systematic way” confers the status of “work”, and even “profession” upon these activities is much loved by these writers. In Addict, Steven Smith writes of George, his first mentor ‘He was the ultimate professional thief, planning in every detail way in advance who

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he was going to rob, when, and what of. He studied society magazines…much meticulous research went into all his work’ (43). The meretricious lexicon Smith employs throughout is taken (appropriately enough) from the legitimate world of capitalism, business, and skilled labour ‘He obviously also saw me as an apprentice, someone he considered worthy enough to teach the finer points of the burglary trade’ (46). Like other addicted rough sleepers, Smith sees the money he makes from begging and stealing as ‘income’ ‘I was now living on the streets and life became much more precarious because with no fixed address my social payments were stopped. This left me paying for drug prescriptions from petty theft, while on the drug high I would steal leather gloves, wallets and other small items from big stores which I sold to small second-hand shops. As a result of the stolen income my drug intake doubled’ (260). Bob Turney writes in I’m Still Standing ‘By now I had a regular drinking partner Terry who was a burglar. I was complaining about lack of work and my reduced income and he invited me to work with him. I did not need a lot of encouragement and snapped up his offer, chiefly to get instant funds for my drinking. After a lunchtime session we stole a car and broke into a house and with the proceeds we had enough drinking money for the next couple of days. That was the start of a working relationship with Terry that would last on and off for the next three years’ (61). In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn also imparts respectability to a criminal act through a vocabulary taken from the legitimate world of capitalism and enterprise, when he writes of his father ‘A few months later my father walks into a bank, passes his first forged check…if you ask him how he got into the checking business, my father will tell you that Dippy-do Doyle and Suitcase Fiddler heard about his head injury and came looking for him’ (99). In these narratives, begging and stealing are represented as hierarchically distinct activities; however, the hierarchy is the reverse of that which is encountered within society. Many of the narrators and protagonists of these texts despise begging even when they are forced to do it themselves. Johnson writes of begging on the London underground, ‘It’s hard. I’d rather look at the ground but that isn’t going to get coins in the cup. The shame of asking for, demanding money. I have sickened myself but now I have to go through with it’ (201). This sense of shame is the principal reason that begging is seen as an inferior activity to stealing in the eyes of the addicted rough sleepers themselves. Many of the descriptions of begging are therefore constructed to minimize this sense of shame by

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insisting on begging as work and, moreover as harder work than stealing. Healy writes: ‘A cold wind had come up, giving me the shakes. A bit too fucked up to beg! Decided to nick a bottle’ (131). That asking for money to buy a bottle is actually harder work than stealing a bottle is a characteristic perspective for addiction narratives to adopt. Again and again, begging is not only depicted as work, but as arduous and even skilled work. In Healy’s first novel, Streets above Us, the omniscient narrator notes of the protagonist, Finn ‘He sinks on to a seat. Even beggars need a little rest sometimes. After a short spell he resumes his work’ (38). In Philp Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, Sabbath is approached by a beggar, ‘The beggar shook his cup like a tambourine, causing the change to rattle dramatically. A heavy odor of rot polluted his breath as into Sabbath’s beard he whispered conspiratorially, “It’s just a job, man - somebody’s got to do it”’ (DETAILS 205). The alcoholic beggar Matt Dixon is described begging thus ‘Once on the thoroughfare Matt went to work with an ease born of long experience…’ (48), and later, the alcoholic protagonist, Tommy Hutton, stops outside an off-licence and ‘he counted his worldly wealth. The previous day had been good for the begging business’ (64). Flynn writes of an alcoholic vagrant, with an impressive use of the second person, present tense; the second person playing a useful role in distancing the narrator from the direct act of begging ‘When the sun’s up you can always stem enough for a bottle – a good morning, a beautiful day, an upturned palm. It’s better if they don’t see you shake – many don’t understand that a sip stops the shaking’ (259. Author’s emphasis). Not only are these narratives committed to the notion of begging as work, they are also preoccupied with representing begging as a virile and masculine activity. This is done primarily in three ways: through elision and suppression of the actual description of begging, through syntactical construction and metaphor, and through graphic descriptions of sexual fantasies and violent physical brutality which in all cases emerge organically from the act of begging, and that reject the implied feminine passivity of begging. A characteristic narrative strategy employed by a number of narrators to avoid this sense of shame while begging is simply to avoid recounting it. Several narrators and characters never describe themselves as actually begging in any active sense, and this serves to render them less abject to the reader. Bromby is particularly evasive about begging. When he describes sitting with two Scots beggars, he writes ‘When a passer-by was not being abused he or she was being asked, ‘Spare a few coppers

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towards a bed for the night.’ I shall always be grateful to Georgie and Hughie (both now dead) for teaching me the art of survival’ (81). It is noticeable here that “survival”, like begging itself, is now also an art. The implication here is that his mentors taught the narrator how to beg, but Bromby only describes himself begging once; money is usually being given to him without him having to ask for it: ‘As I managed to obtain a drink after meeting some old acquaintance who would give me a handout..’ (78). Similarly, in Ripley Bogle, the narrator observes: ‘I’m growing replete with jaded beggary’ (187), but he never describes himself actually begging, only drinking up the proceeds after the elided act of begging. In Cardboard City, too, the protagonist never actually begs himself; like Bromby, he is always being given money without having to even ask. ‘He often had money pressed into his hand so he was never without the wherewithal to buy the liquor to satisfy his craving’ (54), and later ‘He made no attempt at begging, but was nevertheless halted several times by more fortunate citizens who pressed money into his hand’ (67). Healey’s The Grass Arena is a virtual encyclopedia of narrative strategies designed to move well beyond shame and reconstruct begging as an active, virile occupation. Although often an eloquent writer, Healy’s prose becomes concentrated and elliptical when he describes himself begging. He describes meeting another beggar, Scarface Mick ‘I was begging in the Euston Road. Met him. He was in rags’ (76). Later in the same chapter, he writes: ‘Dipper and I went begging from everything that moved: men, women, and children…fight a dog for its bone. Dip pulled a smart young bloke’ (77). Here, it is noticeable that it is not the two beggars who have lost their humanity, but the people from whom they beg “everything that moved”. The image of fighting a dog for its bone although squalid, privileges aggression rather than passivity. The final sentence “Dip pulled a smart young bloke” is remarkable for the way in which it links sexual power with the act of begging—in colloquial English the infinitive “to pull” means to sexually attract. In Streets above Us, Healy writes of Finn, who is begging ‘His next victim is a businessman’ (37). Here, the beggar is constructed as predatory, rather than pitiable. Similarly, Roth describes two beggars utilizing an ostensibly inappropriate image, but one which characteristically serves to equate begging with masculinity ‘two beggars who were no further from the puppeteer than one corner of the boxing ring is from the other’ (206).

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Begging is often transformed into assertions of masculinity unequivocally represented in terms of violence. Bromby rejects the abject nature of begging in decisively physical terms: George told me which door to knock on for a handout from a priest. I was given ten pence. I was not in the habit of begging. Hughie said to me, “If you are not going to pan-handle (beg) then you’ll get no bloody booze from me!” Hughie pushed me as he spoke. I launched a vicious retaliation. People who had known me before my decline into dereliction would not have recognized the snarling animal who attacked in self-defense. I punched and I kicked and I spat. (91)

In Cardboard City, the two alcoholic beggars Tommy and Matty avenge the rape and murder of Tommy’s girlfriend by dealing with the killer in an, especially violent manner. ‘First the ankles were shattered, then the shins as the hammers rose and fell. Kneecaps were reduced to a splintered mess, ribs were stove in and the elbow joints on both arms smashed to a bloody pulp’ (227). This episode is emphatically represented as a necessary affirmation of masculinity, one which dramatizes Tommy’s rehabilitation and his return to the world of sobriety and work, away from that of begging and alcoholism. The suggestion that begging is “just a job” is insufficient for several writers; instead, begging and stealing are represented as skillful work. Turney, for example, writes of his accomplice ‘I would watch Eddie perfecting his begging technique. He did not beg very often but when he did he was expert at it’ (80). Flynn’s father’s accomplice is transformed within the narrative from common criminal to “artist”. Another criminal called Suitcase is also elevated in similar fashion when Flynn refers to him as a ‘paper-hangar, a master, the one who forges the checks, a true artist ’ (98). From work, to profession, to art: this risible gradation is also offered by Healy, in Streets above Us ‘Every artist needs some form of recognition; most produce their best work with encouragement. Beggars are no exception, their need being more immediate, though’ (38). The beggar can receive no higher assessment of value than this; from being an abject and unproductive figure generating equal measures of pity and contempt, the beggar is now an artist—on a par with the producer of the text within which he figures. Synecdoche is the dominant rhetorical trope within these narratives.

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Relentlessly, alcoholic and drug-addicted beggars are reduced to nothing more than hands, eyes, beards, mouths, and feet. In Cardboard City, Tommy passes the bottle from his pocket to ‘the grimy hand which had materialized from the bundle of rags beside him’ (43). In Sabbath’s Theater, a beggar appears to Sabbath as if he had no body: ‘A grizzled black face, wild and wasted, eyes bereft of any desire to see - blurred muzzy eyes…appeared only inches from his own grizzled face’ (205). However, as might be expected in texts which focus on tramps, it is toes, feet, legs, and the absence of them which dominate these texts. Flynn writes ‘Men come through the door with limps and canes, with walkers, crutches, in wheelchairs, and crawling. Some are carried in, draped between two friends, feet dragging behind’ (56). In The Grass Arena, Healy writes: ‘Joined a queue of shabbily dressed, batteredfeatured vagrants, some with limbs missing, others on crutches’ (154). In Streets above Us, a beggar known as The Limp is forced to give up begging for the evening ‘It’s too cold. He walks quickly in the direction of the tube. As quickly as his feet will allow, that is’ (65). In Ripley Bogle, the protagonist greets his only friend ‘Perry maneuvers his crutches and hobbles fantastically to a seated position’ (72). In Cardboard City, a character called Ironfoot Jack, because of the corrective surgical boot he wears, actually has the leg amputated after an accident. Again, in The Grass Arena, Healy writes: ‘Talking of legs, I shared a cell with Tin Legs Alex, an old wino. He fell on a railway line in Scotland dead drunk one night and only woke when a train had gone over his feet. He had to have them both off’ (130). On one level, such incidents serve the genre’s primary raison d’etre, the hortatory one of demonstrating through bodily mutilation the horrors of excessive drinking. However, it is noticeable that the loss of a limb is rarely seen as anything other than a fortunate addition to the beggar’s armoury. Healy’s observation in The Grass Arena is absolutely characteristic of the genre’s attitude to amputation and mutilation. ‘Heard the Sham was in hospital; got run over by a lorry. He’s lost the will to live; he’s also lost an arm, poor cunt. He should do well begging, though’ (124). Within all these books, it is clear that the loss of a limb or two is a perfectly acceptable price to pay if it helps to pay for the persistent craving for alcohol or drugs. In Trainspotting, Johnny Swan has his leg amputated after injecting heroin directly into his artery ‘The bandage on his stump gives Johnny some cause for concern. It looks filthy. Mrs. Harvey, the community nurse, is coming today to change it, doubtless with a few

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accompanying choice words on personal hygiene’ (318). He, like Healy’s The Sham, is quite indifferent to the loss of a limb and begs outside Edinburgh’s Waverly Station pretending to be a Falklands war veteran ‘He makes £26.78 after a couple of hours. It’s not bad going and it’s easy work’ (320). Throughout these books, the conflict between mind and body is always present. In his introduction to The Grass Arena, Colin McCabe writes ‘To think, even briefly, about addiction is to disturb one of the West’s crucial constitutive divisions: that between body and mind’ (ix). Cannon writes of Tommy in the early stages of his alcoholism ‘He was still drunk, but it was not the hallucinatory intoxication of the night but another kind of alcoholic infection that permitted his mind to operate divorced from a body over which it had almost no control’ (36). Later, when describing Ironfoot Jack after the amputation of his leg, Cannon writes ‘Ironfoot Jack had always held to the belief that what happened to the body was of little or no importance, so long as the mind was not impaired’ (144). The separation of mind and body is dominant within these narratives; they are suffused with a tenacious, anachronistic endorsement of the Cartesian dichotomy. In Shopping Cart Soldiers, John Mulligan writes of a dream experienced by his alcoholic protagonist ‘She lowers her head and looks down down at the separation of her body. The separation of body and soul ?’ (Mulligan 1996: 209). These texts reject the religious dynamic of nineteenth-century temperance narratives. Just as they reflect the contemporary rejection of the work ethic and stress the distinction between mind and body, so too they bear witness to a contemporary rejection of organized religion as a source of spiritual enrichment. Within these books, the numerous convents, missions, churches, religious hostels, and denominational soup kitchens are represented, paradoxically, solely as sources of material comfort: food and shelter. Steve Bruce writes in God Is Dead ‘Spiritual values may inspire the Church’s involvement in social work but there is very little in the experience of that inspiration that distinguishes it from secular provision’ (8). While the principal characters within these texts are preoccupied with the body, the texts actually stress the fundamental inessentiality of the body. Bogle begins his story by announcing ‘Now I’m nothing. Nobody knows me and I barely exist. I’m going the way of all flesh, i.e. fading into reality’ (8). However, this drive towards incorporeality, dissolution, death, is always successfully resisted by the principal characters, who upon gaining sobriety rejoins the larger body that is the community.

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Works Cited Dalrymple, Theodore. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Davies, Nick. Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain. London: Vintage, 1998. Mulligan, John. Shopping Cart Soldiers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Murray, Charles. The Emerging British Underclass. London: IEA Health & Welfare Unit, 1990. Perkins, Adam. The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Prostitution and Addiction

Prostitution constitutes the most obviously mercantile form of the exchange of women which men engage in and which, together with marriage, structures the organization of society. No other institution, perhaps, more tightly links the instinctual and the economic. —L. Fraper-Mazur Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade, 1989 The prostitute and the client, like the dealer and the addict, is the most successfully exploitative relationship of all. And the most pure. —Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, 2007 Our temperament decides the value of everything fortune bestows on us. —La Rochfoucauld, Maxims, 1665

Debrah Nord writes In Walking the Victorian Streets ‘The paradoxical role of the streetwalker as both social outsider and social connector becomes a trope for the dangerous aspects of the urban condition. She can be viewed as the isolated repository of social ills, assuring the middle and upper classes of their safety and protection within urban society, and she can be understood as the ineluctable destroyer of that safety, posing a threat to middle-class insulation. She promises containment and contamination both’ (Nord 1995: 74–75). Just as beggars were evaluated in the previous chapter, the prostitutes in the narratives to be discussed here are not “tropes”. The prostitutes are being offered as real women and men © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_6

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engaging in prostitution in order, in this case, to buy the heroin to which they have become addicted. Throughout this chapter I use the word “prostitute”, principally because most of the women in these narratives use that word themselves. A major difference between begging and prostitution is the way in which these activities are perceived by the Law. As was noted in the previous chapter, The Vagrancy Act 1824 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that made it an offence to sleep rough or to beg. However, in Great Britain prostitution has never been defined in statute, so the meaning of the word arises from common law. The Sexual Offences Act 1956 does not, effectively, criminalize prostitution, nor does the much later Sexual Offences Act 1993. The effect of the later legislation was only to move prostitutes off the street, as Rachel Moran writes in Paid for: My Journey through Prostitution This is one of the reasons why the Sexual Offences Act of 1993 was so traumatic for street-walking women. It robbed us of our autonomy, the little we had to begin with. Incredibly, the bill didn’t seek to criminalize the act of prostitution itself, for neither the male or the female participants. What it did was criminalize the act of soliciting for the purposes of prostitution. Soliciting is the legal term for loitering with the intent to prostitute oneself or to seek to engage in prostitution. Therefore, the act criminalized the participants of one section of prostitution only; the street-walkers. It targeted street-walking prostitutes, and street-walking prostitutes alone. This had the obvious (and I believe intended) consequence of driving prostitution indoors. (2013: 68)

The 1993 Act was clearly intended to force street-walking women indoors; no Pynchonesque conspiracy theories are required to understand this particular piece of legislation. It is worth noting that while The Vagrancy Act 1824 kept vagrants walking, The Sexual Offences Act of 1993 stopped prostitutes walking. It may seem curious that beggars, who are essentially harmless, are perceived by the law as criminals, while prostitutes, who are perceived by many people as capable of bringing diseases into the domestic environment, and who often consort with drug dealers and other criminals, are not seen as criminals. Moran writes ‘Incredibly the bill didn’t seek to criminalize the act of prostitution itself, for neither the male or the female participants’ (211), but it is not at all “incredible”. It is entirely logical and absolutely consistent with the very essence of capitalism. On this issue the Law and capitalism coincide, as indeed they do so

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often. I suggested in the previous chapter that despite strenuous efforts by various narrators and fictional characters to insist that begging was work, it is not. Work, in any meaningful sense of the word, is predicated on the principle of reciprocity. In descriptions of the urban underworld it is conventional to include beggars alongside prostitutes. In a description of the slums of St Giles in the nineteenth century, Linnane writes in London’s Underworld ‘…their spirits still untamed by pauperism, squalor and overcrowding, hordes of ragamuffins, beggars, prostitutes and thieves poured out of them each day to plunder the city in their various ways’ (55). In Brass, Helen Walsh writes ‘everything around me is hyper-real. Intense and slow. I drift past a hooker and her john, past a gaggle of tramps glugging greedily on bottles of raw liquor, laughing raucously’ (Walsh, DETAILS 1). Actually, while beggars and prostitutes are invariably linked together, this connection only identifies them both as social nuisances; in essence, though, they are very different, although certainly in the texts I am discussing there are some similarities. It is entirely appropriate that thieves and beggars should be linked; neither work, both only take, but prostitutes do work. They provide a service for which they are paid. It is work many would rather they did not perform, but prostitution is, incontestably work. Coombs writes of her days selling sex in crack houses ‘I worked. I worked fucking hard’ (126). Gee writes ‘I spent most of the cash I’d earned from fucking a stranger on a gram of coke, and the rest on fags and booze’ (2013: 42). The way in which she chooses to spend her money is her own affair, but, unlike the claims of beggars and criminals in the earlier chapter, Gee has indeed “earned” her money. Prostitution, therefore, is not a crime because at the same time that prostitutes are “on the game”, they are also playing Capitalism’s game. Beggars and thieves are not, and therefore they are deemed criminals. The OED defines a prostitute as ‘a person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment’. The word is taken from the middle of the sixteenth century (as a verb): from Latin prostitut- ‘exposed publicly, offered for sale’, from the verb prostituere, from pro- ‘before’ and statuere ‘set up, place’. Similarly, Webster’s defines a prostitute as ‘A woman who engages in sexual activity in return for payment, esp. as a means of livelihood; (formerly also) any promiscuous woman, a harlot’. Joanna Phoenix, in Making Sense of Prostitution, writes ‘Prostitution has never been defined in statute, thus the meaning of the term arises from common law, which stipulates that sexual intercourse is not a necessary

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component of prostitution…indeed, no actual physical contact between a man and a woman is necessary for prostitution to occur: all that needs to happen is for a woman to be paid for an “indecent act”’ (or sexual service) (Phoenix 1999: 4). The word “prostitute” is capable of giving offence, a quality it now shares with a great many words. In an earlier chapter I noted that euphemisms are very common in addiction discourse, and they are particularly plentiful in these narratives. In Prostitution, Politics and Policy, Roger Matthews observes of contemporary discussions about prostitution ‘The debate has become steeped in euphemisms…the role of these euphemisms is to render the phenomena more opaque and to muddy the conceptual waters…The history of prostitution is replete with euphemisms such as “ladies of the night”, “fallen women”, “whores”, “scarlet ladies”, “harlots” as well as terms like “punters” and “johns” for those who pay for sex. “Sex worker” is the latest in a series of euphemisms (2008: 41). As in all addiction narratives euphemisms are rife in these narratives too. “Turning tricks” is the most common euphemism when exchanging sex for money, as Cupcake Brown explains in A Piece of Cake ‘I didn’t think of turning tricks as prostitution. I saw it as a job…turning tricks allowed me to buy drugs and booze that helped me forget my past, ignore the present, and be absolutely oblivious to the future’ (Brown 2006: 97). The most common euphemism for the men who pay prostitutes for sex is “johns”; presumably a contraction of “John Doe”. The police woman who narrates Liz Moore’s Long Bright River is hugely critical of such men ‘I can muster sympathy for almost any type of criminal except for johns. When it comes to johns I am not impartial or objective. Quite simply, I hate them: their physicality repulses me, their greed, their willingness to take advantage, their inability to control the basest of their instincts’. She is especially contemptuous of the men who trawl for prostitutes ‘on the Ave, where some of the women would do anything for anyone, where some of the women need a fix so badly that they can’t say no or yes’ (58). Her contempt for johns raises an intriguing moral issue. Certainly, paying a prostitute who is addicted to heroin for sex is unlikely to rate very highly in anybody’s understanding of morality. However, the sexual urge is at the very least a natural one; without it not one of us would be alive. Additionally, it is common knowledge that drinking too much alcohol usually renders a man impotent, and it is also well known that eventually heroin addicts lose all interest in the sexual act. These consequences of over indulging in these substances alone indicate the unnatural nature of alcoholism and drug addiction. The prostitute

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who is so dependent on an unnatural substance like heroin that she must now have sex with strange men is not in the slightest occupying higher moral ground than the men who pay her for sex. In The Idea of Prostitution, Sheila Jeffreys cites the venerable Abraham Flexner and defines prostitution as ‘characterized by three elements variously combined: barter, promiscuity, emotional indifference. Any person is a prostitute who habitually or intermittently has sexual relations more or less promiscuously for money or other mercenary consideration’ (Jeffreys 1997: 24). Jeffreys rejects arguments which are predicated on assumptions about a prostitute’s personal choice and individual agency. She writes ‘The contemporary defenders of prostitution use the rhetoric of “choice” to make prostitution seem acceptable. The language of choice is deeply problematic from a feminist perspective. It is the language of sexual liberalism’ (Jeffreys 1997: 129). Language, of course, is never neutral and the terms we employ to describe an activity or its participants necessarily assist in constructing our view of it. Jeffreys writes in the preface ‘It is ten years since this book was first published. Unfortunately, the pro-prostitution ideas that are analysed and responded to in The Idea of Prostitution which are that prostitution should be seen as ordinary work, even a form of “sexual freedom” have not become less influential during this time’ (2008: vii). Matthews counters ‘Like other radical feminists Jeffreys refers to “prostituted women” rather than prostitutes because it emphasises the dependent position of the woman and her lack of choice. But this terminology only perpetuates rather than resolves the free choice/coercion dichotomy’ (42). In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the young and innocent Marija works as a prostitute so that she can feed her family. While working in the brothel she becomes addicted to morphine, telling her brother ‘I seem to need more of it every day’. She doesn’t understand her desire to take more and more morphine and tells Jurgis ‘I don’t know why. If it isn’t that, it’s drink. If the girls didn’t booze they couldn’t stand it any time at all. And the madame always gives them dope when they first come, and they learn to like it’ (Sinclair 1985: 352). The Jungle was first published in 1906, one hundred and twenty years ago, and yet today a remarkable number of sociologists, criminologists, and cultural commentators not only prefer, but insist upon, the same causation: prostitution then addiction. In My Name is Angel, Rhea Coombs writes in the concluding pages ‘Women who work on the streets to support an expensive drug habit don’t choose prostitution. It is simply the only option left to them. Crack and heroin

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are their pimp’ (Coombs 2007: 159). Perhaps they don’t “choose” prostitution, it is indeed the only way to pay for an expensive drug habit, but they did choose to take enough drugs to become dependent on them. If, instead, one of the women had chosen to join the army, it is very unlikely that she would be offered a choice of times to get out of bed in the morning. The relationship between heroin addiction and prostitution raises an issue that is as much philosophical as it is socioeconomic. In Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis the guest speaker at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Bombay announces ‘I want to start with a question. Is it true that taking heroin is an example of free will at its most powerful? I believe there is a good case for this argument. All users know how addictive the drug is, and dangerous. OD, infection, crime, we know we’re risking our lives and yet we choose to do it’ (248). In Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, a prostitute makes it very clear that prostitutes don’t take some sort of perverse pleasure in selling their bodies ‘We knew we sold only the simulacra. No woman would turn her belly to the trade unless pricked by economic necessity sir’ (Carter 1994: 112). In this chapter it is taken for granted that prostitutes do not engage in the practice for any other reasons than financial ones; this is particularly the case when the prostitute is also a heroin addict. While there is a clear connection between alcoholism and drug addiction and homelessness and begging, it is not at all clear whether the protagonists became addicted to heroin or alcohol and then ended up on the streets as a result of their addictions, or whether the grimness of rough sleeping and the degradation of begging ensured they sought relief from their brutally circumscribed lives in alcohol or heroin. Precisely the same issue of causality is raised in the texts I wish to discuss in this chapter. The relationship between addiction and prostitution can, of course, be overlooked as unimportant. Writing of prostitution in London during the middle of the eighteenth century, Fergus Linnane writes in London’s Underworld ‘Another cause for much moral confusion were the hordes of prostitutes who thronged the city, many of whom were, incidentally, victims of the gin craze’ (2003: 28). The word “incidentally” is striking here; striking because Linnane’s refusal to acknowledge causality with reference to prostitution and addiction, in one direction or another, is so unusual. Usually, writers on this subject acknowledge a connection even when they remain equivocal. In Substance and Shadow, for example, Stephen Kandall writes ‘In some cases, a woman’s initial exposure to drugs was the direct result of her entry into prostitution…In other cases, however, women turned to

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prostitution to support an existing habit’ (1996: 105). However, it is very common to encounter the claim that heroin addiction is a direct result of prostitution; the causality, to them, is unambiguous and unproblematic. Matthews writes, for example ‘As some commentators have pointed out, heavy drug use has historically been linked to prostitution and is generally seen as a coping mechanism for dealing with the pressures and strains arising from involvement in this activity’ (10). Similarly, Jeffreys claims ‘a significant percentage of prostitutes only become problematic drug users after being involved in prostitution’ (108). The circumlocutionary, coy phrase “involved in” is used in all manner of ways as a preface to an activity within addiction discourse, and its function is to distance the addict from any actual participation. It is noticeable that Jeffreys does not write “after becoming prostitutes”. The narratives themselves, however, literally tell a very different story. In Urban Grimshaw, Hare writes of a shelter for homeless women ‘the majority of women in there were smackheads, who shoplifted or prostituted themselves to pay for their gear. On the positive side, of you got in and remained undetected, you were guaranteed a toot and a shag’ (26). When David Sheff, searching for his drug addict son, talks to another young addict she tells him that she ‘pays for meth by dealing. When I can’t pay, I give a blow job or whatever’. She says this and then seems embarrassed, somehow jarred by the memory of an ossified emotion (144). Macy recounts a mother’s story of her daughter’s ‘descent from Cave Spring honor-roll student and athlete to heroin addict and prostitute, preyed upon by a growing network of drug dealers and pimps’ (263). Indeed, Macy is relentless on this issue and she is as emphatic as Jeffreys on causation, referring to ‘young women now prostituting themselves for drug money’ (114). When she hears some research on drug addiction she writes ‘I struggled to understand how Bickel’s research applied to the real-life heroin users I knew, some of whom were now trading sex for drug money a few blocks from his office’ (116). Gee writes ‘most women with drug problems have sold themselves – it goes with the territory’ (2013: 21). In the narratives discussed in this chapter the act of prostitution occurs in three clearly defined areas: hotels and expensive apartments, massage parlours, and on the street (usually, eventually, in a car on the back seat), or alley ways or grim abandoned factories and urban wastelands. Prostitution is also understood as applying to sexual services being provided in exchange for drugs. In James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces the narrator

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describes finding a female crack addict who has absconded from a rehab clinic and found a crack house ‘I get to the end of the Hall and I stand in front of a door. Behind it I hear oh yeah, you little Whore, just like that take it take it all take it all you little Whore. I open the door and I step into the Room and she’s there on her knees, her face buried in an old man’s crotch. There is a pipe and torch on the floor next to her’ (315). That the act of prostitution is very much the same act, irrespective of its setting, is an argument made by a number of writers (sociologists and prostitutes). Andrea Dworkin, for example, writes ‘From the perspective of a woman in prostitution or a woman who has been in prostitution – the distinctions other people make between whether the event took place in the Plaza Hotel or somewhere more inelegant are not the distinctions that matter. These are irreconcilable perceptions, with irreconcilable premises. Of course the circumstances must matter, you say. No, they do not, because we are talking about the use of the mouth, the vagina and the rectum. The circumstances don’t mitigate or modify what prostitution is’ (1993: 141). Similarly, Gee writes ‘But being a hooker is being a hooker, however you want to package it. If you sell your body for 300 quid or a tenner, or a line of coke, or free drinks from someone you don’t give a hoot about, you’re still selling yourself’ (110). Gee’s tautology here “being a hooker is being a hooker” is, as tautologies necessarily are, inescapably true but Dworkin and Gee are both here addressing the quiddity of prostitution, its actual essence. There is, however, no doubt at all that for the prostitutes discussed in these narratives there is a considerable difference between hotel rooms, massage parlours and the back seats of cars or dank alley ways. Rachel Moran writes of her fellow prostitutes in Paid for: My Journey Through Prostitution ‘The women themselves bought into the supposed hierarchical structure of prostitution, with prostitutes in escort agencies looking down their noses at street-walking women and those in massage parlours comforting themselves with the fact that at least they weren’t out on the streets, at least they “hadn’t sunk that low”’ (Moran 2013: 92). However, the hierarchy is far from a supposition. Only in the most abstract, academic sense could all forms of prostitution be regarded as the same act. There is clearly a hierarchy in prostitution with call girls and “escorts” at the top, followed by prostitutes who work in massage parlours, or in rooms provided for them, and at the bottom of the hierarchy, street walkers. It is important to note that this hierarchy is largely based upon youth, not even beauty necessarily.

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These narratives are also teeming with unearned elevations. Gee writes ‘my money had just about run out, and I felt that I had no choice but to go back to what I knew. This realization stung me, but thinking of other options seemed futile. Would a trained lawyer leave his job, then decide to work on a building site with hardly any knowledge of the industry and even less confidence that he could do the job?’ (167). The analogy is staggeringly inappropriate; performing fellatio on strange men in hotel rooms does not begin to compare with the focus and discipline and intelligence which is a prerequisite of being called to the Bar, but it is quite consistent with the self-aggrandizing that permeates the majority of these addiction narratives. Jeffreys is impatient with the idea that prostitution is skilled, professional work ‘The problem with the idea that prostitution involves special skills which require it to be recognized as a profession, particularly as a therapeutic profession, is that the basic act which the average john wishes to perform in the body of a prostituted woman can be performed without the exercise of any special skills on her part’ (167). Just so; prostitution is not a profession on moral grounds but on pragmatic ones. In a legitimate profession the value of the professional increases with age and experience; the prostitute, particularly one who is addicted to heroin, totally to the contrary, inhabits a world in which, for the most part, age and experience do not add value, they decrease it—only inexperience and youth can be successfully sold. The trajectory for the addicted prostitute is always downwards, as Davies writes in Candy ‘A downward thing, as in Candy went inexorably from good escort to bad escort, from the ritzy brothel to the cheesy. Always getting the sack for not toeing the line and for being too stoned. And ended up freelancing it, on Grey Street in St Kilda. After which there was really no place to go’ (181–182). This basic truth, though, can be misunderstood. Coombs writes of her time working as a “hostess” in Soho ‘London’s sex square mile chews up those who work in it and then spits them out for newer, younger, firmer models who can better sate the relentless appetite for fresh faces and flesh’ (2007: 85–86). Coombs is incorrect here. The younger women can never even better “sate” the “relentless appetite” of the square mile, and, more importantly, Soho, as reified here, has no interest at all in the new. Appearances to the contrary, again, what it wants is what it has always wanted; exactly the same, over and over again. In this sense, prostitution and heroin addiction are deeply connected. The addict, too, appearances to the contrary, only wants the

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same experience every single time; like Soho itself, the addicted prostitutes want heroin to provide the old, the familiar, the reassuring. There is nothing adventurous about drug addicts, or alcoholics. They want only the safe and the familiar, over and over again. But they have to pay for it. Alcoholics and drug addicts are consumers par excellence. Far from standing outside the capitalist system, addicts and alcoholics genuinely believe they can purchase happiness and well-being across a bar or down an alley. They believe courage and tranquillity are purchasable virtues. They have long lost the sense of belonging to a community. The drugs offer the heroin addicts escape but drugs are unmistakably consumable commodities; products of a capitalist culture. Obviously money is at the very core of prostitution. Phoenix writes after a series of interviews with prostitutes ‘In short, in comparison with earning money through legitimate employment, involvement in prostitution was seen as a very attractive option’ (1999: 81). Ann Marlowe observes the manner in which we refer to addictions in financial terms: ‘No one says of an alcoholic, “He has a twenty-dollar-a-day bourbon habit”; they say he “drinks a quart of bourbon a day”. But we describe dope use in terms of money. Heroin habits are denominated in dollars, in multiples of ten: a five-bag-a-day habit is a fifty-dollar habit’ (223). Obviously, as we can see above in the quotation from Coombs, this is also true in Great Britain. Marlowe goes on to suggest That heroin habits are spoken of in dollar terms tells us something important about the drug. Dope, like money, occurs always in the aggregate; human affection is always for the particular. The peculiar status of heroin as an addictive commodity, purchased with avidity yet owned with no tenderness, influences those who use it for a long time, infecting all transactions, commercial and social with a trademark distance and indiscrimination. (224)

“Distance and indiscrimination” are essential tools for prostitutes; the connection between heroin and the money earned to pay for it through selling sex may be more complicated than it at first appears. In his impeccably louche memoir Dandy in the Underworld, Sebastian Horsley explains the attraction of paying for sex ‘I wanted the sensation of sex without the boredom of its conveyance. In a brothel you can buy physical closeness without the intervention of personality. It was an artificial paradise. I used money, the most impersonal instrument of intimacy, to

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buy the most personal act of intimacy. Lust over love, sensation over security – and to fall into a woman’s arms without falling into her hands’ (Horsley 2007: 197). The addicted prostitutes’ attitudes to the sexual act are of distance and disregard for themselves, and disdain for the men who pay them. Davies’ narrator notes ‘Candy was beginning to get good at working, at the way to do it without feeling, at how to get the most money for the least effort…’ (52) Coombs writes ‘For me the whole process of smoking crack was about emotional distance and disengagement from others: my chemical buffer zone. I didn’t mind opening my legs for paying customers but I couldn’t bear it when they tried to get into my soul’ (165). It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which a paying customer would try and get into any prostitute’s “soul”, but the careless use of the word here is characteristic of much of this writing. There is, as might be expected, a great deal of graphic detail within the books, although it is also worth noting that some of the narratives, Gaynor Goodchild’s One Little Speck (2011), Rachel Webster’s The First Floor (2013) and Brianna Murphy’s My Heroin Story (2014), are almost comically coy in their lack of any sexual detail disclosed by the prostitute narrators. On the one level, such graphic detail offers itself as true to life, as real as life can get. Dalrymple writes of one his patients ‘He was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others; that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side – and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of modern popular culture’ (2001: 119). Certainly, this is one reason for the level of graphic detail permeating these books, but there is also another reason. In these books the world is strikingly “too much with us”; it is unstintingly represented in its most unsavoury aspects in order to legitimize the desire for escape required by the heroin addicted prostitutes. It is not only sexual detail that is relentless; all kinds of human excretions are emphasized. Gee, for example, is preoccupied with her bowel movements; after snorting a line of cocaine she writes ‘I turned away, needing to take a dump. I went over to Charlie, who was comparing shoes with Petra, and asked her to direct me to the loo. Coke is a stimulant and my first line always made me need to empty my bowels…It’ll be smelly’ (21–22). The emphasis throughout these books on human excretion, on shit, piss, semen, vaginal juices, sweat, menstrual blood, snot and vomit announce the real world

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and simultaneously offer an explanation for the desire to escape it through the use of heroin and or alcohol. There is considerable irony implicit in the client/addicted prostitute relationship: the prostitute’s body in such texts is a commodified object which is temporarily being purchased. The client receives pleasure by purchasing the addict’s body, while the addicted prostitute spends this money purchasing a pleasure that has as its own principal goal disembodiment—the abandonment of the body, and therefore reality. Gee writes of heroin ‘but even if you avoid physical addiction, the dreamlike state it induces can be too bewitching for a person who seeks total freedom from reality…’ (49). In a very similar manner Coombs writes ‘From the moment I began having conscious thought processes I was aware of a fundamental mismatch between my body and my soul’ (9). There are, of course, no references to any sexual pleasure experienced by the prostitutes themselves in these narratives, and also unsurprisingly, there are virtually no descriptions of the pleasures of taking heroin either. Jacobs writes ‘The warm blanket of heroin had slackened and in her half-sleep, she’d mistaken the arguments on television for her own’ (4), while Davies writes ‘It’s a beautiful afternoon in Leichhardt and I want Candy to experience more of it, not just the heavenly weight that descends on vertical bodies, not just the exquisite crush of inertia’ (6). The language in both cases evokes distance and disembodiment: warmth, protection and a rejection of the actual, material universe. We cannot be sure whether the prostitute’s client is purchasing sex, or power; it is quite possible that the client is not sure. We can be sure, though, that the prostitute who is addicted to heroin is using the money from the transaction to purchase a removal from reality, a personal practice that is deeply intertwined with her working life. It is noticeable that only two of the prostitutes discussed in this chapter endorse the so-called, self-explanatory “hydraulic model” of prostitution, and claim that prostitution provides a valuable social service. I suggest that it is not a coincidence that they are fictional. Janowitz’s prostitute narrator in ‘Modern Saint #27’ informs us ‘I was like a social worker for lepers. My clients had a chunk of their body they wanted to give away; for a price I was there to receive it. Crimes, sins, nightmares, hunks of hair; it was surprising how many of them had something to dispose of. The more I charged, the easier it was for them to breathe freely once more’ (2). Similarly in Candy, Davies writes after Candy starts working in a Melbourne brothel ‘She was the hot-shot money tree. We lay, warm

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junk flowing through us thinking that she was helping the maladroit who without her might do something dangerous’ (221). Overall, though, the vast majority of heroin addicted prostitutes are under no illusions about their societal value and are quite clear, even brutally so, about the reason they are prostitutes. Davies writes of Candy ‘When she wanted to make money for heroin – which was basically all the time – she was good at it’ (181). Gee writes ‘I charged £300 per hour for use of my snatch’ (2013: 58). Coombs describes her drug intake to a counsellor, omitting to tell her she earns the money through prostitution ‘“Well, I’m on about 65 mls of methadone a day and I’m using about £200 a day of crack and heroin on top of that,” I added, hanging my head’ (224). As modes of representation, sociology and autobiography differ, of course, from fiction and it would seem to be in the latter mode that causal ambiguity is not only represented but endorsed, and even celebrated. Emphatic causality is rarely articulated in fiction about heroin addiction and prostitution. Janowitz writes ‘I had to choose the most difficult profession available to me; at night I often couldn’t sleep, feeling myself adrift in a sea of seminal fluid. It was on these evenings that Bob and I took drugs. He would softly tie up my arm and inject me with heroin’ (2004: 2). We cannot tell if the narrator is working as a prostitute to finance the purchase of heroin or if she has taken to using heroin to dull the unpleasant activity of prostitution. Similarly, in the title story of Evelyn Lau’s Fresh Girls, which is set in a massage parlour, the female narrator observes one of the other women, Carol Sitting on the floor, poking at herself with the needle, smearing a trickle of blood with the back of her hand onto her thigh, onto that dress she’s borrowed from somewhere, a purple mini with flowers. Pretty legs, hair falling into her eyes; she’s not even sweating though she’s been poking for the last twenty minutes. She’s even made one up for me, it’s sitting on the overturned cardboard box Mark calls a coffee table. Pale gold liquid and then the squirt of her blood in the syringe, like a curly hair. I look at it, look back at her, wait to get desperate enough. (Lau 1994: 4)

As it opens in medias res, as do almost all of these autobiographical and fictional texts, the reader cannot determine if Carol and the narrator began working in the massage parlour to fund their heroin habits, or if they have become heroin addicts in order to cope with the life. Given that Carol has to spend twenty minutes searching for a vein she has been

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an addict for some time, but we cannot construct a causal connection solely from this observation, nor are we ever able to do so throughout the story. It is perhaps unsurprising that it is in several contemporary fictional narratives about prostitution and addiction that we find the most striking images. It is the combination of imagery and psychology in Evelyn Lau’s short story ‘Rose’ that offers an actual insight into the exchange of money for sexual services ‘He worshipped me at first because he could not touch me. And then he worshipped me because he could only touch me if he paid to do so. I understood that without the autumn leaves, the browns of the hundreds and the fiery scarlet of the fifties, the marble pedestal beneath me would start to erode’ (29). How subtly Lau has contrasted the soft, folding paper money with the hard rigidity of the marble, and how cleverly she has inverted stereotypical properties associated with male and female. “The marble pedestal beneath me” is a beautifully turned metaphor. The wondrously versatile rhetorical device now popularly referred to as “demon” or “demons” is pervasive throughout addiction discourse and heroin addicted prostitutes use this valuable resource as much as any other addict. Gee writes, exhaustedly ‘the process of trying to fight my demons alone had brought me to my knees’ (263), while Keogh writes ‘I found a rehabilitation centre where, in a gentle and non-judgmental environment, I learned to conquer my demons’ (2010: xii). The representation of demons in the mythology of addiction causes immense confusion, while remaining very useful indeed for the addict. Writing of his fellow addicts in rehab, Moyers writes ‘here, at Hazelden, we immediately discovered common ground – we were all flawed, imperfect, hurting, ashamed, and scared. We struggled with the same basic demons…’ (159). The representation of demons in the mythology of addiction is very useful indeed for the addict. Although scientists usually dismiss the images of hell, demons, snakes and other folkloric images that permeate the language of alcoholics and drug addicts, the belief in monsters has a history within addiction narratives. White writes Images of dragons, snakes and monsters pervade the early history of addiction and its treatment in America…American temperance literature is filled with images of addiction as a monster or a beast. The image of persons chasing and fighting dragons seemed to simultaneously capture societal

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efforts to suppress intoxicants and the efforts of those trapped in addiction to slay the dragons of their own self-destruction. (xv)

This is a very charitable interpretation, as arguably alcoholics and drug addicts are too self-centred to construct mythological images around external attempts to suppress their addictions. Dragons have largely vanished in contemporary addiction narratives and in the mythology of the addiction underworld, although Moyers offers an interesting contemporary instance of both dragons and demons in a letter he quotes from his father ‘Dear Cope, It seems to me you have two dragons to slay. One is drugs…The other lies deeper. Cocaine appeases it briefly but never slays it…I want to be here when you need me. I will know when that is, not by what you say but by what you have done to face the realities of your addiction and the demons that drive it’ (255). We note here that the “two dragons” are the drugs themselves, and also at the same time the urges that force Moyers to seek out and use drugs. Overall, dragons have been emphatically replaced by demons, but demons, like dragons, also have a number of functions to perform. In Soul Destruction, Ruth Jacobs writes ‘Nestled on the claret, velvet sofa, she shot some junk to counter the aching in her bones. The demon inside that drove and controlled her faded and she settled into the reprieve she’d created’ (223). Keogh writes, having dismissed Narcotics Anonymous and returned to taking drugs, ‘all of my old demons resurfaced…’ (183). In addiction narratives demons tend to “resurface”, as though they are usually suppressed, or hidden. Undoubtedly the demons have ceased to be both external and posthumous; they now exist internally, somehow “inside” the still living alcoholic or drug addict. When literary critics think of demons they might think of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), or Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) or most memorable of all might be the demons described in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they were once beautiful. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Such is the language of those fiendish tormenters, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and disgust’ (Joyce 1976: 76). In these texts demons perform their traditional function, tormenting the sinful dead in Hell, prodding them with pokers, and roasting them in eternal flames. Already, in 1916, Joyce’s demons

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prefigure modern demons in the way they add cruel language to the physical torment of the eternal flames. Addicts, connectedly, are particularly attracted to the belief that addiction is ‘hellish’. At the conclusion of her drug soaked memoir Tweaking the Dream, Clea Myers writes of her eventual incarceration in a London mental hospital ‘How on earth do I end up here. For this was surely hell’ (Myers 2009: 247), while in The Girl Behind the Painted Smile: My Battle with the Bottle, Catherine Lockwood describes her drinking patterns “My binges would usually start with an all-day marathon. The next day, unless my drinking continued, the withdrawal would be unbearable. Initially I would never intend for it to carry on so long. It was a cycle that could easily spiral into a continuum that could last for days. Anyone who thought I enjoyed it would be very much mistaken. It was a living hell that I absolutely detested” (Lockwood 2013: 127). Cupcake Brown, who will become dependent on crack cocaine, writes proleptically of her mother’s early ‘Little did I know, my hell hadn’t even begun’ (20). Sutherland, too, is insistent on this issue ‘I’m an addict. Addiction is hell on earth’ (257), and later repeats the chthonic reference ‘I would beg God to save me and take my breath away in my sleep. This was hell’ (334). Literary critics also use this cliché; Crowley writes ‘The quest for a “higher” order of (unhealthy) truth is recounted in the most memorable chapters of john Barleycorn, in which London, with merciless self-scrutiny, relives his gradual but inexorable descent into alcoholic hell’ (3). In Slave Girl, Sarah Forsyth writes of her time spent as an addicted prostitute in Amsterdam ‘Because by now it wasn’t just lines of powdered cocaine alternating with sweet, warm hits of hash. Now I had been introduced to a new type of anaesthesia – almost instantly effective at blocking out all the noise and hurt of my daily grind. I had been initiated into the private hell of “crack”’ (Forsyth 2009: 142). The word ‘hell’ has, of course, been emptied of any specific religious significance. Strikingly, though, it also has no intimations of punishment, which, after all, is the very point of the traditional hell. There is no sense of punishment because addicts are encouraged to believe that they have done nothing wrong; why should they be punished? Although drug addicts and alcoholics are fond of claiming a familiarity with hell, indeed with a thorough immersion in it, I suggest that they are only paying the going rate for their dependencies, with savage usury added. While once demons punished the sins of those sinners who were no longer alive, now, instead of tormenting the dead they goad and prod the living drug addict and alcoholic into using drugs and drinking

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alcohol. The subsequent addictions to these substances make them act in immoral and criminal ways. In an increasingly secular age Western culture has almost entirely banished ‘Satan’ from any form of discourse held to be helpful or responsible. However, we have also, simultaneously, promoted demons, once Satan’s factotums, to centre stage. They have now been given an agency they never once possessed; one which allows, even encourages, drug addicts and alcoholics to make claims, which are taken perfectly seriously, in environments which are almost exclusively staffed by doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, other health care providers, and even lawyers and judges. In contemporary addiction discourse “demons” refers to an internalized compulsion that “forces” the addict to drink alcoholically or to continue taking heroin. Addicts succumb to their demons (or eventually overthrow them), but at the same time the demon is the addictive substance itself, and also Addiction itself. Then, to add to the confusion, addicts also perceive themselves as “demonised” by a larger culture that views them as monsters instead of sympathetically accepting that they have a progressive, chronic disease. The word “monsters” also makes it easy for the addict to relapse, over and over again. Nic Sheff writes of taking heroin ‘The fact was, I couldn’t just stop. That sounds like a cop-out, but it’s the truth. It’s like I’m being held captive by some insatiable monster that will not let me stop’ (Sheff 2008: 8). Anachronistic, primitive, atavistic, irrational—but emphatically and insistently there are monsters and demons in the underworld of the addict. It is extremely difficult to see what value neuroscience could attribute to either of the words “monster” and “demon”. The most useful way of understanding the function of demons and monsters in addiction mythology is to see them as agents of exculpation. Alcoholics and drug addicts use the word “demons” to describe their urges to drink or take drugs, their memories, their fears, their anything at all—as long as it explains their continuing addictions. The mother of a drug addict tells Macy ‘All but two of her spoons were missing, swiped for heroin mixing, she assumed. “It’s like there’s a demon inside her”, Patricia said’ (249). The demon now is not an urge to take drugs, or a memory so traumatic it necessitates drunkenness; it has taken on a more solid form. The next stage of demonic development within addiction narratives will undoubtedly require exorcism. The most sophisticated depiction of the relationship between demons and addiction can be found in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain. When Shuggie’s alcoholic mother, Agnes, begins drinking again, Stuart’s description of the “demons” who, or which,

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encourage Agnes’ drinking and keep her company while she drinks herself unconscious, possess a vague status which merges actual neighbours with traditional addiction demons ‘The lowest of the demons came out of the off-licences and bookies, and they filled her with the drink. They drank and smoked together, and then they fell asleep, sat upright in her armchairs, only to wake and start drinking again’ (Stuart 2020: 356). It is demons which demand alcohol and heroin, not the addict who remains helpless and innocent in the face of this internal onslaught. The preoccupation with unhappy childhoods in many addiction narratives often allows demons to be really understood as memories; these painful events are rigorously kept alive, at the expense of happier memories, to enable and justify continued addiction. The construction of demons, here, can be seen to function as a more primitive version of the “disease” model of addiction; both can be used to reduce, even entirely eliminate, addicts’ ability to have control over their lives. What economic and historical determinism can do for the sociologist and the criminologist, an inchoate, self-serving, quasi-supernatural apprehension of a world in which luck and demons still flourish can do for the alcoholic and drug addict. It was suggested in the previous chapter that religion is represented in narratives which focus on begging and addiction to be a spent force. Nothing remains in such narratives of the supernatural or numinous dimension of religion; all that remains is a weary theological vocabulary with no appreciable focus. Churches and convents are seen as dispensers of charity, nothing more. In this sense, although these texts deal with people well outside the mainstream, they are indicative of overall attitudes to religion in developed Western countries. The attitude adopted to religion in narratives which focus on prostitution and addiction is similar to that which is found in begging and addiction narratives; indeed, in the general culture outside. At its worst, religion proffers only stern moral condemnation, and even at its best it can offer no more than an elegiac sense of lost tranquillity. In the concluding pages of Brass, for example, Walsh’s narrator walks towards the Cathedral, which is where many prostitutes and their johns congregate after dark ‘I walk in the direction of the Cathedral which, like the moon, stands as a permanence within the mercurial passage of the night. How ironic that a place which radiates such beauty and sanctity should fester such vice and corruption’ (284). Nothing the narrator has said up to this point gives the reader the slightest confidence that the word “sanctity” is being used here in its conventional sense of being “holy” or “sacred”. In Hooked, Gee also demonstrates

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a thoroughly contemporary misunderstanding of the word “religiously” when she uses it in the sense of performing an act, invariably a secular one, repetitively ‘It never used to be like that. At one time, two or three lines and I’d be soaring. But when sniffing and drinking became something I did religiously, the effect of the quantity that I once sniffed to get me high became negligible’ (2010: 103). Addiction narratives actually tend to be regressive in that they abandon religion and revert to superstition. In the absence of formal religion many of the addicted protagonists in these narratives become preoccupied with luck, almost always, of course, bad. Whether aware of it or not, most people, including drug addicts and alcoholics, endorse the popular view which sees superstition (or magic) preceding religion, which is seen by them as only a more formalized set of superstitions. Science, they believe, is the most modern and the most developed of the three models and therefore is superior to both of the preceding stages. Ironically, or hypocritically, many addicts who insist that alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases and that this is a scientific “fact” are simultaneously slaves to superstition. In particular, they are prone to blame their dependencies and the ensuing difficulties which inevitably occur by ascribing their condition to luck, or even fate. Just as occurred in the previous chapter it is very unusual to read an account of drug addiction by prostitutes which attempts to blame society or capitalism for their plight. It is not that these narrators are all totally unaware of the larger socio-economic picture, but rather that their fundamental belief in such blind forces as chance and fate and luck actually form part of their addictions. The function of luck in these narratives is to further diminish any individual agency, and to introduce a modified degree of randomness into a world almost totally constrained by the rigorous demands of an addiction, with its attendant emphasis on cause and effect. Luck, overall, rejects the possibility of religious intervention. Ed Smith writes in Luck ‘the existence of luck is an affront to Divine Providence’ (Smith 2013: 230). However, luck also rejects the possibility that individual lives are grimly and relentlessly socially predetermined. Smith writes: ‘Fate is like the modern concept of luck in that it is beyond your control. Yet in another sense, fate is the opposite of luck. Fate is set in stone. Modern luck is not: it is unified, capricious and unpredictable’ (76). Addicts often operate in a world that almost seems independent of individual human agency; this then permits the pervasive sense of diminished responsibility that permeates these narratives to flourish. In Denis Belloc’s

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novel Slow Death in Paris the narrator, a male prostitute who is addicted to heroin, speaks to a female prostitute, who is addicted to heroin ‘At the Marine I order two beers. Sophia’s stopped crying. She’s complaining about her bad luck’ (1991: 59). Similarly, the heroin addicted lover of the eponymous Candy in Luke Davie’s Candy writes ‘But I guess the truth is, it didn’t really take all that long for things to settle down into a downward direction. It’s like there’s a mystical connection between heroin and bad luck, with some kind of built-in momentum factor’ (1998: 19). The reader assumes the word “mystical” here is being deliberately misused by the author, if not by the narrator. ‘I assumed that the people whose lives I envied were simply luckier than me…’ Coombs writes (2007: 51). Later in her narrative she writes, using an interesting conflation of the superstitious and the theological ‘My belief that things just happened to me and that I had no control over the fact that God had stamped my life card ‘UNLUCKY’ helped to propel me further towards the void’ (108). Luck takes the place of agency; the individual decision to use enough heroin to become dependent on it and then and sell one’s body to pay for it is reduced to “bad luck”, not a personal choice. The function of luck in these narratives is to further diminish any individual agency, and to introduce a modified degree of randomness into a world almost totally constrained by the rigorous demands of an addiction, with its attendant emphasis on cause and effect. Smith writes: ‘Fate is like the modern concept of luck in that it is beyond your control. Yet in another sense, fate is the opposite of luck. Fate is set in stone. Modern luck is not: it is unified, capricious and unpredictable’ (76). Addicts often operate in a world that almost seems independent of individual human agency; this then permits the pervasive sense of diminished responsibility that permeates these narratives to flourish. Keogh employs yet another device commonly used by drug addicts and alcoholics to evade responsibility ‘I had an addictive personality; I was the kind of person who would get addicted to anything if it helped me to escape from myself and from reality’ (96). To assert that one has an “addictive personality” is to employ a capitalist formulation; an individual’s personality is what one has, what one owns —in the addict’s case a desire to drink or take drugs. The “addictive personality” of the addict is a pseudo-psychological rendering of “the demons inside me”; both are ways of evading personal responsibility. The question “Would you like a happy ending?” is, I understand, a commonly employed euphemism utilized by prostitutes who work in massage parlours. It is a way of asking if the man would like to be

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brought to orgasm. There are very few “happy endings” within addiction narratives unless the alcoholic or the drug addict stops drinking or using heroin. The first step in staying stopped is often a stay, or indeed several stays, in a rehab clinic. These clinics are the focus of the next chapters in this book.

Works Cited Belloc, Denis. Slow Death in Paris. Translated by William Rodarmor. London: Quartet Books, 1991. Brown, Cupcake. A Piece of Cake: A Memoir. London: Bantam, 2006. Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. London: Penguin, 1994. Coombs, Rhea. My Name Is Angel. London: Virgin Books, 2007. Crowley, John. The White Logic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Dalrymple, Theodore. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Davies, Luke. Candy. London: Vintage, 1998. Dworkin, Andrea. Prostitution and Male Supremacy. Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 1 (1), 1993. Forsyth, Sarah with Tim Tate. Slave Girl. London: John Blake, 2009. Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. London: John Murray, 2003. Gee, Clare. Hooked: Confessions of a London Call Girl. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2010. Gee, Clare Unhooked: The Rehab of a London Call Girl. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013. Goodchild, Gaynor. One Little Speck. London: Palace Park Press, 2011. Hare, Bernard. Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Horsley, Sebastian. Dandy in the Underworld. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007. Jacobs, Ruth. Soul Destruction: Unforgivable. Chatham: Caffeine Nights Publishing, 2013. Janowitz, Tama. Slaves of New York. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Jeffreys, Sheila. The Idea of Prostitution. Melbourne: Spinefex Press, 1997. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin, 1976. Kandall, Stephen. Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Keogh, Rachel. Dying to Survive: Rachel’s Story. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2010. Lau, Evelyn. Fresh Girls. Trowbridge: Minerva, 1994.

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Linnane, Fergus. London’s Underworld: Three Centuries of Vice and Crime. London: Robson, 2003. Lockwood, Catherine. The Girl Behind the Painted Smile: My Battle with the Bottle. London: Ant Press 2013. Macy, Beth. Dopesick. New York: Head of Zeus, 2019. Marlowe, Ann. How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z. London: Virago, 1999. Matthews, Roger. Prostitution, Politics and Policy. Oxford: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008. Moore, Liz. Long Bright River. London: Hutchinson, 2020. Moran, Rachel. Paid for: My Journey Through Prostitution. Dublin: Gil & Macmillan, 2013. Moyers, William Cope with Katherine Ketcham. Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption. Westminster: Viking, 2006. Myers, Clea. Tweaking the Dream. London: YouWriteOn Books/Arts Council England, 2009. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. New York: Cornell University Press, 1995. Phoenix, Joanna. Making Sense of Prostitution, Hampshire: Palgrave, 1999. Sheff, David. Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Meth Addiction. London: Pocket Books, 2009. Sheff, Nic. Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamine. London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Smith, Ed. Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Stuart, Douglas. Shuggie Bain. London: Picador, 2020. Sutherland, Jack. Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth. London: Faber & Faber, 2016. Thayil, Jeet. Narcopolis. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Walsh, Helen. Brass. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. White, William. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. Bloomington: Chestnut Health Systems, 2014.

Rehabilitation Clinics and Addiction

Except where a word is patently ambiguous, it is natural for us to assume that the different situations, or types of situation, to which it applies have a distinctive common feature. For otherwise why should we use the same word to refer to them? —A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, 1956 Some follies are as catching as contagious diseases. —La Rochfoucauld, Maxims, 1665 My idea of the perfect apartment was Hitler’s bunker: windowless, soundproof, absolutely free of anything resembling outside life. When you live the drug life all humanity is an intrusion. —Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight, 1996

Nobody should be surprised that so much money is spent on rehab clinics in the West, with such extraordinarily poor results. The financial cost of rehab is incontestable. Anne Fletcher writes in Inside Rehab ‘The amount spent on treating alcohol and drug use disorders in the United States in 2010 was $22 billion, and analyses estimate that the figure will increase to $30 billion by2016’ (Fletcher 2013: 103). William White writes similarly ‘US addiction treatment expenditures grew from a few million dollars in the mid-twentieth century to its present status as a multibillion dollar enterprise. Total expenditure for addiction treatment rose from $9 billion © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_7

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in 1986 to $28 billion in 2010 and is projected to be $35 billion in 2014’ (White 1998: 423). It might be assumed that given the enormous expenditure on rehab there would be some impressive results but this is not at all the case. Fletcher writes ‘The truth is that more than half of people who go through a formal treatment programme will resume use of alcohol or other drugs following discharge – most often in the first ninety days. Total abstinence at a year is around 20–25 percent when measuring just alcohol’ (103). Multiple visits to rehab are commonplace. In I want My Life Back, Steve Hamilton writes ‘It might have been my sixth, maybe seventh time in rehab. I thought I had got as low as I could go and I was determined to stick to the straight and narrow. I was in my twenties and didn’t have a thing to call my own’ (Hamilton 2002: 79). One hundred pages later he writes ‘Andrea arrives in rehab at the same time as me. We are in admissions together. I can’t remember how many times she’s tried to get clean, but this is my eleventh institution and when they bring me in I’m in pretty bad shape’ (174). Although even younger than Hamilton, Nic Sheff writes in Tweak as a veteran of numerous rehab clinics ‘It’d seemed like, after countless rehabs and sober livings [houses], I had finally beaten my drug problem. And yet, there I was, standing on Haight street, drunk on Stoli and stoned out on Ambien, which I’d stolen from the med room at that rehab’ (Sheff 2007: 5). Unfortunately, Sheff’s account above of relapsing before he had even left the rehab clinic is an extremely common story; many addicts relapse on the same day they get out of rehab, or even while still in rehab. That this extraordinary state of affairs is seen as normative is in large part due to the tenacity of the treatment industry in shifting the blame for such massive levels of recidivism back onto the addicts themselves, while further arguing, in a remarkably persuasive manner, that the addicts really need to stay in rehab longer. Relapses are invariably blamed on the behaviour of addicts who have just been through rehab, as Fletcher points out ‘Clients who return to using alcohol or drugs are commonly blamed for “not getting with the programme” or not trying hard enough, and often have to “start all over again”, even though they’ve experienced very similar programmes many times before’ (20). She later writes ‘The idea that someone goes away to a thirty-day rehab and comes home a new person is naïve. Rather, there’s a growing view that people with serious substance abuse disorders commonly require care for months or even years, just as they would for other chronic medical conditions, such as diabetes…The short-term-fix mentality partially explains why so

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many people go back to their own habits’ (16–17). This “growing view”, perhaps unsurprisingly, is most strongly held within the rehab clinics themselves. As Marc Lewis writes ‘The disease model is excellent news for the owners and managers of the more than fifteen thousand drug and alcohol rehab centres operating in the United States and Canada, because it means We know what your problem is, and we’re the ones to fix it. Drug and alcohol treatment represents a multi-billion dollar industry in the Western world’ (19). This is connected, of course, to the equally strong belief in what Fletcher calls ‘the complexity of substance use disorders’ (18), as well as the somewhat paradoxical, even contradictory, view that it is a disease. However, although addiction is not complex and is not a disease, I suggest that the principal reason for the failure of rehab is the power of the disease theory of addiction. Craig Reinarman writes in the journal Addiction, Research and Theory ‘In the US and many other Western industrialized societies at the start of the twenty-first century, “addiction” is said to be a “disease”. Virtually everyone in the treatment industry embraces the notion that “addiction” is a “disease”, as do nearly all people who understand themselves to be “in recovery” from it’ (2005: 30–37. Marc Lewis also notes in The Biology of Desire ‘The idea that addiction is some kind of disease is unquestionably the dominant view in government, medical, and most scientific circles around the world’ (Lewis 2016, 11). The slow, painstaking construction of addiction as a disease is actually more of a literary issue than it is a medical one. Nevertheless, the disease theory of addiction has had a stranglehold on the ideology of the contemporary rehab clinic. Steve Hamilton tells his readers what he has learned in rehab ‘One thing to remember about addiction is that it’s a progressive disease. It will ravage you physically as well as mentally and it won’t simply stop when you stop drugging’ (Hamilton, 28). David Sheff, Nic Sheff’s father, also accepts this view ‘The only thing knowable was that Nic had a terrible disease’ (178). Of course Sheff’s comment here is not accurate, it is not ‘knowable’ that addiction is a disease; this is a theory. However, it is a theory that has become a fact; a hypothesis that has been transformed into a monster. Much of the addict’s time in rehab is actually engaged in helping to construct the perfect disease; one that is all powerful and omnipotent, one that has the best chance possible of being able to take the blame for the addict’s almost inevitable relapse. Not only is addiction a disease; it is a “unique” disease, as Moyers writes of what he has learned in rehab ‘In its ability to take over your mind and destroy your

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will to survive, addiction is unlike any other chronic, progressive disease in the world’ (343). Similarly, David Sheff, after years of supporting his son through his various addictions, stresses this particular aspect of addiction ‘He has a disease, but addiction is the most baffling of all diseases, unique in the blame, shame, and humiliation that accompany it’ (179). Very few addicts in rehab ask themselves if the “uniqueness” of addiction actually disqualifies it from the taxonomic category of “disease” to which it has so implausibly been assigned. A major problem with the disease theory of addiction is not that it is incorrect but that a belief in it shuts down further explanations for addiction. A disease just is. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘No Country for Old Men’ the title of which he takes from Yeats’ poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the weary old lawman says ‘There’s always been narcotics. But people don’t just up and decide to dope themselves for no reason’ (McCarthy 2006, 303). While a disease is actually its own reason (a crucial aspect of its appeal), social scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have all offered various reasons to explain why some people (a great many of them) “dope themselves” to the point where they have to enter a residential rehab clinic to save their own lives. The scientific explanation is surely, at the very least, insufficient to account for addictions so severe they require the patient to be detoxified before even beginning treatment. The rock musician Anthony Kedis writes, for example, of smoking crack ‘As soon as you hit the pipe, boom, there’s that familiar instantaneous release of serotonin in the brain, a feeling that’s almost too good’ (Kedis, 198: 22). Kedis has been in rehab several times by this stage and he is picking up the language of the clinics. What we might note is the absence of any external referent; it is now serotonin itself that is simultaneously the instrument and the object of pleasure. In such accounts serotonin and dopamine are ends in themselves, perfectly circular like the dragon chasing its tail. The authoritarian voices addicts hear in rehab clinics, although offered as challenging, are full of familiar, comfortable phrases, in their way as reassuring and predictable as the effects produced by the drugs and alcohol they were so reliant upon before entering rehab: “low self -esteem”, “dual diagnosis”, “economically disadvantaged”, “trauma”, “synaptic configurations”, “stigma”, “co-dependent”, “higher power”… I noted earlier that one of the more remarkable features of contemporary addiction narratives is the way they remain deeply, and anachronistically, indebted to Cartesian Dualism. The issue of ‘free will’ can obviously be seen as a philosophical issue. Only a few of the characters and narrators

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in the rehab narratives to be discussed in this section realize that addiction is not a disease but a behavioural disorder, with roots that are deeply entangled in conventional Western religion and morality. The disease theory of addiction although still dominant was attracting no new converts, and not much interest, as the twentieth century moved into the new millennium. Just as a drug addict who has overdosed can be revived by Narcan, so too the disease theory of addiction was revived by neuroscience. The arrival of neuroscience offered a great deal to those interested in addiction and scientifically minded. What was once only a much-disputed, rather inchoate “disease” looked very much like it could be a specific disease—a brain disease. DuPont inevitably locates the desire for alcohol or drugs in the addict’s brain ‘True addiction does not end with a simple decision to quit a particular behaviour. The grip of addiction on the addict’s brain is too firm for that to happen’ (107). Moyers, like so many addicts, believes what he is told about addiction as long as it’s a doctor or some sort of scientist doing the telling. Researchers say that addictive drugs, when used in large enough amounts or for long periods of time, ‘hijack’ the brain, like Trojan horses that sneak into the nerve cells and take control. That explains the biochemical process, but it doesn’t get close to describing the desperate hunger, the consuming thirst, the unbearable craving, the furious yearning, the excruciating need that grabs you and shakes you and won’t let you go. (278)

Actually, this does not even explain the ‘biochemical process’, which Moyers himself accepts is the more unimportant aspect here. Both Moyers and DuPont are basing their views on discoveries made in the brains of people who were already addicted: “addictive drugs, when used in large enough amounts or for long periods of time…” Naturally addicts’ brains will show changes, and decay; they are constantly damaging their brains, but that does not in way suggest that addiction is a “brain disease”. It is no more likely that a human brain would remain unchanged after prolonged alcohol and drug abuse than it is that a man’s brain would remain unchanged after he repeatedly slammed his head against a brick wall. What cannot be explained by science or medicine are the reasons for somebody using drugs or alcohol in sufficient amounts and for long enough periods to become dependent upon them. Causation is surely the only real subject of interest here and Moyers concedes that he has no answer to that question. Jack Weiner, in

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Drinking, suggests that adolescent “fragility” “…has begun to express itself in a condition known as “instant alcoholism….” (Weiner 1976: 85). In Blackout Girl: Jennifer Storm describes her first experience of snorting crack cocaine ‘It instantly made me feel good, light, and carefree. All the emptiness in my stomach, the big black hole in the pit of my stomach, went away. This drug did everything I had always wanted alcohol and other drugs to do – it took away all the pain and left me feeling numb and peaceful. I immediately wanted more. In that instant, crack became my best friend. I was addicted before I even exhaled’ (Storm 2008: 110). What Storm means is that she wanted more of a substance that made her feel so good; it does not mean that she was “addicted” in the sense of being dependent. Sutherland writes of his first time smoking crystal meth with his lover ‘The cloud swirled down into my lungs and hit. It took me, in seconds, to a level I couldn’t recall reaching before. Love at first gasp. As I grabbed the pipe and puffed, deep and long, I found myself totally without inhibition. Or, more importantly, pain…It went on for hours. I was hooked’ (208). Dresner writes in a similar manner of the first time she snorted amphetamine ‘Years of self-hatred and anxiety instantly vanished. I felt like it was okay – good even – to be me. This is what I had been chasing with decades of therapy and psychiatric meds. And here it was: Prozac…with wings! Synthetic self-esteem and bliss. From that moment I was hooked. Who wouldn’t be?’ (Dresner 2017: 70). A common sense response to her rhetorical question here might well be: anybody who was not full of self-hatred and anxiety, and anyone who had not spent decades in therapy medicated by doctors. “Hooked” is a synonym for “addicted” and yet clearly both Sutherland and Dresner do not mean that they were immediately dependent upon amphetamine after this first smoke; they mean they enjoyed the feeling so much that they wanted more of it. Indeed, after the lines quoted above she writes ‘…within seven short months I was completely strung out. I never saw it coming…You don’t become a drug addict overnight’ (70). She shows more insight here: there is no “instant alcoholism” or any “instant drug addiction”; it takes time to build up a dependency. In Agenda Heroin, Julian Durlacher cites De Quincey on this particular issue ‘Making allowance for constitutional differences, I should say that in less than 120 days, no habit of opium-eating could be formed strong enough to call for an extraordinary self-conquest in renouncing it, even suddenly renouncing it. On Saturday you are an opium eater, on Sunday no longer such’ (Durlacher 2000: 81). Durlacher immediately

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follows this quotation by observing ‘Heroin is probably more addictive but nonetheless it usually takes considerably more than one “hit” to get hooked, contrary to popular belief’ (81). Burroughs, too, writes in Junky (1953) ‘You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all’ (Burroughs 2008: xl). In Roaring Drunk, John T. Newton writes ‘Nobody starts of (sic) being an alcoholic; it is something that develops over years of drinking’ (7). During these months and even years of consumption the drug addict and the alcoholic enjoy considerable pleasure—if they did not then they would not continue consuming, but in the vast majority of addicts’ accounts these pleasures are elided. The belief that alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine generate pleasure is anathema to contemporary understandings of alcohol and drug dependency. Dodes, in Heart of Addiction is dismissive of suggestions that addiction is driven by the desire for enjoyment ‘No addiction is fundamentally motivated by a search for pleasure. On the contrary, addictions are compulsively driven whether they lead to pleasure, or not, and are determined by deeper factors than pleasure-seeking…’ (206). The belief that it is possible to become immediately addicted to alcohol or heroin is part of the larger project designed to loudly reject any suggestion that alcoholics and drug addicts may actually be getting pleasure from alcohol and narcotics. A pervasive Puritanism, coupled with an almost universal exculpatory urge, works steadily throughout the last century and into this one to minimize, even obliterate, any suggestion that addicts might use substances because they enjoy doing so. The researchers Moyers alludes to above have told us nothing useful about addiction at all, and yet words and phrases like “biochemical” and “nerve cells” provide the acceptable, indeed sadly compulsory, vocabulary for the twenty-first-century narrative of addiction. Moyers above uses a reference that can be found in The Iliad to put forward the view that drugs “sneak into the nerve cells and take control”. Equally, it is possible to suggest that this lamentably passive comprehension of addiction is not as accurate or as useful as the comment made by Girolamo Savonarola in 1494 ‘Habit, indeed, is second nature, and as the rock’s nature is to fall and it cannot alter this and cannot be raised except by force, so habit too becomes nature, and it is very difficult if not impossible to change men, especially whole peoples, even if their habits are bad, for their habits spring out of their character’ (Hawkes, 23). As Savonarola recognizes, habit and character are connected and we agreed long ago to protect

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addicts from any irritating scrutiny, let alone any sensible criticism of their morality. Although outpatient rehab is actually a far more common experience for alcoholics and drug addicts than the much more expensive inpatient care, the rehab clinic has some obvious advantages as a setting for the writer. Dresner writes ‘Inpatient treatment is communal living at its finest. We are stuck together all day in multiple groups, eating meals together, smoking on the patio together, and going to evening meetings together. It feels a bit cultlike – as if we’re in some weird quasi-spiritual compoundbut here, everybody’s religion is addiction’ (26). In ‘The Streets’ the drama and conflict is always portrayed as physical; the urban landscape is a backdrop for endless conflicts, struggles, and dramas. In this section, ‘The Clinics’, the sound of police sirens has receded; there is, even in the worst of the rehab clinics, some peace and quiet, but yet there is still much potential for an author to orchestrate other forms of conflict. In rehab there is also the opportunity to introduce ideological clashes, rarely seen in ‘The Streets’ The very large majority of the texts to be discussed ‘The Clinics’ are offered to the reader as autobiographical: journals, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies. In the rehabilitation clinics themselves the autobiographical form is privileged, both in writing and in speech. As the sound and the fury of the streets recedes, the relative quiet and calm of the clinics, as well as the often successful attempts to extract long dormant emotions from the addicts, and the actual insistence by the clinic’s staff on some form of confessional and aspirational writings from the patients, generates a great deal of accounts of addiction, and recovery from it. Rehab clinics cost money, a great deal of it. ‘Multiple trips through detox, rehab and sober houses can take a financial toll almost beyond belief’ (93), Fletcher informs us. It is a sine qua none of contemporary addiction discourse to insist that pain and trauma underlie addiction. Indeed, the very title of Johann Harri’s hugely successful Chasing the Scream (2015) dramatizes this view, and we see it very economically expressed by John Diamond ‘The escape from pain and the illusion of control are core issues for all addicts and persons in recovery’ (11) and later “Addiction is a way to numb feelings, suppress memories and escape pain” (Diamond 2000: 239). Another way to look at the issue is to observe that alcoholics and drug addicts are just the most innocent and deluded of consumers. At the heart of addiction there does not necessarily or inevitably lie pain, or tormented memories, or complex trauma but instead the corrupt belief that you can obtain something of

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considerable value without paying a very high price for it. Perhaps paradoxically, these narratives also dramatize the equally corrupt view that everything of great value must cost a great deal of money. Certainly, drug addicts and alcoholics are among the greatest dupes of capitalism, but they are far from alone in this; nor is this the worst aspect of their abject surrender to the belief that money can buy happiness. What is much more damaging is that they have willingly colluded in one of capitalism’s most powerful imperatives ‘It is reasonable to suppose that capitalist corporations systematically propagate the concept of the human being as an insatiable, desiring machine, or as an animal governed by an infinity of desires’ (Hawkes 1996: 11). This is indeed how addicts perceive themselves, and are encouraged to perceive themselves, within contemporary recovery culture: as misfiring machines, crippled by faulty, flickering wiring, driven by an insatiable, unquenchable desire for more drugs, or more alcohol. In Barnaby Conrad’s Time is All We Have he describes a lecture given in the rehab clinic, using experiments conducted on rats, specifically designed to demonstrate that alcoholism is entirely divorced from morality: Now, that long ongoing experiment has a point and a goal. Like so many people, certain of those rats have an X factor in their makeup that makes them not be able to assimilate alcohol and also makes them susceptible to alcohol and to crave alcohol. They do not have weak characters, they are not less moral than their fellows. They have a disease, and we are trying to determine what it is in their physical makeup that makes them react differently to the intake of ethyl alcohol. (1996: 26–27) (My italics)

Because addicted rats do not have weak characters, because they cannot be accused of being less moral than their fellow rats, then it is blindingly obvious that this must inevitably be the case with alcoholics and drug addicts who are exactly like rats in every respect—except, of course, that they are actually human beings; creatures by impulses that are not always detectable by the limited tools available to science. The problem with this refusal to consider flawed morality as a possible cause of addiction is apparent in Peter Benchley’s meditations during his stay in a rehab clinic ‘He had a new perspective on himself, on his disease. He was coming to see a truth in what he used to think facile exculpatory nonsense. It was a disease, not a character flaw, because it was something he couldn’t help, like hemophilia. He drank because he could not drink’ (Benchley, 231).

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In The Corrections Franzen mocks the chemical reductivism of much recovery discourse in his depiction of the huckster trying to sell pain killers to a sad older woman, whose name, significantly, he forgets. “Chemicals in your brain, Elaine. A strong urge to confess, a strong urge to conceal: What’s a strong urge? What else can it be but chemicals? What’s memory? A chemical change! Or maybe a structural change, but guess what. Structures are made of: proteins! And what are proteins made of? Amines!” Enid had the dim worry that her church taught otherwise – something about Christ being both a hunk of flesh hanging from a cross and also the son of God – but questions of doctrine had always seemed to her forbiddingly complex… (341)

Despite her supernatural, religious intimations, Edith does, all the same, buy the expensive pills. The relationship between capitalism and intoxication is crucial in understanding the nature of addiction: a cerebral, sometimes even transcendent, experience is bought in the market place, for crass, materialist money. Caveat Emptor. The title of Barnaby Conrad’s rehab memoir Time is All We Have is taken from Hemingway, another in a long line of alcoholic American writers. Conrad recounts a session with one of his counsellors in which Conrad observes “You can’t have thrills without some danger”. The counsellor replies: ‘I was reading the famous Otto Finichel about that subject last night.’ He opened a tome to a page marked by an index card and read: ‘When the organism discovers that it is now able to overcome without fear a situation which would formerly have overwhelmed it with anxiety, it experiences a certain kind of pleasure. This pleasure has the character of “I need not feel anxiety any more”’. (Conrad 1992: 153–154)

This “freedom from anxiety” is of such value to the addict they will do whatever it takes to buy it. And they are buying it. No matter what the cost to themselves, or indeed no matter what the cost to others. As recovery culture begins to follow scientific models, in the belief that science must by definition be going in the right direction, inevitably it begins to reject individual moral flaws as contributory factors in the aetiology of addiction. Jamison suggests that her alcoholism is probably genetically transmitted by her father ‘…his wiring, the parts of his genetic code he passed along to me, the chromosomal variations we shared that

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made our neural systems more primed to coax dependencies’ (155). King is also attracted to the metaphor of malfunctioning electronic wiring to explain her alcoholism ‘I didn’t know that, when it came to alcohol, I was bodily and mentally different from normal people. I didn’t know that when the first drink entered my system, I was hardwired to want a second, and a third, and so on to infinity’ (67). Her belief that alcoholics have an abnormal reaction to alcohol pervades addiction discourse. Carr echoes this belief ‘To people who don’t have the allergy, there’s no clear way to explain the unmanageability that goes with addiction. A drunk or an addict picks up a shot because, same as anyone, he just wants to feel a little different. But it never stops there’ (381). It doesn’t stop there, he claims, because alcoholics and drug addicts have an allergy. This “allergy” is another of the many misleading words drawn from a medical lexicon, like recovery and relapse, used constantly within addiction narratives. As an explanation of alcoholism it is clearly inadequate. There is no logic at all in arguing that because alcoholics want to drink even more of a substance than everybody else, a substance that almost everybody else enjoys drinking too, then they must be reacting to it differently. Common sense would actually suggest that alcoholics’ reaction to alcohol is not at all abnormal, it is the same as everybody else’s reaction. After all, if a couple from England, for example, enjoyed the sunshine and the lifestyle to be found in Spain so much that they sold their house, left their relatives and friends behind, and emigrated to Spain, we would be unlikely to suggest that they enjoyed sunshine and sangria differently than everybody else; instead, we would sensibly assume that they enjoyed it even more than the rest of us. It is the extremely high value that alcoholics and drug addicts award to heroin and alcohol which keeps them addicted. The history of the rehab narrative demonstrates the gradual abolition of any criticism of the addict’s moral flaws or weaknesses in favour of a determined drive to view addicts as helpless victims. Jean Cocteau’s Opium: journal d’une desintoxication was published in France in 1930. In 1928 and 1929 Cocteau went voluntarily into ‘desintoxication’ clinics in Paris. One of his biographers writes ‘Neither treatment cured him, but the second failure produced a hodgepodge called Opium, which contains more penetrating glimpses into Cocteau than his other autobiographical writings’ (Brown 1968: 240). It is perhaps natural that a biographer should value Cocteau’s Opium primarily for the insights it offers “into Cocteau” but Cocteau’s journal has much to offer the reader who has a more specific interest in drugs and, even

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more specifically, in addiction to drugs. Cocteau’s mordant humour is also a delight ‘Without opium, plans, marriages, and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes’ (17). Opium also depicts the embryonic world of the rehabilitation clinic; an institution now so distressingly familiar to the early twenty-first century that the familiar contraction “rehab” is immediately understood by everybody. When Amy Winehouse sang in 2013 “I don’t want to go to rehab no no no” all her listeners knew where she did not want to go. On the first page of Opium, Cocteau writes ‘I am describing a cure: a wound in slow motion’ (18). Strikingly, in 1930, Cocteau sees the cure itself as a “wound”. Throughout the following eighty years we see the reverse of this position become slowly more entrenched until it appears as the truth, or as an incontestable fact. After Cocteau’s Journal we see that addiction is always presented as a state caused by pain; it becomes heretical to claim that abstinence is a painful state, or a wound. As will be seen in the following chapters, throughout the rest of the twentieth century and now well into the present century it becomes axiomatic to insist that addiction is actually caused by wounds. The physical and psychological pain experienced by the addict results in desperate attempts, in metaphors ubiquitous among addicts and counsellors and therapists, to “self-medicate” and to “numb the pain”. Both of these phrases appropriate, usually unchallenged, the discourse of medicine, and in particular that of anaesthesiology. Despite his flamboyant personality, Cocteau is too sensible to claim that he was driven to take opium because of intolerable pain; at most he is rueful throughout Opium. He is always aware that he has admitted himself to a “disentoxification” clinic; a medical centre specifically designed to remove an abundance of self-administered toxins from his body. Cocteau writes ‘Opium is a decision to be taken. Our only error is wanting to smoke and to share the privileges of those who do not smoke’ (54). As will be seen, though, this error, the “only error”, is at the very core of addiction. Still, Cocteau understands: he has smoked too much opium—here in the clinic is the reckoning. Opium offers the reader a world in which actions have consequences and one in which adults have sufficient free will to make poor choices, and then pay for them. William Seabrook prefaces his memoir Asylum (1935) with these nononsense words ‘None of this book is fiction or embroidery. It is not a

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novel. It is straight fact” (Seabrook 2015: iv). Most readers of autobiographies and memoirs will accept such assertions cum grano salis but nevertheless it is indisputable that Asylum is presented to the reader as a factual account of Seabrook’s eight-month stay at a Westchester mental hospital in 1933. The book opens with these uncompromising words ‘Acute alcoholism’ was the way my commitment read, to which was added when the doctors and psychiatrists had checked me over: Chronic; Neurasthenic symptoms; marked; Psychopathic symptoms; zero’ (Seabrook: vii). Seabrook is now probably best known for introducing the word ‘zombie’ into English, but he was a highly successful explorer and journalist and Asylum is written from the point of view of a diligent anthropologist with considerable literary flair. Cocteau and Seabrook differ in a significant way in their attitudes to addiction: Cocteau is essentially indifferent to the rewards of physical and mental health and actually prefers the artificiality of addiction to the reality of life without opium, while Seabrook laments the damage he has done to himself by drinking excessively and wishes to return to a prelapsarian state of health. However, and more importantly, they share the view that they alone are to blame for their addictions. Seabrook is highly self-condemnatory ‘God forbid that any of this record be or become a temperance lecture. I still think whiskey is a grand thing. I still believe that no man ever became a victim of whiskey – but only of some weakness within himself” (117). Later he writes of a conversation with his psychiatrist Dr Paschall ‘ [he] said the main thing they hoped to do was simply to break me permanently from the habit of using alcohol as a psychic-pain-killer, as an anesthetic, as coward’s refuge…’ (166–167). The contemporary reader notes the casual word “simply” here; addiction is a habit and therefore it is possible to break it. Fallada’s alcoholic narrator is similarly alert to his own weakness and is even more self-lacerating than Seabrook ‘I am a weak man, I know that now, but I am no thief. My fear is always greater than my appetite, and in that I am weak too’ (240). On the penultimate page of the novel, Erwin confronts his own flaws and failings ‘I know that every single second of my life I have been a coward, I am a coward, I shall go on being a coward. Useless to expect anything else’ (280). The belief that alcoholism and drug addiction are the results of “cowardice”, or even “some weakness within” addicts themselves is anathema to modern understandings of addiction. Throughout the rest of the century, and onwards, this belief virtually disappears from artistic depictions and academic debates about the principal causes of addiction.

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Seabrook understands that alcohol is not especially powerful; he is just not very strong. In a manner reminiscent of Cocteau’s, he is quite aware he has drunk so much alcohol that he has made himself physically and mentally ill; that he is, in fact, in a hospital because of his alcoholism. However, he claims no pain, no trauma; just over indulgence. The more amiable and less analytical Seabrook lacks the grandiosity of Cocteau and he goes to some specific trouble to insist that he is reporting from the front line as a quite ordinary correspondent ‘I want to set down briefly some of the things I thought, not because I consider myself a unique or specially interesting individual, but because, on the contrary, I may be a quite common or flourishing, weedy garden variety of the whitecollared, educated drunkard – and a legitimate general interest may lie in tha’ (161–162). Asylum is certainly well written and perceptive enough to provide a legitimate specialized interest too. The belief that excessive drinking of alcohol and using of drugs could just be “bad habits” recedes almost to the point of invisibility within subsequent rehab narratives. The view that addicts are basically not very robust, but instead develop the bad habit of relying so heavily on intoxicants to avoid dealing with the realities of life that they become addicted to them is just too disruptive and damaging to the narrative of addition that begins to dominate recovery culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Fletcher, by no means hostile to the dominant ideologies in rehab clinics, writes. Some experts argue that many of the ways in which rehabs handle use [of drugs or alcohol] during treatment run counter to the rehabs’ own view that addiction is a disease. Even the words “relapse” and “lapse” have moralistic overtones, perhaps less obvious than words like “clean” to refer to drug-free individuals and “dirty” to refer to those still using. (344)

Deeply embedded within the mythology of addiction is the pervasive belief that a great part of addiction’s deadly attraction is a desire to repeat the hallowed “first time”. Kedis writes ‘But that initial high is the feeling that you’re doomed to be chasing for the rest of your life, because the next time you do it it’s good but not quite like that’ (141). The curious reader may wish to know “like what”? Nick Johnstone in A Head Full of Blue writes ‘No one I have ever met – outside Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that is – remembers the first time they got drunk quite as romantically as I do. For me, that night was an epiphany. Nothing would ever

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be the same again’ (3). Similarly, Moyer writes ‘When addicted people look back on the very first time they sipped a drink from the bottom of a parent’s glass, swallowed a painkiller to ease the agony of a broken bone, or took a hit off a bong in a dorm room, they remember instant, intense, feelings of freedom, rapture, and relief’ (42). Again, the literary critic might reasonably ask “freedom from what?”, “rapture in what?” and, again, “relief from what?” Ann Marlowe writes in Heroin A-Z ‘We all want to get back to that first time. Which shows you that heroin addiction is really nostalgia, which should tarnish the luster of nostalgia quite as much as it does that of heroin’ (154). However, this often articulated desire by addicts to repeat the first time is misleading; it is not time that the addict wishes to regain, but the experience itself. This experience is, as we have seen, often apprehended by the addict as transcendent; there is a sense of unity, the breaking down of barriers between the addict’s conscious self and the outside world; a strong sense of universal, even cosmic, integration; an abolition of the suffering self. To suggest that the addict wishes to recapture that “first time” is to confuse temporality with transcendence, to mistake time for timelessness, which is the actual abolition of time. This is an error, but it is not as grave an error as the addict makes when they think such an experience is endlessly repeatable. Sheff writes in We All Fall Down ‘So, uh, yeah, that’s the way I play it this morning. I finish off the rest of the vodka in the freezer, and immediately warmth and tranquility fill my mind and body, like I’ve swallowed the sun down inside me. It’s a miracle, really. And so what if it’s all dependent on a substance?’ (190). Well, so everything. It is crucial to note not only the feelings of ecstasy and transcendence such addicts experience but also the money they spent and the consequent immediacy of the experience. “What was good about it” was actually getting it so quickly, so cheaply, and so artificially. Although for many addicts some form of religious or spiritual transcendence is undesirable or unattainable, the rejection of reality in one form or another is always the driving force behind their addictions. Steve Smith phrases it in Addict with impressive economy ‘Unable to face reality, I drank’ (Smith 1998, 155). An inevitable consequence of alcoholic drinking is the frequency of blackouts which are so common that alcoholics often diminish their significance, as Donald Newlove indicates in his autobiography Those Drinking Days ‘Blackouts were a commonplace (so common they had no name), a drinker’s burden, and a lost hour here and there was not too harsh a price, and could be weirdly

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amusing’ (Newlove 1981, 22). Almost all of the alcoholics in rehab narratives acknowledge frequent and lengthy blackouts. The psychologists Neil Kessel and Henry Walton note a more sinister implication in their interpretation of alcoholic memory loss ‘The term “blackout” is often used to describe this amnesia, particularly by alcoholics themselves, but it is misleading because there has been no unconsciousness. The abnormality is a failure to register events in the memory’ (Kessel and Walton 1965, 158). It is quite possible to see in the accounts of addiction offered by numerous characters in various texts set in rehab clinics that the desire to escape reality can become even more desperate, as Dionysus gives way to Thanatos. In her autobiography Drunk Mom, Jowita Bydlowska writes of her alcoholic blackouts ‘Living is difficult. Dying is difficult. Being dead is not difficult. And what else is a blackout if not death?’ (Bydlowska 2013, 45). Later she writes ‘My blackouts are the perfect, absolute erasers of reality. There are no maybes, no gray edges. It’s pure temporary death. And not the death that ends with a warm light at the end of the tunnel. Not even flickering. No flashbacks coming back later, either’ (95). Mate writes ‘“I’m not afraid of dying”, a client told me. “Sometimes I’m more afraid of living”’ (30). It is not possible to comprehend the nature of addiction without an understanding of its fundamentally epistemological nature. Gabor Mate writes in In The realm of Hungry Ghosts ‘Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics. Heroin and cocaine, both powerful physical painkillers, also ease psychological discomfort’ (34). The belief that addicts are reacting to otherwise unbearable pain is a commonplace of addiction studies and therefore addicts in rehab clinics hear it so often that most of them eventually believe it. Many addiction narratives suggest otherwise; they indicate that it is not pain but fear that drives the addict. These are different; pain is reactive, but fear is anticipatory and in our culture we view the response to pain, however antisocial or personally destructive, as a more natural and even admirable reaction than we do the fearful and slightly craven expectation of pain. Hence the enormous appeal of this largely mistaken view is directly connected to the equally popular and equally erroneous view that addicts are victims of a debilitating disease who are constantly struggling against enormous odds to stay clean and sober and, inevitably, often failing. Pragmatically, it is important to note that precisely because fear of pain is perceived culturally as considerably less meritorious than even an extravagant response to pain, then addicts will lie to conceal the unpalatable truth. Lying lies at the

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centre of addiction. Addicts lie. Neuroscientists and medical doctors and psychiatrists and rehab counsellors may often overstate their respective cases, confuse theories with facts, even mislead and confuse their patients, but addicts actually lie. Fletcher, however, is bullish on the subject of lies and addicts: Have you ever heard this joke? Q. A.

How do you know when an addict is lying? When his lips are moving.’

She continues ‘Quite frankly, I find it offensive. It stems from the widespread notion, often promulgated in addiction treatment itself, that virtually all people with alcohol or drug problems are dishonest. Even a nationally known expert in the field included “they’re all liars” in his definition of an addict when talking with me’ (14). Our culture has been so ruthlessly bullied into seeing all addicts as innocent victims who are so traumatized and vulnerable they could not possibly lie, that the words of a “nationally known expert” are dismissed as not only incorrect, but actually offensive. However, those with a more detached perspective might wonder if there is any other area of contemporary human suffering where the views of a “nationally known expert” would be so immediately and contemptuously dismissed. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that addicts do lie, they lie a lot, and sometimes they are even aware that they are lying. Early in his addiction Nic Sheff writes, when confronted with an unpleasant truth ‘My first instinct was, of course, to lie’ (Sheff 2007, 9) while his father, whose book is an account of his son’s addiction, writes of his failure to notice Nic has relapsed after rehab and is using heroin again ‘I have been so traumatized by his addiction that surrealism and reality have become one and the same. I can’t distinguish the normal from the outrageous anymore…Or maybe it’s only that, with practice, addicts become flawlessly gifted liars, and this coincides with parents’ increasing susceptibility to their lies’ (175). The mother of the eponymous Rachel, in Marian Keyes’ Rachel’s Holiday, is so thoroughly exasperated by her addict daughter’s constant lies that she shouts at her ‘Rachel, WILL YOU STOP LYING?’ (Keyes 1997, 13). In Drunk Mom, Bydlowska finally acknowledges to herself ‘I’m a liar. I’m a liar and I can’t afford to be anymore. I’m an alcoholic, I’m a liar and I’ve lied about everything’ (230). In We All Fall Down, Nic Sheff describes

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his reaction to the school principal’s enthusiastic thanks after Sheff has given the students an anti-drugs lecture ‘I smile back at him. I lie with my smile. I lie with my eyes. I lie with my own words. I am a liar. It’s not exactly news. I’ve been a liar since as long as I can remember’ (Sheff 2012, 266). Writers like Fletcher, Mate and Johann Hari, however, reject the notion of the addict as consummate, life-long liar and consistently adopt a more trusting approach when listening to addicts. Fletcher cites the research of two psychologists: Mark and Linda Sobell, who claim: The bottom line is that if people believe that what they are telling you will be confidential – particularly that it will not incur adverse consequences - and they are asked in a clinical or research context, then what they say tends to be reliable and valid. (This all holds if the person has no substances in their systems at the time of the enquiry). But people are not stupid – if telling the truth about using drugs or drinking to a significant other, probation officer, schoolteacher, or work supervisor is going to bring trouble, why not lie and avoid the negative consequences? In short, if people have no reason to lie to you, the evidence suggests they will be truthful. (Fletcher, 17)

The psychologists are so convinced that their interviewees respect the “clinical and research context” as much as they do (who spend their working lives immersed in it) that it never crosses their minds that addicts themselves are very likely quite unimpressed and tell the same stories they always tell, irrespective of the particular authoritarian setting. Moreover, it is equally inconceivable to the scientists that the addict’s lying might go deeper than a mechanical response to a practical situation; that it might actually be part of the response to life that prompted the addiction in the first place. They write “if people have no reason to lie to you…” but addicts always have a reason to lie to you, and even to themselves. Mate also believes virtually everything his addict clients tell him and when he has his reservations he generously shares them among the wider community, as when he writes of alcoholics and addicts ‘Yes, they lie, cheat and manipulate – but don’t we all, in our own way?’ (22) Well, probably nowhere near as often as addicts and alcoholics do, and with nothing like the horrific consequences, would be the usefully robust response such a question never actually receives. Addicts are, of course, quick to perceive the credulousness of rehab staff. Bewildered by her own lack of control over alcohol, Bydlowska writes of a session with her counsellor:

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I just say that I drink because of the stress of childcare and my life, which is a failure. I don’t really attribute my drinking to this. I could talk about the obscene appetite of my wanting, or about the guilt crushing my sobriety, or perhaps about subconsciously wanting to die, not being able to stop. Yet all of that is too abstract, too complicated to explain. I can’t even explain it to myself…But since I’ve seen this movie before, I know that you have to come up with some kind of explanation. Cause and effect. A formula that goes like this: Baby equals stress equals feeling of failure equals drinking. (Bydlowska: 61)

Obviously Bydlowska has begun to crack the rehab code; we note the specific scientific terminology: “cause and effect” and “formula”. More cynically, Steve Hamilton effortlessly exploits the naivety of his counsellor ‘I discovered I had a brilliant gift for bullshit. Some of my problems got a bit elaborate and then I had to check myself and pull back and focus on the more mundane aspects of my troubled life, like how badly my father’s drinking had damaged our family. She liked that avenue. Her fingers positively flew along her notepad. I got bored with it in the end and stopped going and my mother’s disappointment was palpable’ (212). Nic Sheff, too, writes about one of his numerous therapy sessions with a counsellor ‘However, I know about rehab and all and this whole codependency thing they always talk about. Every program I’ve ever been in has had groups centred around treating codependency…I also know that if I resist her telling me to stay for three months, she’ll say that my addict self just wants to use again and there’ll be no way I can get out of here any sooner. I want to play this rehab game perfectly and I think I’ll be able to do it too, because I’ve been in so many of these goddam places’ (291). Some addict’s incessant lying is so deeply integrated into their psyches that recovery from addiction and rejecting the countless lies they have told themselves and others become synonymous. Even when they are confronted with their lies and forced to recognize them as lies, addicts are quick to construct a dubious causality around them, one which is rarely queried by their counsellors, who themselves are just as quick to collude in the convenient fantasy that addicts are just like everybody else, except that they are addicted. Moyers is far from alone in mistakenly believing that his lies were the result of his addiction, when he asks himself why he did not tell his parents or his wife about his addiction: Because addicts don’t tell the truth about their drug abuse. We lie repeatedly, and we are incredibly inventive with our deceptions and obfuscations,

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turning and twisting them to fit the situation. We lie not because we are inherently dishonest people but because the nature of addiction is such that we have to lie in order to keep using and we have to keep using because our bodies literally need the drug to function. That is the fundamental “truth” about addiction – when “want” becomes “need”, truth, honor, integrity, and decency cease to matter. All that matters is the drug. (112)

Mark Johnson offers a similar pseudo confession at the conclusion of Wasted, as he leaves his final rehab clinic; Gradually, after intensive group and individual therapy, I come to believe that I was born an addict. I believe that addiction is a disease I’ve had since before birth, the way some people are born with more obvious physical disabilities. My stealing and other antisocial behavior was an indication of my illness long before I ever had a drink or a drug. And I’m learning not to blame my childhood, my parents or my background for anything because when I hear others’ stories I have to admit that plenty of people have suffered more and haven’t grown up like me. (2007: 295)

While Johnston claims that he doesn’t blame his parents it is noticeable that, characteristically of most drug addicts and alcoholics, he refuses to blame himself either. He believes he was born with a disease and consequently believes that this disease was responsible for all of his maladjusted, antisocial, and even criminal behaviour. It is perhaps the avoidance of individual agency within such apologias that is likely to attract the attention of literary critics more than it will other researchers in the field of addiction studies who assume, a priori, the existence of such hugely improbable passivity. The principal reason such statements are received so well by other addicts and their enablers, as well as the counsellors and therapists in rehab clinics, is because they seem like honest reflections; admitting to having constantly lied to get drugs or alcohol is perceived as having a certain therapeutic value because the addict is openly acknowledging earlier antisocial behaviour. But what have Moyers and Johnston actually confessed to doing, or being? After all, if the addict has a disease (and obviously both Moyers and Johnston insists that they do) then all behaviours which spring from it, irrespective of the damage they cause, are totally understandable and, therefore, forgivable. Moreover, a deeply flawed causation can be seen operating here in both statements. Moyers and Johnston are extremely typical of recovering addicts in mistaking a

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cause for an effect, in believing that their lying and stealing were symptoms of their disease. These activities were manifestations of their anxiety and preceded alcohol and drugs, indeed had actually cooperated smoothly with these substances to keep reality at an acceptable distance. At best, both Moyers and Johnston offer meretricious half-truths because many addicts begin to habitually lie, as well as steal, many years before they ever begin taking drugs or drinking alcohol. Elizabeth Wurtzel, in More, Now, Again, writes of her stealing while in her mid-twenties ‘But truly, I am looking for something to steal, for no other reason other than that I feel like stealing something. It happens that, as always, I am high, but that’s no excuse, because I am a compulsive thief. I’ve been stealing stuff for years now. It’s the kind of thing that teenagers do, but I do not need to be an adolescent to behave like one’ (Wurtzel 1996, 77). Sheff, too, while still in rehab, writes of his stealing but with considerably more avoidance of any actual agency on his part ‘I’ve gone out twice this week to twelvestep meetings – plus on a group trip to Target and Borders. Of course, I still don’t have any money, but this stealing thing I’ve gotten into is a hard habit to break’ (43). Later, he writes of his habitual stealing, typically widening the meaning of the word “addiction” ‘And, it’s crazy, you know, cause I never really thought jacking shit could become some kind of addiction, but still, now that I’m sober, I find myself walking outta places with books in my hands and candy bars in my goddam pockets – none of which I need or even want particularly. It’s super dumb. I mean dumb’ (44). However, such compulsive, unnecessary stealing, observable in the lives of many addicts, is only “dumb” if it is viewed from a superficial, materialistic perspective, as indeed it is within rehab clinics. When it is connected to lying and addiction, though, it becomes clearer that all three aberrations are attempts to construct an alternative reality, one in which, unlike the rest of society, the addict is not compelled to tell the truth, live soberly, or pay for what they want. Rehab clinics are wrong to tell their patients they have a “unique” disease, but they are surely correct in telling them that they are not “special”. The addicts who do achieve sobriety in these rehab narratives are those who come to realize that Jack London is correct when he writes, as cited above ‘But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule’ (London: 31). Using alcohol or drugs to achieve a state of ecstasy, or to at least avoid the quotidian, rejects the bare facts of ontology; stealing assumes the existence of a world of “free freights”, and lying disrupts the moral economy: to lie is to receive something valuable in exchange

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for something that is worthless. The “truth” about addicts, the “truth” that is never spoken in rehab clinics, is that, contrary to Moyers’ assertion cited above, addicts actually are “inherently dishonest people”. Their entire lives are dishonest. In an attempt to understand his son’s addiction, David Sheff recounts reading a pamphlet given to him at a recovery meeting. The pamphlet is entitled ‘Letter from an Addict’ and Sheff quotes from it ‘Don’t accept my promises. I’ll promise anything to get off the hook. But the nature of my illness prevents me from keeping my promises, even though I mean them at the time…don’t believe everything I tell you; it may be a lie. Denial of reality is a symptom of my illness’ (210–211). Only a very few addicts eventually comprehend the flawed causation at the centre of such utterances in rehab clinics; these few realize that this denial of reality is not at all a symptom, but the very cause of their addictions. The connection between lying, stealing, and addiction is essentially an ontological one, which is the main reason the issue is not raised by rehab clinic staff but must be experienced individually by a handful of addicts, as we shall see, who themselves eventually understand that habitual lying and addiction are both drastic attempts to reject reality. Lying is only ever perceived as a breach of the social contract, indeed at its most pragmatic level, in rehab clinics; this is why it was inconceivable to the psychologists cited earlier that addicts might lie without an obvious, mechanical reason for the lie. In his brief book Lying, Sam Harris writes ‘People tell lies for many reasons. They lie to avoid embarrassment, to exaggerate their accomplishments, and to disguise wrongdoing. They make promises that they do not intend to keep’ (Harris 2013, 5) Harris here offers only the ethical comprehension of lying that is indeed the only one operating in rehab clinics. What is never considered within rehab clinics is the possibility that lies, just like alcohol and drugs, are attempts to adjust, or even reject reality. Lying and stealing, as well as alcohol and drugs are in Bydolowska’s memorable phrase “erasers of reality”. It is the fear of reality that drives the addict to alcohol and drugs and many addicts would rather lie and pretend that they are fleeing from pain than admit that they are frightened of pain which has yet to materialize. Many addicts would rather literally die than confront that appalling fear. Naturally, given the laws of exchange and compensation which particularly drive addiction, in order to eliminate the faintest possibility that addicts may actually be far from robust people, the enormously destructive powers of alcohol and heroin must be reiterated at enormous and

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expensive and useless volume. Conrad gives a solid demonstration of this basic principle in a hortatory episode near the memoir’s conclusion. After a patient absconds from the clinic, the inevitable occurs ‘Five days later, Chico’s body was found in an irrigation ditch near his hometown of Sacramento. He had OD’d. The news cast a pall over the BFC [Betty Ford Center] for a long time and served to reinforce the fact that in chemical substances we were up against an unseen, implacable, and powerful adversary’ (245). What chance does the unfortunate addict have against an enemy that is not only immensely strong and obdurate, but also invisible? A reader would need to turn to the pages of comics, written for adolescents, or television cartoons, to find villains who can boast attributes of a similar nature. Yet Conrad has actually been persuaded during his time at the BFC that he has now learned a scientific perspective on addiction. Fortunately, for the reader, Chico leaves a note ‘To my beloved peers: I’ll be gone when you read this. I can’t hack it. The monkey on my back wins – it won’t get off. It’s bigger and stronger than the BFC and me combined, and it doesn’t fight clean’ (245). Using another phrase that was once in common usage among drug addicts, Chico has anthropomorphized his drug addiction into an animal which is just too strong for him to fight; moreover, a beast that does not even have the decency to fight the noble addict fairly. Again, what chance is there of victory? Sacha Scoblic writes in My Lush Sobriety ‘I thought I filled the void inside me with alcohol and then shopping because no one understood me, because no one knew the real me, because no one got that I needed more and more and more and more. I had more of a thirst than most people. I was just special that way. But that was the biggest lie I told – and I told it to myself. I didn’t need more of anything; I just wanted more’ (Scoblic 2011: 131). Christopher Lawford, in Symptoms of Withdrawal, writes ‘There is a feeling of power ignited by the real and imagined perception that the rules did not apply to us. All of this can be very intoxicating, and like any good addict I wanted more’ (Lawford 2005: 61). The logic here is deeply, tragically, flawed; like all drug addicts and alcoholics he does not always want more because he is an addict, he is an addict, like Scoblic and countless others, because he always wants more. In Redeemed, King writes ‘I met someone who said that a debtor is someone who takes out of the world more than he puts back in, and even though I didn’t owe a penny, in that sense I was about as big a debtor as it was possible to be’ (King 2006: 82). King though shows unusual insight. Later she writes of her excessive frugality after she stopped drinking ‘It

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took me a long time to see that this wasn’t holy, it was masochistic; that it was based not on faith, but terror; that it presupposed a universe I had to cheat a little bit, to sneak around on, because if I did things the open, truthful way, there wouldn’t be enough – money, food, love’ (79– 80). Another Heather King, in Parched, writes of stealing food from the restaurant where she worked ‘…it was right in line with my view of a universe in which there was never enough – food, money, love – and that had to be cheated into coughing up more’ (136). Lisa Smith also suggests that her alcoholism is a form of compensation ‘My slide into round-the-clock drinking was something I was entitled to…I felt entitled to do whatever it took to win the battle against the unfair circumstances of my life, this life in which I played by all the right rules and still ended up miserable and lonely and riddled with self-hatred’ (Smith 2016: 133). A characteristic of active drug addicts and alcoholics is their belief that they are owed something; they take, greedily, incessantly, but they refuse to give. The characters who leave rehab clinics with the most optimism for a clean and sober life are those who acknowledge the flaws and weaknesses which eventually required them to stay in a rehab clinic.

Works Cited Benchley, Peter. Lush. London: Arrow, 1990. Berryman, John. Recovery. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Brown, Frederick. An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau. New York: Viking Press, 1968. Burroughs, William S. Junky: The Definitive Text of ‘Junk’. London: Penguin Group, 2008. Bydlowska, Jowita. Drunk Mom: A Memoir. New York: Penguin, 2013. Carr, David. The Night of the Gun. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Cocteau, Jean. Opium: The Illustrated Diary of his Cure. Trans. Margaret Crossland. London: Peter Owen, 1990. Coles, Richard. The Madness of Grief . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021. Conrad, Barnaby. Time Is All We Have. San Francisco: Cameron & Company, 1992. Diamond, Jonathan. Narrative Means to Sober Ends: Treating Addiction and its Aftermath. New York: Guildford Press, 2000. Dodes, Lance. The Heart of Addiction. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Dresner, Amy. My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean. New York, Hachetter, 2017.

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Dupont, Robert L. MD. Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic. Baltimore, MD: Institute for Behaviour and Health, Inc., 2018. Durlacher, Julian. Agenda Heroin. London: Carlton, 2000. Edmonds, David and John Edinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Fallada, Hans. The Drinker. Trans. Charlotte and A. Lloyd. Vermont: The Marlboro Press, 1990. Fletcher, Anne M. Inside Rehab: The Surprising Truth about Addiction Treatment – And How to Get Help That Works. New York: Penguin, 2013. Hamilton, Steve with Alison Lowry. I Want My Life Back. South Africa: Penguin, 2002. Harris, Sam. Lying. New York: Four Elephants Press, 2013. Hawkes, David. Ideology. London: Routledge, 1996. Keyes, Marian. Rachel’s Holiday. London: Penguin, 1997. Kiedis, Anthony with Larry Sloman. Scar Tissue. London: Time Warner, 2005. King, Heather. Parched: A Memoir. London: Penguin, 2006. Jamison, Leslie. The Recovering. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Johnson, Mark. Wasted. GB: Sphere, 2007. Kessel, Neil, and Henry Walton. Alcoholism. London: Penguin, 1965. Lawford, Christopher Kennedy. Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption. New York: William Morrow, 2005. Lewis, Marc. The Biology of Desire. Melbourne: Scribe, 2016. Macy, Beth. Dopesick. New York: Head of Zeus, 2019. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Arrow, 2006. Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. Moyers, William Cope with Katherine Ketcham. Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption. Westminster: Viking, 2006. Newlove, Donald. Those Drinking Days. New York: Horizon Press, 1981. Nietzsche, Frederick. The Gay Science. Trans. Thomas Common. New York: Minerva, 2006. Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Reinarman, Craig. “Addiction as Accomplishment: The Discursive Construction of Disease”. Addiction, Research and Theory, 08/2005. Scoblic, Sasha. Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety. New York: Citadel Press, 2011. Seabrook, William. Asylum. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 2015. Sheff, David. Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through his Son’s Meth Addiction. London: Pocket Books, 2009. Sheff, Nic. Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines. London: Simon & Schuster, 2007. ———. We All Fall Down: Living with Addiction. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2012.

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Smith, Steven. Addict: A True Life Story. London: Westworld, 1998. Storm, Jennifer. Blackout Girl. Hazelden Publishing, 2008. Sutherland, Jack. Stars, Cars and Crystal Meth. London: Faber & Faber, 2016. Weiner, Jack. Drinking. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976 Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. London: Minerva, 1994. White, William. Slaying the Dragon. Bloomington, Illinois: Chestnut Health Systems, 1998. Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir. London: Quartet, 1996.

The Rooms: Alcoholics Anonymous

I came in [to A.A] to save my ass. And found out it was attached to my soul. —Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die, 1986 Shaken, he had replied, “You’re talking bullshit, Doctor. Maybe I have a dram or two too many from time to time. But I’m not about to piss my life away chasing God in church basements”. —Ivan Gold, Sams in a Dry Season, 1990 When he realised that the various Substances he didn’t used to be able to go a day without absorbing hadn’t even like occurred to him in almost a week, Gately hadn’t felt so much grateful or joyful as just plain shocked. The idea that AA might actually work unnerved him. —David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1997

Although, or because, Alcoholics Anonymous is the largest and most successful mutual aid society in history, it has attracted a great deal of criticism over the decades since its formation in 1935. The lack of a membership list proves very useful for both its critics and its advocates. The same holds true of the latterly formed Narcotics Anonymous. The admirers of AA claim a success rate of anywhere between 30–40–50– 60%, while its critics claim the figure is closer to 5%. Over the decades, AA has been criticized for being too middle class, too white, too male, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1_8

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too religious, too authoritarian, and inter alia, too much like a cult. Among the most ferocious of the criticisms of AA is Monica Richardson’s The 13 th Step (2016) a documentary film lambasting the organization for enabling criminals to use the rooms to prey on vulnerable women. Her attack joins those of authors such as Ken Ragge in The Real AA: Behind the Myth of 12-step Recovery (1998) and Robert Warner, with his book’s gulp-inducing title A.A.: How Alcoholics Anonymous Steals Your Soul (2012). As if this wasn’t enough for AA to have to deal with, many writers of addiction narratives have perceptions of AA and its members which are at least forty years out of date. The most frequently encountered images called up by addicts who have not attended an AA meeting are tramps, brown paper bags concealing alcohol, ragged clothing, unpleasant smells, urine (or worse), and out of control drunken behaviour. I would not suggest that Claire Pooley is inventing anything in The Sober Diaries, but her understanding in the early pages of her book does offer two of the most frequently employed anticipatory images of AA. It’s a club that welcomes everyone, but absolutely no one chooses to be a member. Because alcoholics have a terrible image. You immediately imagine tramps quaffing methylated spirits in gutters, smelling of wee, and mothers lying face down in pools of vomit while their children forage for scraps…Sentenced to survive forever without the world’s favourite drug, taking one day at a time and reliving past misdemeanors in dusty basements while drinking sweet tea from plastic cups. (21)

The conflation here is illogical and unworldly; tramps, or some of them, may indeed completely fit her description, but if they do then they are not currently, at least, a member of AA. Virtually, all members of AA believe that all that is keeping them from “quaffing methylated spirits in gutters, smelling of wee” is AA. I suggest that in narratives published even since the millennium such apprehensions of AA are highly implausible. A large number of films which showed at mainstream cinemas, not art houses, have been released to considerable acclaim. Without any fact checking most people, particularly those with an interest in addiction, would mention When a Man Loves a Woman, Traffic, 28 Days, Flight, Smashed, Ben is Back, Beautiful Boy, and several others. The same can be said, actually more so, of television. Cagney and Lacey introduced AA into the plots, as did Hill Street Blues in the 1980s. AA featured in NYPD

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Blue, New Tricks, and was seen in the corridors of power too, as in The West Wing and House of Cards. The success of the recent television sit coms Mom and Loudermilk alone indicate that AA is, and has been for many years, very much part of Western culture. Such anachronistic constructions of AA that Pooley, along with many other writers of addiction narratives, offers here are narrative devices, nothing more. The hesitation over actually attending an AA meeting can be ascribed to such concerns. This implausible construction of AA functions as a narrative impediment, such as occurs in romantic comedies. Everybody knows that the two people on the film poster with the biggest heads will pair off in the end, but the aficionado of this genre looks out for the obstacle, and the way it is removed, which seems like it might disrupt this desirable ending: another man/woman, parental opposition, religious/ethnic differences, a job thousands of miles away, and so on. In addiction narratives something similar occurs; this construction of AA meetings as full of drunk tramps is an impediment to sobriety which must be overcome. The artificial apprehension is dramatically disturbed by attending their first AA meeting. Then, surprisedly, they see that the others at the meeting look like everybody else they ever meet. The value of this anachronistic understanding of AA lies in its flexibility; it can be used in the closing pages, or in the middle, or as an in medias res opening to the book. The intensity and frequency of their blackouts are often the reason numerous alcoholics first attend an AA meeting. Some stay in the rooms, often for life. Many of the others, in the characteristically passive phrasing of addiction narratives, “drift” away from AA. Blackouts are so common among alcoholics that they often diminish their significance, as Donald Newlove indicates in Those Drinking Days ‘Blackouts were a commonplace (so common they had a name), a drinker’s burden, and a lost hour here and there was not too harsh a price, and could be weirdly amusing’ (Newlove 1991: 22). However, the psychologists Neil Kessel and Henry Watson note a more sinister implication in their interpretation of alcoholic memory loss ‘The term “blackout” is often used to describe this amnesia, particularly by alcoholics themselves, but it is misleading because there has been no unconsciousness. The abnormality is a failure to register events in the memory’ (Kessel and Walton 1965: 158). Alcoholics who have drunk themselves into blackout are not only rejecting the world as it is, but now they are refusing to even acknowledge its existence. Recurrent blackouts are a philosophical issue as well as a medical one. The desire to

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escape reality can become even more desperate, as Dionysus gives way to Thanatos. In Drunk Mom, Jowita Bydlowska writes of her alcoholic blackouts ‘Living is difficult. Dying is difficult. Being dead is not difficult. And what else is a blackout if not death?’ (Bydlowska 2013: 45). Later she writes ‘My blackouts are the perfect, absolute erasers of reality. There are no maybes, no gray edges. It’s pure temporary death. And not the death that ends with a warm light at the end of the tunnel. Not even flickering. No flashbacks coming back later, either’ (95). Mate writes ‘“I’m not afraid of dying”, a client told me. “Sometimes I’m more afraid of living”’ (30). The belief that all addicts are reacting to otherwise unbearable pain is a cliché. It isn’t necessarily pain that drives the addict. When pain is inflicted upon us, we become victims. A very large part of the covert agenda of AA is to reveal to the alcoholic (and to the drug addict in NA) that their addictions are the result of the usual suspects: greed, fear, sloth, vanity, etc. Against these dangerous flaws, AA encourages the development of such qualities (or old school virtues) as patience, humility, and courage. With its insistence on the newcomer undergoing a “moral inventory”, it is able to let addicts see that their own weaknesses and flaws need attention. Sacha Scoblic writes in My Lush Sobriety ‘I thought I filled the void inside me with alcohol and then shopping because no one understood me, because no one knew the real me, because no one got that I needed more and more and more and more. I had more of a thirst than most people. I was just special that way. But that was the biggest lie I told – and I told it to myself. I didn’t need more of anything; I just wanted more” (Scoblic 2011: 131. Author’s emphasis). AA can also expose the dangerous logic shown here very well by Christopher Lawford in Symptoms of Withdrawal ‘There is a feeling of power ignited by the real and imagined perception that the rules did not apply to us. All of this can be very intoxicating, and like any good addict I wanted more’ (Lawford 2005: 61). But like all drug addicts and alcoholics, good or bad, he does not always want more because he is an addict, he is an addict, like Scoblic and countless others, because he always wants more. Heather King writes ‘I met someone who said that a debtor is someone who takes out of the world more than he puts back in, and even though I didn’t owe a penny, in that sense I was about as big a debtor as it was possible to be’ (82). Later she writes of her excessive frugality after she stopped drinking ‘It took me a long time to see that this wasn’t holy, it

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was masochistic; that it was based not on faith, but terror; that it presupposed a universe I had to cheat a little bit, to sneak around on, because if I did things the open, truthful way, there wouldn’t be enough – money, food, love?’ (9). Another Heather King, in Parched, writes of stealing food from the restaurant where she worked ‘…it was right in line with my view of a universe in which there was never enough – food, money, love – and that had to be cheated into coughing up more’ (136). Lisa Smith also suggests that her alcoholism is a form of compensation ‘My slide into round-the-clock drinking was something I was entitled to…I felt entitled to do whatever it took to win the battle against the unfair circumstances of my life, this life in which I played by all the right rules and still ended up miserable and lonely and riddled with self-hatred’ (Smith 2016: 133). As was earlier suggested, a characteristic of active drug addicts and alcoholics is their belief that they are owed something; they take, greedily, incessantly, but they refuse to give. AA and NA show alcoholics and drug addicts how to stop taking, and how to start giving. Deeply embedded within the mythology of addiction is the pervasive belief that a great part of addiction’s deadly attraction is a desire to repeat the hallowed “first time”. Kedis writes ‘But that initial high is the feeling that you’re doomed to be chasing for the rest of your life, because the next time you do it it’s good but not quite like that’ (141). Johnstone writes ‘No one I have ever met – outside Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that is – remembers the first time they got drunk quite as romantically as I do. For me, that night was an epiphany. Nothing would ever be the same again’ (Johnstone 1999: 3). Similarly, Moyer writes ‘When addicted people look back on the very first time they sipped a drink from the bottom of a parent’s glass, swallowed a painkiller to ease the agony of a broken bone, or took a hit off a bong in a dorm room, they remember instant, intense, feelings of freedom, rapture, and relief’ (42). Marlowe writes in a similar fashion ‘We all want to get back to that first time. Which shows you that heroin addiction is really nostalgia, which should tarnish the luster of nostalgia quite as much as it does that of heroin’ (154). However, this often-articulated desire by addicts to repeat the first time is misleading; it is not time that the addict wishes to regain, but the experience itself. What they want is to feel that first ever hit or drink again. Time is not involved. This experience is, as we have seen, often apprehended by the addict as transcendent; there is a sense of unity, the breaking down of barriers between the addict’s conscious self and the outside world; a strong sense of universal, even cosmic, integration; an abolition of the

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suffering self. To suggest that the addict wishes to recapture that “first time” is to confuse temporality with transcendence, to mistake time for timelessness, which is the actual abolition of time. This is an error, but it is not as serious as the one that addicts make when they think such an experience is endlessly repeatable. Sheff writes insouciantly ‘So, uh, yeah, that’s the way I play it this morning. I finish off the rest of the vodka in the freezer, and immediately warmth and tranquility fill my mind and body, like I’ve swallowed the sun down inside me. It’s a miracle, really. And so what if it’s all dependent on a substance?’ (190). Well, so everything. The feelings of ecstasy and transcendence have been bought in the marketplace; the feelings were obtained so quickly, so cheaply, and so artificially. These experiences, the subsequent lives of the addicts demonstrate, cannot be bought, or obtained without rigorous and disciplined effort. To assume otherwise is to further disrupt the moral economy in the same way that the constant lying of addicts disturbs it. In 99 Days, Bill Clegg ponders his relationship with AA ‘Am I one of those people in the rooms whom I hear others talk about, who quite literally cannot get sober – one of those cases who are incapable of being honest with themselves? And what does honesty with oneself have to do with anything?’ (Clegg 2012: 71). I suggest that because our moral vocabulary has become so eroded, and because the actual causes of drug addiction and alcoholism are so unflattering to the addict, then addicts will lie to conceal these unpalatable truths. Lying lies at the centre of addiction. Addicts lie. Neuroscientists and medical doctors and psychiatrists and rehab counsellors may often overstate their respective cases, confuse theories with facts, even mislead and confuse their patients, but addicts lie. Fletcher, however, is bullish about lies and addicts: Have you ever heard this joke? Q. A.

How do you know when an addict is lying? When his lips are moving.

She continues ‘Quite frankly, I find it offensive. It stems from the widespread notion, often promulgated in addiction treatment itself, that virtually all people with alcohol or drug problems are dishonest. Even a

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nationally known expert in the field included “they’re all liars” in his definition of an addict when talking with me’ (14). Her “quite frankly” is quite delightful. Our society has been so ruthlessly bullied into seeing all addicts as innocent victims who are so traumatized and vulnerable they could not possibly lie, that the words of a “nationally known expert” are dismissed as not only incorrect, but actually offensive. However, those with a more detached perspective might wonder if there is any other area of contemporary human suffering where the views of a “nationally known expert” would be so immediately and contemptuously dismissed. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that addicts do lie, they lie a lot, and sometimes they are even aware that they are lying. Early in his addiction Sheff writes, when confronted with an unpleasant truth ‘My first instinct was, of course, to lie’ (9) while his father, whose book is an account of his son’s addiction, writes of his failure to notice Nic has relapsed after rehab and is using heroin again ‘I have been so traumatized by his addiction that surrealism and reality have become one and the same. I can’t distinguish the normal from the outrageous anymore…Or maybe it’s only that, with practice, addicts become flawlessly gifted liars…’ (Sheff 2008: 175). The mother of the eponymous Rachel, in Marian Keyes’ Rachel’s Holiday, is so thoroughly exasperated by her addict daughter’s constant lies that she shouts at her ‘Rachel, WILL YOU STOP LYING?’ (Keyes 2001: 13). Bydlowska finally acknowledges to herself ‘I’m a liar. I’m a liar and I can’t afford to be anymore. I’m an alcoholic, I’m a liar and I’ve lied about everything’ (230). In We All Fall Down, Nic Sheff describes his reaction to the school principal’s enthusiastic thanks after Sheff has given the students an anti-drugs lecture ‘I smile back at him. I lie with my smile. I lie with my eyes. I lie with my own words. I am a liar. It’s not exactly news. I’ve been a liar since as long as I can remember’ (Sheff 2012: 266). Writers like Fletcher, Mate, and Johann Hari, however, reject the notion of the addict as consummate, life-long liar and consistently adopt a more trusting approach when listening to addicts. Fletcher cites the research of two psychologists: Mark and Linda Sobell, who claim: The bottom line is that if people believe that what they are telling you will be confidential – particularly that it will not incur adverse consequences - and they are asked in a clinical or research context, then what they say tends to be reliable and valid. (This all holds if the person has no substances in their systems at the time of the enquiry). But people are not

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stupid – if telling the truth about using drugs or drinking to a significant other, probation officer, schoolteacher, or work supervisor is going to bring trouble, why not lie and avoid the negative consequences? In short, if people have no reason to lie to you, the evidence suggests they will be truthful. (Fletcher, 17)

They are so convinced that their interviewees respect the “clinical and research context” as much as they do (who spend their working lives immersed in it) that it never crosses their minds that addicts themselves are very likely quite unimpressed and tell the same stories they always tell, irrespective of the particular authoritarian setting. Moreover, it is equally inconceivable to the scientists that the addict’s lying might go deeper than a mechanical response to a practical situation; that it might actually be part of the response to life that prompted the addiction in the first place. They write “if people have no reason to lie to you…” but addicts always have a reason to lie to you, and even to themselves. Mate also believes virtually everything his addict clients tell him and when he has his reservations he generously shares them among the wider community, as when he writes of alcoholics and addicts ‘Yes, they lie, cheat and manipulate – but don’t we all, in our own way?’ (22) Well, probably nowhere near as often as addicts and alcoholics do, and with nothing like the horrific consequences, would be the usefully robust response such a question never actually receives. Addicts are, of course, quick to perceive credulousness. Bewildered by her own lack of control over alcohol, Bydlowska writes of a session with her counsellor: I just say that I drink because of the stress of childcare and my life, which is a failure. I don’t really attribute my drinking to this. I could talk about the obscene appetite of my wanting, or about the guilt crushing my sobriety, or perhaps about subconsciously wanting to die, not being able to stop. Yet all of that is too abstract, too complicated to explain. I can’t even explain it to myself…But since I’ve seen this movie before, I know that you have to come up with some kind of explanation. Cause and effect. A formula that goes like this: Baby equals stress equals feeling of failure equals drinking. (61)

Obviously Bydlowska has begun to crack the recovery code; we note the specific scientific terminology: “subconsciously”, “cause and effect”, and “formula”. More cynically, Steve Hamilton effortlessly exploits the naivety of his counsellor ‘I discovered I had a brilliant gift for bullshit. Some of

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my problems got a bit elaborate and then I had to check myself and pull back and focus on the more mundane aspects of my troubled life, like how badly my father’s drinking had damaged our family. She liked that avenue. Her fingers positively flew along her notepad. I got bored with it in the end and stopped going and my mother’s disappointment was palpable’ (212). Sheff, too, writes about one of his numerous therapy sessions with a counsellor ‘I also know that if I resist her telling me to stay for three months, she’ll say that my addict self just wants to use again and there’ll be no way I can get out of here any sooner. I want to play this rehab game perfectly and I think I’ll be able to do it too, because I’ve been in so many of these goddam places’ (291). The addict’s incessant lying is so deeply integrated into their personalities that recovery from addiction and rejecting the countless lies they have told themselves and others become synonymous. Even when they are confronted with their lies and forced to recognize them as lies, addicts are quick to construct a dubious causality around them, one which is rarely queried by their counsellors, who themselves are just as quick to collude in the convenient fantasy that addicts are just like everybody else, except that they are addicted. Moyers is far from alone in mistakenly believing that his lies were the result of his addiction, when he asks himself why he did not tell his parents or his wife about his addiction: Because addicts don’t tell the truth about their drug abuse. We lie repeatedly, and we are incredibly inventive with our deceptions and obfuscations, turning and twisting them to fit the situation. We lie not because we are inherently dishonest people but because the nature of addiction is such that we have to lie in order to keep using and we have to keep using because our bodies literally need the drug to function. That is the fundamental “truth” about addiction – when “want” becomes “need”, truth, honor, integrity, and decency cease to matter. All that matters is the drug. (112)

Mark Johnson offers a similar pseudo confession at the conclusion of Wasted, as he leaves his final rehab clinic. Gradually, after intensive group and individual therapy, I come to believe that I was born an addict. I believe that addiction is a disease I’ve had since before birth, the way some people are born with more obvious physical disabilities. My stealing and other antisocial behavior was an indication of my illness long before I ever had a drink or a drug. And I’m learning not to blame my childhood, my parents or my background for anything

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because when I hear others’ stories I have to admit that plenty of people have suffered more and haven’t grown up like me. ( 295)

While Johnston claims that he doesn’t blame his parents it is noticeable that, characteristically of most drug addicts and alcoholics, he refuses to blame himself either. He believes he was born with a disease and consequently believes that this disease was responsible for all of his maladjusted, antisocial, and even criminal behaviour. The principal reason such statements are received so well by other addicts as well as the counsellors and therapists in rehab clinics is because they seem like honest reflections; admitting to having constantly lied to get drugs or alcohol is perceived as having a certain therapeutic value because the addict is openly acknowledging earlier antisocial behaviour. But what have Moyers and Johnston actually confessed to doing, or being? After all, if the addict has a disease (and obviously both Moyers and Johnston insist that they do), then all behaviours which spring from it, irrespective of the damage they cause, are totally understandable and, therefore, forgivable. Moreover, a deeply flawed causation can be seen operating here in both statements. Moyers and Johnston are extremely typical of recovering addicts in mistaking a cause for an effect, in believing that their lying and stealing were symptoms of their disease, instead of realizing that these activities were proleptic; stealing and lying preceded alcohol and drugs, and indeed actually cooperated smoothly with these substances to keep reality at an acceptable distance. At best, both Moyers and Johnston offer meretricious half-truths because many addicts begin to steal, many years before they ever begin taking drugs or drinking alcohol. Wurtzel writes of her stealing while in her mid-twenties ‘But truly, I am looking for something to steal, for no other reason other than that I feel like stealing something. It happens that, as always, I am high, but that’s no excuse, because I am a compulsive thief. I’ve been stealing stuff for years now. It’s the kind of thing that teenagers do, but I do not need to be an adolescent to behave like one’ (77). Sheff, too, while still in rehab, writes of his stealing but with considerably more avoidance of any actual agency on his part ‘I’ve gone out twice this week to twelve-step meetings – plus on a group trip to Target and Borders. Of course, I still don’t have any money, but this stealing thing I’ve gotten into is a hard habit to break’ (43). Later, he writes of his habitual stealing, typically widening the meaning of the word “addiction” ‘And, it’s crazy, you know, ‘cause I never really thought jacking shit could become some kind of addiction, but still, now that I’m

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sober, I find myself walking outta places with books in my hands and candy bars in my goddam pockets – none of which I need or even want particularly. It’s super dumb. I mean dumb’ (44). However, such compulsive, unnecessary stealing, observable in the lives of many addicts, is only “dumb” if it is viewed from a superficial, materialistic perspective, as indeed it is within addiction discourse. When it is connected to lying and addiction, though, it becomes clearer that all three aberrations are attempts to construct an alternative reality, one in which, unlike the rest of society, the addict is not compelled to tell the truth, live soberly, or pay for what they want. The addicts who do achieve sobriety in these texts are those who come to realize that Jack London is correct when he writes, as cited earlier ‘But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule’ (31). Using alcohol or drugs to achieve a state of ecstasy, or to at the very least avoid the quotidian, rejects the bare facts of ontology; stealing assumes the existence of a world of “free freights”, and lying disrupts the moral economy: to lie is to receive something valuable in exchange for something that is worthless. The “truth” about addicts is that contrary to Moyers’ assertion cited above, addicts actually are “inherently dishonest people”. Their entire lives are dishonest. In an attempt to understand his son’s addiction, David Sheff recounts reading a pamphlet given to him at a recovery meeting. The pamphlet is entitled ‘Letter from an Addict’ and Sheff quotes from it ‘Don’t accept my promises. I’ll promise anything to get off the hook. But the nature of my illness prevents me from keeping my promises, even though I mean them at the time…don’t believe everything I tell you; it may be a lie. Denial of reality is a symptom of my illness’ (210–11). Only a very few addicts eventually comprehend the flawed causation at the centre of such utterances; these few realize that this denial of reality is not at all a symptom, but the very cause of their addictions. The connection between lying, stealing, and addiction is an ontological one. Only a handful of addicts eventually understand that habitual lying and addiction are both drastic attempts to reject reality. Lying is only ever perceived within addiction narratives as a breach of the social contract. This is why it was inconceivable to the psychologists cited earlier that addicts might lie without an obvious, mechanical reason for the lie. In his brief book Lying, Sam Harris writes ‘People tell lies for many reasons. They lie to avoid embarrassment, to exaggerate their accomplishments, and to disguise wrongdoing. They make promises that they do not intend to

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keep’ (Harris 2013: 5). Harris here offers only an ethical comprehension of lying; that is indeed the only one operating in these narratives. What is never considered within these texts is the possibility that lies, just like alcohol and drugs, are attempts to adjust, or even reject reality. Lying and stealing, as well as alcohol and drugs are, in Bydolowska’s memorable phrase “erasers of reality”. It is fear of reality or disdain for it that drives the addict to alcohol and drugs. It is a desire to return to reality that sends many of them into the rooms of AA. As well as the largely invented anticipation of AA and NA meetings being full of drinking and drug taking undesirables, there is often a further impediment which must be overcome by protagonists of addiction narratives: AA is cultish and turns its members into brainwashed zombies. This view is nicely expressed in Dan Fante’s 86’d when he attends an AA meeting held in ‘a crowded hall populated by smiling, miracle-oozing, AA robots’ (Fante 2009: 125). This understanding is taken considerably further by a character in Dan Barden’s novel The Next Right Thing, a phrase, or rather an instruction, in very common use in NA and AA ‘You’re in A.A., right? Just because I didn’t drink the Kool Aid doesn’t mean I can’t recognize cultlike behaviour’ (Barden 2012: 271). It is noticeable that the allusion is to one of the most infamous of cult atrocities. However, no single author has written about AA more illuminatingly, or more amusingly, than Wallace in Infinite Jest. The “Crocodiles”, a group of old timers in Boston AA meetings are the funniest chorus in American literature since Twain’s in Pudd’n Head Wilson (1894). The ‘Crocodiles’ are far from acting like robots or zombies; they take pleasure in mocking and criticizing newcomers’ lies and their desperate attempts to blame their alcoholism on external factors. Moreover, they are far from being bereft of malice, nor are they above indulging in, even wallowing in, schadenfreude: The Crocodiles talk about how they can’t count the number of guys that’ve Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not gotten to die. They even point some of these guys out – gaunt gray spectral men reeling on sidewalks with all that they own in a trashbag… Old emphysemic Francis G. in particular likes to slow his LeSabre down at a corner in front of some jack-legged loose faced homeless fuck who’d once been in AA and drifted cockily out and roll down his windows and yell ‘Live it up!’ (356)

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Wallace demonstrates throughout his very lengthy novel that AA is not remotely cult-like. The Rooms, for Wallace, are full of alcoholics and drug addicts who are at various stages of understanding that no social factors, or parental ones; no curse, no genetic transmission, no chemical imbalance—indeed nothing but their own moral flaws and weaknesses has driven them into AA. It is usually assumed, often by addicts themselves, that religion is what most of the members of AA have been brainwashed into believing. Brown writes of AA in The LA Diaries ‘the religious overtones, the constant references to God and a Higher Power put me off’ (183). Frey, characteristically, not only rejects the religious aspect of AA but also takes the opportunity to claim ownership of every illegal and immoral action in his life ‘The meetings themselves make me sick. Too much whining, too much complaining, too much blaming. Too much bullshit about Higher Powers. There is no Higher Power or any God who is responsible for what I do and for what I have done and for who I am. There is no Higher Power or any God who will cure me’ (70). Frey’s preference for the more fluid attitude to life as expressed by Lao Tse over AA’s authoritarian and prescriptive ethos is understandable, but he could have been a little more attentive to what was actually said to him during the meetings. He was never told a Higher Power or a God would cure him. A great amount of ink was used in arguments over the generic nature of A Million Little Pieces, but Frey’s book raises many other issues. It is fascinating to see Frey’s narrator boldly presenting an attitude that is pervasive in Western culture. He describes a cultural practice as “religious” using language that demonstrates that he knows nothing at all about religion. Most people don’t. I suggested earlier that medical doctors have no right to comment on moral behaviour, beyond their own right to criticize as citizens. I suggest the same is true of Frey’s narrator here, and of countless numbers of people in addiction narratives who claim that AA is “religious”. Again, as I suggested earlier, addiction is not a complex issue, but morality is—that too is the case regarding religion and addiction. Addiction is not complex, but religion is; it is at a bare minimum hundreds of thousands of years old, and some form or other of it has appeared in all cultures across the world. The criticisms levelled at AA that it is religious only demonstrate that they come from people who, like Frey’s narrator, know very little or nothing about religion. AA is not religious. In Getting Better, Nan Robertson gives a good presentation of the most commonly employed method to demonstrate the religiosity of

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AA ‘The two basic texts of Alcoholics Anonymous - its Twelve Steps to Recovery and the Big Book, which contain the steps - are studded with references to God. Six of the Twelve Steps mention God directly or by implication’ (Robertson 1988: 139). However, this “numerical argument” to show the essential religiosity of AA is deeply flawed. It makes little difference how many times the word “God” is used in AA; everything depends on how that word is understood. Nobody in these narratives who rejects AA as being too religious ever asks themselves where their authority and conviction to pronounce on religious issues comes from. Nor does it occur to any of the many addicts who flee the rooms because of all the religion to even consider the possibility that here, in the Rooms, perhaps the word “God” has different meanings to what it normally does outside AA or NA meetings. It is most unlikely, for example, that any of the addicts among these hordes of self-applauding free thinkers possess the imagination to conceive of God in the manner of Graham Greene’s alcoholic priest in his novel The Power and the Glory (1940). At the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery – that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. (Greene 2004: 98)

“Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet”—what is required for basic communication is a shared understanding of the terms being used. However, the majority of people, including drug addicts and alcoholics, know almost nothing at all about religion and their conceptions of God are usually anachronistic, sentimental, unintellectual, and, overall, amount to little more than confused misunderstandings. Earlier I referred to Wittgenstein’s suggestion that in order to find the meaning of a word we needed to see how it was used in the “stream of life”. When we are looking at the language employed in a very particular organization, one moreover in which the entire membership is connected only because they can’t control their drinking, the following observation by Pierre Bourdieu in Symbolic Capital may be even more useful. His premise here is that words do not have in themselves an intrinsic power,

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but that rather their significance and authority are communicated by the social context within which they are uttered: It is clear that all the efforts to find, in the specifically linguistic logic of different forms of argumentation, rhetoric and style, the source of their symbolic efficacy are destined to fail as long as they do not establish the relationship between the properties of discourses, the properties of the person who pronounces them and the properties of the institution which authorizes him to pronounce them. (Bourdieu 1991: 111)

In the case of AA, I suggest that criticisms, or even understandings, of it as a religious organization not only demonstrate a lack of knowledge about religion, but also indicate a complete misunderstanding of the unique flexibility of the word “God” as used in AA and NA. These same critics have also failed to take into consideration, in Bourdieu’s phrase “the properties of the institution which authorizes him to pronounce them”. AA has “properties”. It also has a history. Roberts writes of the founders of AA ‘Neither Wilson nor Dr. Bob Smith was a religious person in any conventional sense of the term’ (129). Yes, it shows. AA has two especially important and powerful “foundation myths”, known sooner or later by anybody who stays longer than a week or two in AA. In one of them, the alcoholic Bill W, desperate for a drink, ignores the sound of laughter and ice clinking in glasses coming from the bar near the pay phones and instead calls another alcoholic. The ensuing conversation forms the basis of what became AA. Roberts describes the other crucial foundational narrative: During the final months of his drinking in 1934, his old school-mate Ebby, who had gotten sober in the Oxford Group, suggested to his resistant friend, “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” Wilson recounted his reaction: “That statement hit me hard,” he wrote. “It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years...It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning ”. (139. Author’s emphasis)

The phrase “choose your own conception of God” surely, alone, disqualifies AA as religious in any meaningful sense of the word. Religions are not usually in the practice of allowing their congregations to choose their conceptions of God. This “Power greater than myself”, or ‘Higher

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Power’, may be, essentially, anything the alcoholic desires it to be. Roberts writes ‘Some members are religious, and some are agnostics or atheists. Many members choose to believe that their “higher power” is their A.A. group’ (109). That one should be asked by an organization to surrender to a ‘higher power’, but that this ‘higher power’ could be that organization itself is neat, but not religious. It is very unlikely that, for example, a Catholic priest would accept that God was the congregation itself, or that an Anglican vicar would think any differently than his Catholic opposite number. The admission and acceptance by AA of a hugely flexible, entirely subjective, non-supernatural, highly supportive “Higher Power” shows its difference to any of the commonly encountered religions. I suggest it demonstrates a distinction that precludes it being seen as in any way religious, in the same way that the often-claimed uniqueness of alcoholism as a disease actually precludes it being one. Wallace shows many times what God means in the Rooms ‘[He] wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the ‘God’ in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you ‘Higher Power’ and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit’ (366). And later, ‘It’s supposed to be one of AA’s major selling points that you get to choose your own God. You get to make up your own understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/Whatever’ (443). It is often suggested, certainly in the United Kingdom, that the most American aspect of AA is its emphasis on public disclosure, but this, absolutely crucial, aspect of the programme emerges from the European protestant tradition and is not a specifically American practice. What is truly American about AA is its pragmatism. AA is not interested in theological speculation; it is only interested in the continuous sobriety of the alcoholic. To AA members, sobriety is God. To engage in debates about the precise ontological status of the individual’s ‘Higher Power’ would be pointless, even prejudicial to the individual’s sobriety. It seems perfectly proper for AA to maintain a cautious disdain for theological speculation, but equally proper for the disinterested observer to note by what linguistic strategies its humanist value system has been constructed. AA narratives are transformative texts, employing the concepts and imagery of religion to construct humanist alternatives. In the rooms of AA, God is not at all a Being which is apprehended in almost exactly the same way by all the other worshippers. In AA, God is not worshipped, or placated, or feared, or loved; no sacrifices are ever made, no periods of fasting undergone.

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In AA, the word “God” is used. Precisely because AA is not religious, it authorizes the word “God” to be used in all manner of ways—not one of which could be described as “religious”. The musician Marc Almond, for example, in Tainted Life, chooses to read the word God as an acronym ‘But over the following days, I began to understand what ‘God’ could mean for me. As one counsellor, Elizabeth, said, ‘GOD stands for “Good Orderly Direction”’. With the religious reference removed, the idea of God began to appeal to me. Good Orderly Direction’ (Almond 1999: 391. My emphasis). AA and NA members themselves are usually highly insistent that the Rooms are not religious; as Roberts notes ‘Nothing makes a member of Alcoholics Anonymous more uncomfortable than the comment that AA is “religious”’ (138). They prefer to use the word “spiritual”. Roberts writes ‘Spiritual and Spirituality are words one hears a lot of in AA’. “It’s not a religious program, it’s a spiritual program” is a sentence AA’s utter over and over again (145, author’s emphasis). O’Reilly writes ‘The AA distinction between religion and spirituality is almost universally appreciated, and theology as such is only rarely an ingredient in AA stories’ (154). Gilmore argues that a chief strength of literature is ‘its awareness that often the root cause or effect of the illness of alcoholism is spiritual’ (9). With its understanding of alcoholism as a tripartite illness: mental, physical, and spiritual, Alcoholics Anonymous similarly places great stress upon the spiritual.’ The link between recovery and spirituality is emphasized by a number of writers of addiction narratives. In A Nice Girl Like Me, Rosie Boycott writes of a famous letter Carl Jung sent to one of the founders of AA, Bill W ‘To Bill, Jung’s letter meant a master’s confirmation of what he, as a layman, had struggled to prove: that the alcoholic can only be rescued through experiences which must be accounted spiritual’ (Boycott 1984:204). Conrad writes of his time at the Betty Ford Center ‘There was no heavy insistence on religion as such at the BFC, yet since the treatment and preparation for subsequent after-care was based on the Alcoholics Anonymous program, it perforce placed considerable emphasis on the spiritual side of the patient’s treatment and development during his time there’ (52). Knapp writes of her own reluctant admission of alcoholism: ‘The gift of desperation has a spiritual quality’ (210). In Any Woman’s Blues, Erica Jong’s protagonist, Leila, says of AA ‘the Program led me to see my life in spiritual terms…’ (Jong 1990:137). Roberts writes of the last of the three central ideas Bill W. took from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience ‘Third was an appeal

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to a higher power, or at least a cry of help to another human being’ (61). Bill W. deftly turns James’ ‘God’ into his own Higher Power, implying by the effortless and unqualified transition that there is no ontological difference between the two, then suggests that an appeal to the Higher Power is itself much the same as an appeal to another human being. Boycott writes: ‘But the whole question of God in AA is a stumbling block’ (202). On the contrary, it is rarely a “stumbling block” in addiction narratives, precisely because God is envisaged so loosely. Conrad writes of his treatment ‘It was reiterated that God, or the preferred term Higher Power, was as we perceived him as individuals, not the way some formal church tradition or TV preacher might have pictured Him’ (202). The use of the word “or” at the opening of the statement takes for granted that these two terms ‘God’ and ‘Higher Power’ are synonymous, and the second ‘or’ assumes an equivalence between a centuries-old religious tradition and the hucksterism of a contemporary media evangelist—a thoroughly illusory equivalence, but one which permits the alcoholic to reject conventional Christianity in favour of an entirely subjective construct. Jerry Dunn writes of the archetypal recovering alcoholic by quoting directly, and without attribution, from the story of the Prodigal Son. Dunn writes ‘We must remember that our alcoholic is like that prodigal son. Once he was lost. Now he is found. Once he was dead. Now he lives’ (Dunn 1977:126). The appealing balance and binarism of such declarations are one of several reasons that the most frequently cited Biblical story in earlier temperance narratives is this reassuring and emphatically worldly tale of dissolution and redemption; intimations of resurrection reside within a strictly secular context. Jong relies heavily on conflation to steer her protagonist through the spiritual dimensions of AA’s programme ‘Her. Or Him. It doesn’t even matter; it’s a sort of vanity even to argue about the sex of God. We’re talking about spirit here, the gift of life - and whether you choose to affirm or deny it. That’s all this is about’ (Jong: 137). Jong moves from ‘God’, to ‘spirit’, to ‘gift of life’, as though all three were synonymous. Recounting her experiences at an AA meeting, Leila suddenly realizes ‘We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow’ (Jong: 202). The meaningless chiasmus is succeeded by an equally meaningless intransitive—grow into what? The specific nature of the “spiritual” experiences within recovery narratives are strikingly vague. Conrad writes ‘I am not arrogant or wise enough to presume that there is or is not a God. But I know that I did

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go through some sort of spiritual awakening…’ (252). The imprecision of the phrase “some sort of spiritual awakening” is characteristic of addiction narratives. The word “spiritual” is never defined within addiction narratives. There are only manifestations of it such as writing or reading poetry, looking at trees, not stealing something and everything like that. The closest to defining spirituality is only achieved within addiction narratives confrontationally, when stressing the differences between religion and spirituality. Notwithstanding this defiant separation, however, AA still actually enjoys the comfort of conventional religious terminology. Gilmore writes ‘“Spiritual” should certainly not be reduced in meaning to “religious”; any good definition of the term would be capacious, including many elements of the irrational and the emotional’ (11). This very common view implies that a narrow religiosity is necessarily inferior to an inclusive spirituality, a view which pervades contemporary culture. O’Reilly’s reference to spirituality in AA focuses on the advantages of an ill-defined spirituality ‘AA’s indeterminate spirituality is a zone where inner experiences - feeling-states, imprecise cognitions, awkwardly intermingled ideas and affects - may be articulated in nonsectarian language, made accessible to others across a range of aptitudes, habits, and codes’ (154). Equally, it can be argued that in addiction narratives as in the larger culture, the word “spiritual” has become an inchoate term of approbation without any determinable referent. It is, essentially, different from religion precisely because it is both subjective and invariably secular. Indeed, while the struggle to accept the “God part” is virtually a generic requirement of AA narratives, the texts never depict an individual’s acceptance of God, rather they articulate the procedures whereby God is replaced. In this, recovery narratives reflect the growing tendency within Western democracies to substitute a secular humanism for a transcendent God, while retaining the comfort of the earlier vernacular. This is, of course, not a recent phenomenon. In Emerson and Power, Michael Lopez writes ‘The habit of using a traditional religious terminology in the advancement of ideas that are neither traditional nor Christian, nor even religious, is one of the distinguishing features of post-Enlightenment philosophy and literature’ (Lopez 1996:157). The phrase “secular religion”, once clearly, even risibly, an oxymoron, is not perceived as such today. This is a significant shift in “religious” perceptions, perhaps even more important, because less obvious, than the emphatic, post-Enlightenment rejection of religion as a viable belief-system. AA meetings provide sites for various strategies

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of linguistic displacement that disassociate traditional theological signs from their conventional Christian framework and re-employ these signs to construct an alternative, secular worldview. Conventional religious words such as ‘spirituality’, ‘resurrection’, and ‘conversion’ now operate within a space where such words have, increasingly, a secular meaning. This use of religious terms for secular ends is precisely what drives AA. As well as the word “God”, there are several other words used which are indispensable to AA; words such as “disease”, “spiritual”, and “conversion”. In a celebrated critique of linguistic essentialism, Bourdieu writes: The naive question of the power of words is logically implicated in the initial suppression of the question of the uses of language, and therefore of the social conditions in which words are employed. As soon as one treats language as an autonomous object, accepting the radical separation which Saussure made between internal and external linguistics, between the science of language and the science of the social uses of language, one is condemned to looking within words for the power of words, that is, looking for it where it is not to be found. (107)

Bourdieu continues to reject the power of words themselves by saying ‘Language at most represents …authority, manifests and symbolizes it’ (109). Undoubtedly this is true, most of the time, but the language of AA offers an opportunity to listen to language which possesses no authority. Roberts writes of disclosures at AA meetings ‘The revelations can be as intimate as those told to a clergyman or a doctor, and the trust that they will be kept confidential is as absolute. The difference is that at the meetings there is no authority figure listening. In AA everybody is equal. Everybody has the same cunning, baffling, powerful disease; there is no rank higher than membership and nobody has sway over anybody else’ (117. My emphasis). Bourdieu’s belief in the social context of language is emphatic ‘the use of language, the manner as much as the substance of discourse, depends on the social position of the speaker, which governs the access he can have to the language of the institution’ (109). True, universally, except in AA. Roberts writes ‘In the subculture that is AA, most of the world’s yardsticks for success do not count. Members usually do not ask others about their age, occupation or profession, where they work or where they went to school. The clothes a person wears, the way he handles language, the size of his bank account, the honors he may

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have won are not important in AA…The language is plain and everyday’ (124). Classless, leaderless, apolitical, and altruistic, AA is successful precisely because it does not recognize social authority. Inevitably, this has implications for the language of AA. Bourdieu’s critique assumes that in any institution there will be representative figures of authority, and, by definition, there will be considerably fewer of these than there will be of those whose role is to obey the dictates of authority. While Roberts may say of AA that within it “everyone is equal”, she could also have said that within AA “everyone has authority”. Perhaps justly, only another of Bourdieu’s highly influential theories can account for an apparently impossible scenario—one in which every member of an institution has the same amount of authority as every other member. In his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, John B. Thompson writes: One of the central ideas of Bourdieu’s work…is the idea that there are different forms of capital: not only ‘economic capital’ in the strict sense (i.e. material wealth in the form of money, stocks and shares, property, etc.), but also ‘cultural capital’ (i.e. knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications), ‘symbolic capital’ (i.e. accumulated prestige or honour), and so on. (Bourdieu 1991: 14)

The “capital” which confers authority on all AA members, the currency which authorizes all of them to speak, is their attendance at the meeting. Their presence is a statement; they want to get sober and that’s enough to be a member of AA. Given that many members of AA believe that they are in essence alcoholics, then even the length of a member’s sobriety is not a particularly valuable “currency”. The life-saving transition from alcoholism to sobriety is often depicted in AA in religious language; employing words and phrases such as “new life”, “conversion”, and “rebirth”. Decades ago, many addiction narratives alluded to St Paul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus. A “conversion” scene is central to Charles Clapp’s The Big Bender (1938), and Clapp’s friend and mentor immediately seizes upon Damascus for a comparison ‘Sam recalled for him the prototypical conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus and told of comparable modern-day marvels’ (Clapp 1938: 128). Raphael, however, notes of Clapp’s description of his “conversion” ‘Here, God is almost entirely uncharacterized; conversion has more to do with a new outlook on life than with any

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specific idea of divinity’ (86). That is true in virtually all AA narratives as well. The word “conversion” doesn’t mean a dramatic, epiphanic, transformation; in essence, to convert is to become like the others. It involves the imitation of models, which corrects the vanity of addicts thinking of themselves as unique. It is only the rhetoric that imparts a religious aspect to what is a strictly secular experience. While there are philosophers like Wittgenstein and Foucault who exult at the sheer multiplicity of what needs to be classified, an equally powerful drive among philosophers is to detect similarities and so actively reduce multiplicity. The insistence of Hegel on unity, for example, caused Wittgenstein some concern. Ray Monk writes of a conversation between Maurice Drury and Wittgenstein ‘On one of their walks in Phoenix Park, Drury mentioned Hegel. “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say things which look different are really the same”, Wittgenstein told him. “Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different”’ (371). The members of AA would almost certainly take the Hegelian view. They are encouraged to overlook the differences in the various stories they hear at the meetings and look out for the similarities. It is a certainty that in addition to those who reject AA and NA for being cults and for being religious there is another very large group; a group guaranteed to disagree with what is AA’s principal function. The great majority of narrators and protagonists in AA texts achieve sobriety, eventually, only with the help of AA, and AA has always been silent on issues that lie outside the immediate orbit of the individual alcoholic. O’Reilly writes: The role of social pathologies in the genesis of individual alienation will never become a powerful theme in A.A.: the restoration and maintenance of sobriety and the development of autonomous moral responsibility are reckoned sufficiently formidable tasks from which, within the framework of the group, engagement with social and political critique could prove only a distraction. This is not to suggest that A.A. members are incapable of, or enjoined from, social activism – only that platforms for it must be found outside the boundaries of the program. Nothing in A.A. precludes activism of any sort, provided it is not chemically buttressed, but this is beyond the reclamatory therapeutic A.A. purview and irrelevant to it. (186)

There is no shortage of people who believe that every human malady is entirely society’s fault, but there are none who feature for very long in AA narratives.

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I suggest that AA is not a religious programme, and nor is it a spiritual programme. We used to use the phrase “The man in the Clapham omnibus” to describe a hypothetical, reasonably sensible and intelligent person. The phrase goes back at least as far as 1871 and is now so anachronistic it can’t be used. However, if, say, a couple on the Victoria line were asked which of either the moral or the spiritual was held in higher esteem, I suggest they would say the spiritual. Roberts writes ‘An atheist member of A.A. said, “People use the word spiritual in ways that define themselves. I think it means the ability to get outside one’s own immediate concerns to perform an altruistic act’ (145). Barden’s macho, “recovering” alcoholic, narrator makes a surprising discovery, then apologizes for an unrelated action ‘You’d think I’d be all Mr. Spiritual after making amends to Colin Alvarez and finding out my dead best friend had a son, but no, not really’ (127). “No, not really”, and yes, quite rightly. In the world outside AA and NA, which is most of it, neither apologizing nor making a very surprising discovery would be seen as even remotely spiritual. This confusion about the definition of “spiritual” is found in many addiction narratives, and obviously well beyond them. An act of altruism is a moral act, not a spiritual one, and “the kindness generated by people” also refers to people behaving morally, not spiritually. In an earlier chapter, I suggested that the claim addiction is a disease is untrue, and it is untrue whether presented as literal, scientific fact, or as metaphor. Addiction is not a disease, literally or metaphorically. Similarly, I suggest here that AA and NA are not religious, but nor are they spiritual. They are moral programmes. They encourage the cultivation of such qualities as patience, courage, and honesty. These are virtues; these are aspects of a person’s morality. All the usual vices, or flaws, are eroded by listening to so many stories in which the speaker consciously or not demonstrates the same failings as those shared by the listener. Those who believe that addictions, including, or perhaps especially their own, are primarily the result of social inequality and various other forces, will not be at all responsive to AA’s insistence that the principal causes of anybody’s addiction are an individual’s own flaws and weaknesses. In AA narratives, as in AA practice, the word “spiritual” is very often used in place of the humbler, yet more accurate, word “moral”. This is a further example of the “unearned elevations” so prominent in addiction discourse. Here, though, the reason is not the usual vanity. The elevation can be seen as tactical. A great many alcoholics and drug addicts in AA and NA spent years, decades, high on

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drugs or drunk. Sobriety inevitably brings with it a sense of waste: years, decades, all wasted and nothing to show for them. John Sutherland writes perceptively on the ambivalent attitude to alcohol and the past shared by many alcoholics and drug addicts ‘I suppose I, too, am grateful for alcohol – despite the wretchedness it brought me (and still does when I look back at all those years of waste and shame)’ (37). The drug addicts and alcoholics in AA and NA are working at becoming the people they could have been years ago. It isn’t pleasant to have to go back and do a better job this time than the previous attempt; it feels as though there is nothing to gain because it should have been done properly the first time. The appropriation of the word “spiritual” and its elevatory implications are used in AA and NA to give the impression of moving forward, of developing, irrespective of the nature of the thought or the deed, just because it is so dispiriting to be made aware of starting again. However, unearned, unwarranted elevation seldom, if ever, is unproblematic and AA’s very generous use of the word “spiritual” comes at a cost. AA’s raising of even basic moral actions into enhanced spiritual ones is insulting, wrong, and irresponsible. It is insulting because it affords morality insufficient respect. It is wrong because morality and spirituality are not synonyms. This pervasive practice is irresponsible because in disregarding the moral, it devalues actions properly understood as driven solely by moral concerns. The moral is in no way subordinate to the spiritual. To believe otherwise is to make the same error that Wittgenstein denounced regarding the evolution of human thought. Wittgenstein believed that it was a mistake to see magic and religion as ignorant, faltering attempts on the way to becoming scientific. For him, they were far from being evolutionary steppingstones on the way to the truth; instead, he saw magic and religion as ways of perceiving the universe, no less valid than science. We can say the same of morality and spirituality; it is an error to see the former as a series of dogged and humble acts which may eventually lead to an ill-defined but elevated state known as the spiritual. As far as it can be understood, the spiritual is, above all else, subjective. It is characterized, additionally, by its nebulosity; it is accommodating, undemanding, and invariably benign. The moral looks outward, communally; it is engage. Narratives which end in sobriety are proof of Hume’s belief that the job of reason is to satisfy the passions. Only when addicts stop using their will power to stop drinking and, instead, become people who don’t want to use drugs or drink anymore is sobriety possible on any long-term basis.

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To no longer wish to use drugs or drink alcohol, however, requires a complete change in character, in values; above all else, in morality.

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Index

A Addictive relativism, viii Alcohol/alcoholic, 2, 7, 10, 12–20, 22–36, 38, 44–46, 49–56, 58–60, 64, 67, 70–72, 74–77, 79–81, 83, 84, 87–89, 91–107, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118–124, 128, 130–132, 138, 140, 144, 146, 149–152, 155, 157–163, 165, 167, 169–173, 176–179, 184–186, 188, 190, 192–194, 196–200, 204–207 Alcoholism, 2, 9, 10, 13, 15, 19, 23, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35–37, 43–48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 64, 65, 67–76, 78–83, 88, 92–99, 101, 103, 106, 112, 115, 120, 121, 123, 130, 132, 138, 140, 153, 162, 165–167, 169, 170, 180, 187, 188, 194, 198, 199, 203 Allergy, 47, 59, 167 American Medical Association (AMA), 68, 73 Argumentum ad verecundiam, 71, 81

Autobiography(ies), 3, 5–7, 10, 13, 87, 93, 121, 123, 147, 164, 169, 171, 172

B Begging, 31, 32, 76, 120–131, 136, 137, 140, 152 Berryman, John, 49, 93 Blackout(s), 5, 29, 92, 101, 171, 172, 185, 186 Body, 2, 3, 15–17, 25, 26, 87, 89, 97, 98, 105, 106, 132, 146, 154, 171, 188 Brain, 14–18, 20, 22, 26, 66, 67, 69–71, 77, 89, 90, 98, 102, 103, 106, 160, 161 Bruce, Lenny, 2

C Capitalism, 31, 120, 127, 136, 153, 165, 166 Christianity, 38, 74, 78, 83, 84, 200

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. McCarron, Narratives of Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1

219

220

INDEX

Cocteau, Jean, 14, 15, 21, 25, 167–170 Crack, 12, 15, 21, 84, 90, 91, 112, 115, 116, 123, 137, 139, 142, 145, 147, 150, 160, 162, 163, 175, 190 Crime, 64, 104, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 140, 146

56, 70–72, 76, 81, 89–92, 95, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 111, 112, 115–118, 122, 123, 131, 136, 138–141, 143–148, 151, 152, 154, 155, 163, 167, 171–173, 178, 187, 189 Higher Power, 59, 195, 198, 200 Hume, David, 16, 206

D Dalrymple, Theodore, 56, 64, 91, 113, 116, 118, 119, 145 Determinism, 37, 87, 105, 152 Dresner, Amy, 26, 95, 107, 162, 164 Drug addict, 7, 9, 18, 20, 23–25, 32, 63, 74, 77, 103, 105, 107, 118, 141, 150, 151, 155, 161–163, 186 DuPont, Robert, 9, 15, 44, 49–51, 68, 71, 103, 161

J Jamison, Leslie, 12, 22, 30, 45, 70, 95, 97, 98, 106, 107, 166

E Epistemology, 16, 84, 98–100, 172 Euphemism, 4, 32, 49, 53–56, 60, 83, 138, 154 Existentialism, 107

F Fallada, Hans, 7, 31, 169 Free will, 37, 52, 105, 140, 160, 168

G Genre, 5, 6, 12, 45, 121, 131, 185

H Hell, 26, 31, 44, 52, 59, 148–150 Heroin, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 24–27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 50, 52,

K Kristof, Nicholas, 9, 10, 19, 34, 56

L Language, 1, 6, 8, 16, 23, 45, 46, 49–51, 54, 58–60, 63, 81, 82, 84, 87, 91, 92, 100, 103, 113, 139, 146, 148–150, 160, 195, 196, 201–203 Literary criticism, 49, 84, 87, 89 London, Jack, 28, 79, 80, 98, 99, 177, 193 Luck, 59, 152–154 Lying, 5, 172–175, 177, 178, 188, 189, 191–194

M Martial imagery, 34, 35 Metaphor(s), 4, 11, 12, 19, 20, 32, 38, 45–54, 57, 60, 88, 89, 91, 114, 128, 148, 167, 168, 205 Money, 29, 31, 34, 55, 76, 83, 91, 92, 104, 115, 116, 123–129, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146–148, 157, 164–166, 171, 177, 180, 187, 203

INDEX

221

Morality, 1, 37, 38, 45, 64, 65, 68–75, 77–79, 82–84, 87, 138, 161, 164, 165, 195, 205–207

Roberts, Nan, 195, 197–199, 202, 203, 205 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71

N Neuroscience, 68, 151, 161 Nietzsche, Frederick, 1, 2, 37, 38, 78

S Schopenhauer, Arthur, 78, 83, 84, 100 Science, 1, 36, 45, 50, 58, 67, 68, 88, 94, 96, 153, 161, 165, 166, 202, 206 Seabrook, William, 95, 168–170 Self-esteem, 33, 34, 59, 82, 162 Simile(s), 32, 52, 53, 60, 88, 90, 98, 103 Spirituality, 59, 74, 199, 201, 202, 206 St. Aubyn, Edward, 16, 21, 24, 31, 35, 52, 66 Surgeon general, 66 Synecdoche, 15, 130

O Opioids, 2, 14, 20, 23, 25, 26, 33, 34, 81, 83, 84, 92, 98, 99, 106, 117, 118 Opium, 13, 14, 17, 21, 28, 72, 111, 117, 162, 167–169 OxyContin, 19, 20, 27, 66, 117 P Personification, 10, 27, 51, 53 Philosophy, 29, 31, 33, 35, 46–48, 84, 92, 98, 107, 201 Pleasure, 13–15, 18, 20–26, 29, 68, 91, 100–102, 140, 146, 160, 163, 166, 194 Pooley, Clare, 35, 53, 184, 185 Prohibition, 75 Prostitute(s), 26, 34, 115, 123, 125, 126, 135–148, 150, 152–154 Q Quinones, Sam, 117–119 R Rehabilitation, 54, 59, 130, 148, 164, 168 Relapse, 18, 54–56, 59, 88, 151, 158, 159, 167, 170, 173, 189 Religion, 37, 38, 58, 59, 72–75, 78, 88, 112, 132, 152, 153, 161, 164, 195–199, 201, 206

T Trahison des clercs , 72, 80 Truancy, 112, 113, 115

U Underclass, 112–114, 116

V Vice, 78, 80, 82, 84, 152 Virtue, 78–80, 82–84, 107, 119, 144, 205

W Wallace, David Foster, 24, 92, 194, 195, 198 Wilde, Oscar, 17, 18 Willpower, 18, 70

222

INDEX

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 23, 24, 46, 60, 105, 196, 204, 206

Work, 4, 31, 33, 49, 58, 75, 87, 92–94, 96, 116, 119, 120, 124–126, 128, 130, 132, 137 WuDunn, Sheryl, 9, 10, 19