Tag: Carrion

Original sci-fi, reacting to vicious drug policy, developed into a 110-page screenplay.

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Drug eating insects

As I work though the ideas for a redraft of Carrion, it has become necessary to consolidate my understanding of the drug eating insect that are such an important part of the story.

One of the first ideas I had for Carrion was the image of insects eating drugs. Initially I though it would be enough to have a species just feed on drugs. I thought these insects could be either a naturally occurring or genetically engineered blight, eating their way through the stockpile of illicit drugs. I envisioned a plethora of subspecies, one for each substance, migrating from stash to stash, decimating the supply. I quickly realised this would probably end the war on drugs, and my story with it.

Aegoidus pacificus corallithorax Tippmann

Then I read about cocaethylene. Cocaethylene is the drug formed in vivo when cocaine and ethyl alcohol are ingested simultaneously. Studies suggest that it may be more cardiotoxic, and possess a longer duration of action than cocaine taken in isolation. The thing I find most interesting about cocaethylene, is that it is only produced in vivo, in the body. From this small revelation, I quickly got to the image of insects feeding on drug users.

I had the notion that a species engineered to feed on drugs in vivo would plague drug users. Logic dictates that this strategy would limit attacks to those under the influence. Once they stop producing the drug, the insects would migrate to another user. While this provides more story, there still isn’t enough drama.

So while looking for a more dynamic scenario, I started to research the various insect species that might be spliced together. While I have been unable to find any species of insect that targets drugs in their refined state, I was able to find several species that attack drug precursors like coca, the source of cocaine.

Aegoidus pacificus lays it’s eggs in the plant bark. The beetle’s larvae then burrows into the stem, irrevocably damaging the plant.

Eloria noyesi, the coca tussock moth

The larvae of Eloria noyesi feeds on coca leaves. Capable of eating fifty leaves in it’s lifetime, an infestation eventually destroys the plant.

Stenocarus fuliginosus and Myzus persicae both feed on and destroy the opium poppy, the source of heroine.

As my research progressed I started to understand more clearly the role the insects would play within Carrion. In a previous post, Drugs as a tool, I described the insects as the “physical manifestation of prohibition. A tool that takes the ruthless unrelenting enforcement of prohibition to its merciless conclusion. The physical destruction of anyone who takes drugs.”

Drugs as a tool

For the insect to have this quality, I realised they needed to be more aggressive. So I started to look for insects that might attack humans, insects that are carnivorous. The insects I found most intriguing are those species attracted to humans post mortem.

From the moment of death legions of insects start to feed on human remains. Calliphoridae (blowflies) lay their eggs around wounds and natural openings in the body. Their eggs hatch, and maggots move into the body secreting digestive enzymes, and tearing tissue with their mouth hooks.

As the rate of decay increases, the smell attracts more blowflies, and species of Coleoptera, including Staphylinidae (rove beetles), silphidae (carrion beetles), and Cleridae (checkered beetles). These late-arriving insects are predators, feeding on the abundant supply of maggots as well as the decaying flesh.

They’re joined by parasitoid wasps such as Brachymeria calliphorae, that lay their eggs inside the maggots, injecting venom into the host along with the egg. This venom is a highly complex mixture of chemicals, that not only paralyse the host, but also modifies the host’s tissue, making it more nutritious for the developing larva.

As the decaying body passes through the stage known a black putrefaction, the predatory insects become more abundant, until the body enters butyric fermentation, when the remaining flesh is removed, and the body dries out.

The reduction in soft food makes the body less palatable to the mouth-hooks of maggots, and the amount of predatory insects declines. The remains become more suitable for the chewing mouthparts of beetles. As the body enters the final stages of decay, mites, tineid moths, and bacteria feed on the remaining tissue.

All insects progress through one of two main types of metamorphosis, complete and incomplete. Complete consists of egg, larva, pupa, adult. Incomplete, egg, nymph, adult.

I envision insects going though the complete metamorphosis. The genetically engineered adults feed on drugs, then much like the parasitoid wasps, lay their eggs in the users. Employing a strategy know as polyembryony, a single egg continues to divide, cloning itself into a mass of individual larvae. These larva then hatch, and start to move around the host, feeding on the non-essential parts of the body, until they are mature enough to pupate.

After complete metamorphosis, the adult insects must then escape the host. I imagine a swarm gnawing free of the host in a bloody explosion. This image is the origin of the name Carrion. Infested users are the living dead, walking through the stages of decomposition, treated as carrion, destroyed by insects. The “physical manifestation of prohibition”.

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Civil war

One of the central ideas of Carrion is that the war on drugs escalates into a civil war. I don’t think it’s enough to simply say the two sides of prohibition start fighting. I need to understand the mechanism that might push prohibition that far.

First things first. What is civil war? I have seen it described variously as “armed conflict between sovereign and/or nonsovereign combatants within a single sovereign territory” or as a “sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1000 battle-field deaths per year”. The Romans gave civil war its name. Bellum civile, a war against cives, or fellow-citizens, fought within the city, or civitas. Interestingly the Geneva Conventions do not specifically define civil war, instead describing a criteria for acts qualifying as “armed conflict not of an international character”. Their criteria includes.

1. The party in revolt must be in possession of a part of the national territory.
2. The insurgent civil authority must exercise de facto authority over the population within the determinate portion of the national territory.
3. The insurgents must have some amount of recognition as a belligerent.
4. The legal Government is “obliged to have recourse to the regular military forces against insurgents organized as military.”

While these criteria might describe the conflict currently raging between the drug cartels and government forces in regions of south America. It doesn’t describe the situation here in the United Kingdom. Here in the United Kingdom, the war on drugs is a one sided conflict, that amounts to a campaign of suppression, allowing the government to police its citizens.

For the war on drugs to become a civil war, those on the wrong side of prohibition would have to fight back, and be recognised as a belligerent. That is, engaged in a legally recognised war. Which prompts the question, what would it take for drug users to take up arms against the government?

Putting that question to one side for a moment, I have to ask, why hasn’t this already happened? Why don’t drug users fight back? The flippant answer is, they’re too stoned to care. That adheres to a stereotype of drug users as feckless ne’er-do-wells who care for nothing but the drugs they take. I don’t think that shoe fits.

In my experience that the majority of individuals who use drugs recreationally are otherwise law abiding productive members of society. They get married, have children, hold down jobs, just like those in the sober world.

Could it be drug users just don’t see the oppression of the war on drugs. They live their lives, take their drugs, unaware of the acute oppression of prohibition. For them to start fighting back, they would have to feel that oppression more acutely than they currently do.

I also think it could be that drug culture is an illicit culture, that is defined as outside “normal” society. Those who take drugs do so in defiance of social norms, and by doing so, feel they’re already fighting prohibition. Could it be taking drugs means users are disengaged from society, and therefore have no interest in fighting it? For them to engage, the normal terrain of their lives would have to be changed, radicalised, before they would react with any kind of violence.

It could be that those who take drugs just aren’t aggressive enough. It is my experience that the majority of illicit drugs do not actually elicit violence in their users. Quite the opposite. MDMA is not called ecstasy because in makes people angry. The violence associated with the drug world comes primarily from the supply/distribution side of drug culture. Either between government agents and those supplying/distributing drugs, or between rival groups seeking to control the supply/distribution of drugs.

None of this answers the question, why don’t drug users fight back? In his book Drug Warriors and Their Prey, Richard Lawrence Miller “explores the process by which society can destroy an ordinary group of people.” His book describes the war on drugs as a process that seeks to systematically destroy drug users. The process he describes follows a series of distinct phases.

1. Identification.
2. Ostracism.
3. Confiscation.
4. Concentration.
5. Annihilation.

As I understand it, the war on drugs has already advanced significantly through the first three phases. Without a radical response from drug users, for civil war to happen in Carrion, the two remaining phases must elicit a violent reaction. That suggests a scenario in which this significant minority are forcibly removed from society, and concentrated in a specific place, but this still might not be enough to push drug users to take up arms.

Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis did not rise up when they found themselves corralled into places like the Warsaw ghetto. It was only at the point of annihilation, when the Nazis started to clear the ghetto, that they started to offer the kind of resistance you might categorised as civil war.

I am not trying to diminish what the Nazis did, or the Jewish reaction to their persecution. I’m only trying to reflect on how far a minority like drug users must be pushed before they react. I think it is only at the point of annihilation that drug users will fight back. They’ll be offered a choice, either fight, or die.

This suggests a scenario in which drug users are being systematically killed. How might prohibitionist do this? While the hard-liners might just say “line ’em up and shoot ’em” I imagine a more surreptitious approach. I envision a plague of drug eating insects attacking drug users, using them as part of their reproductive cycle.

In a previous post. Drugs as a tool I described these insects as “physical manifestation of prohibition. A tool that takes the ruthless unrelenting enforcement of prohibition to its merciless conclusion. The physical destruction of anyone who takes drugs”. Attacks by drug eating insects benefits from being a localised attack, specifically and exclusively directed at drug users. It also offers the government plausible deniability. They could argue, quite believably, they had nothing to do with what is happening to the drug users. Users brought this calamity on themselves. Again I return to the question, how would this escalate into civil war?

I think it will take a combination of two thing. First, the government denies drug users medical attention. They pass laws that stop those with a history of drug use getting access to the NHS. Second, drug users discover the plague of insects was initiated by the government. It is only at this point, at the point of death, when users understand specifically who their persecutors are, will they take up arms against the government.

Only at this point will the war on drugs escalate into civil war.

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What makes him rebel?

I am working on trying to understand Adam’s motivations. By the end of the story the war on drugs has escalated into civil war.

So what makes Adam go from policeman to rebel?

What is a rebel? An initial interpretation might focus on those individuals navigating the trials of adolescence, setting themselves in opposition to the values of parental authority. This understanding falls too closely to the unfocused rebellion epitomised by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. “Hey. Johnny. What are you rebelling against?” To wit Johnny relies. “What’ve you got?” It’s hard to see this as anything more than petulant defiance. Brando’s rebellion is the rebellion of the outsider, and possesses a nihilism that is an anathema to Adam.

His rebellion is the rebellion of someone standing in opposition to something. He becomes a participant in an insurrection, a violent uprising against the government, he’s a rebel as defined by his opposition to a specific set of values.

What forces this change? If Christopher Vogler (in The Writer’s Journey) is to be believed he must experience death. Only by experiencing death “is he able to return to ordinary life reborn as a new being with new insights”. So what’s dying?

To understand this I think we have to go back to his upbringing. Until he was fifteen Adam was an only child. Like Christine he was the sole beneficiary of his parents resources. Then his father lost his job, and they ended up living in a bed and breakfast. Despite their impoverished circumstance his parents did their best. He could see them doing their best, and reciprocated. Their attention meant he was an articulate child, reflecting their values, and exhibiting a strong sense of what is right and wrong, an obedience to social authority, and a sense of duty. That’s why he joined the army.

He didn’t want to get into the debt associated with obtaining a university education. He didn’t want to burden his parents, or his infant sister, by demanding financial assistance. The army was the logical choice. When his parents were killed in 2007, their values motivated him to buy himself out of the army, return to the family home, and take care of Christine.

Joining the police was a sideways move, that fitted his sense of duty. So what makes him reject the values he had lived by, and take up arms against the government, against the war on drugs?

It would have to be something that kills his understanding of the world as he knew it, and forces his rebirth. No single event could cause this, it has to be a series of events that build, ultimately reversing his understanding. There is a conflict between the sense of duty he feels towards authority, and the sense of duty he feels towards his sister.

What makes him rebel?

I think he comes to see the war on drugs as unfair, and all that word implies. He comes to understand that no matter what Christine and her peers have done, they do not deserve what is being done to them, they don’t deserve the plague of insect that are killing them.

Ultimately his rebellion is an attempt to right a wrong, and save his sister.

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Christine Leigh

Christine Leigh is Adam’s younger sister. I settled on the name Christine for several reasons. The name comes from the Latin word Christianus, meaning follower of Christ.

Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah”. The messianic etymology of the name counterpoints the negative image that defines Christine’s status in Carrion as a drug user. It can also be shortened to Chris, giving her character a certain androgyny.

Born in 1995, she was two when her brother joined the army. In the years that followed she saw him occasionally. His absence from the family home meant she actually grew up an only child, the sole beneficiary of her parents emotional, physical, and financials resources.

The constant attention, lead to a strong willed girl, sensitive to disapproval. Denied competition from a sibling, she exhibits a certain possessiveness with her time, space, and belongings. Perfectly happy to spend time alone, fiercely loyal, she prefers the company of a few close friends, to the superficial connections exhibited by her extrovert peers.

Strongly dependant on her parents for emotional support, she is devastated by their deaths in 2007. This forced separation, that under normal circumstances would have been difficult enough, is even more traumatic. The resistance normally associated with early adolescence, jams up against the push for freedom, and propensity for conflict associated with middle adolescence. That in turn jams up against the need to try more adult activities associated with late adolescence.

Adam, who shared his sisters emotional proclivities, took the full force of the turmoil. Out of his depth, he found himself unable to offer her anything but the most material support. Her grief, coupled with her unrequited emotional needs, forces a distance, that manifested itself as anger. The growing pains of adolescence, compounded by her strong will, lead to escalating conflicts with Adam. They would argue, constantly, sometime over the most trivial things.

To escape the conflicts, she would go out, spend hours hunkered down with friends, wandering the streets, or hiding in her room, anything but deal with Adam, and what he represented, her dead parents.

By the time she was fifteen she had started drinking. By the time she was sixteen she was a regular in the local clubs. By the time she was seventeen recreational drug use was a regular part of her life. With hindsight her behaviour was was direct challenge to her brothers position as a police officer.

Suspecting she was using drugs, he searched her room, found the evidence he was looking for, and confronted her. The argument that followed escalated into violence, and she stormed out. By the time she was seventeen Christine was living independently. She lived for a while with some friends, got a job working in a shop.

Late in 2011 she met Stephen Joseph. Early 2012 they were living together. Supplementing what income they had from regular jobs, they supplied the pills and powders that fuelled their weekends to close friends.

Stephen’s dealing was small scale, never out in the open, never to strangers, but it was enough to attract the attention of drug eating insects.

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Adam Leigh

Adam Leigh is a character in Carrion. His forename comes from early research. Adam is a colloquialism for MDMA or ecstasy. In the early seventies scientists researching MDMA’s use in psychotherapy nicknamed the drug “Adam”, referring to the state of “primal innocence” induced by the drug.

Adam’s surname is a derivation of the name Lee. William Lee was a pseudonym used by William S. Burroughs. I’m interested in his work, and took some inspiration from his first book Junkie. Leigh is an oblique reference to drugs.

Born in 1980, when Carrion starts Adam Leigh is in his early thirties. He’s old enough to have some understanding of the world, made some mistakes in life, have a weariness about him, but still young enough to be engaged, see the world differently.

As a younger man, unwilling to saddle himself with the debts associated with obtaining a university education, he went out to work. He’s known first-hand the damage debt can cause. In the financial collapse of the 1980’s his father was made redundant. Out of work, and unable to pay the mortgage, on the council house they had bought in Thatcher’s right to buy scheme, the bank repossessed.

As they had technically made themselves homeless, by defaulting on the mortgage, the council refused to rehouse them. They ended up living in bed and breakfast, until his father was able to get a job in a local supermarket. Adam watched the experience take its toll on his parents, and vowed never to put himself in that same position.

In his late teens, when his contemporaries were starting university, Adam joined the army. He thought whatever skills he learned in the service, would stand him in good stead when he returned to civilian life.

Early in 2002 he saw combat in Afghanistan, where he was wounded. An improvised explosive device detonated in close proximity, killed one his comrades, and left Adam with shrapnel scars across his back.

During his recovery, he met and married a local teacher Joan. Their marriage only lasted a couple of years. She was unable to deal with the rigours of life as an army wife. A tour of duty took him away for several months soon after their wedding, and when he returned, carrying the weight of post-traumatic-stress-disorder, his emotional distance pushed a wedge between them.

The final straw came when Adam transferred into the military police, and they were forced to relocate. Joan refused to follow him. They finally divorced in 2005.

Adam dedicated himself to his work, until 2007, when his parents were killed in a car crash.

Their death forced him to take guardianship of his baby sister Christine. Born in 1995, she was two years old when Adam joined up. She knew him only as an occasional visitor, and saw him more as a distant uncle than a brother.

In the months that followed Adam bought himself out of the army, moved back into the family home with Christine, and joined the Metropolitan Police. He tried to offer her stability, but the grief of loosing her parents, the tribulations of adolescents, and his dedication to his work, meant Adam found her difficult to deal with.

A growing resentment developed between them. The older she got, the more defiant she became, until finally, in the summer of 2012, she moved in with her drug dealing boyfriend.

Angry, Adam was left with an unresolved sense of guilt that he didn’t do better by her. A year later, and they’re on opposite sides of the war on drugs, no closer to resolving their differences, until drug eating insects attack Christine’s boyfriend.

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People convinced of their superiority

In my last post I finished with a quote from Richard Lawrence Miller’s book Drug Warriors and Their Prey. “People convinced of their superiority rescue a country threatened from within.”

What is prohibition really about?

This could be what John Truby calls the designing principle of Carrion, but what does Miller mean when he says “people convinced of their superiority?” Again I find myself going back to the dictionary. The word superiority, and its precursor superior. Superior means greater in quality, of high or extraordinary worth, higher in rank or status, displaying a conscious sense of being above or better than others.

For me Miller’s aphorism implies a small group of people, but this doesn’t explain the mandate asserted by the government. Could it be the attitudes of this small group are disseminated through, and followed by, the larger body of the population? If that is the case, democracy has been inverted. The government’s not representing the views of the majority, the majority re-presents the views of the government. Which leads me to the question, why are drug users singled out, why are they treated with such hostility, why are they vilified?

The conclusion I have come to is that drug users function as the other, the outsiders, the threat, the group over there to be feared. The irony is, the people convinced of their superiority need drug users. They can only maintain their position “inside” by identifying drug users position as “outside”. From their position inside, they’re able to blame drug users for all the ills of society.

If this is the case, the question for drug users is how do you fight them? Do you expose their hypocrisies, expose the machinery of prohibition, or do you match might with might, and fight back?

My feeling is these people are so entrenched in their opinions, so hardened in their position, so convinced of their superiority, nothing will shake them. They only respond to force, a force equal to the animosity they show towards drug users. The implication of this are horrifying, because the only way to stop them, is to destroy them.

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What is prohibition really about?

As I am prone to do when I am trying to understand something, my first port of call is a dictionary. Prohibition is the act of prohibiting, or state of being prohibited. An order or decree that prohibits. To prohibit is to forbid an action or activity by authority or law. Essentially prohibition is control. Control means to exercise restraint or direction over, dominate, command, to hold in check, or curb.

I’d argue prohibitions function within our society is to control. On the face of it prohibition controls the manufacture, transportation, and sale of a prescribed set of substances, namely drugs. It also controls behaviour. Prohibition controls an individuals right to make a choice, good or bad, to take a certain action, that is take a specific drug.

A question comes to mind, why do they want to control what individuals do? At this point I think it is necessary to understand who I mean by “they”. They are the government, those people we elect to represent us. But if that is the case, why aren’t the views of the drug users represented? I presume the argument would come back that we live in a democracy, and the majority think drug taking is bad. But why? Why do we think drugs are bad, when every culture I can think of takes drugs in one form or another?

Putting that to one side, another question comes to mind. If these are the same people who allow individuals to choose to smoke and drink, why can’t that same people allow individuals to choose to take drugs. Rebuttals might sight the addictive nature of drugs. I don’t think the drugs that are currently prohibited are any more or less addictive than cigarettes or alcohol. Individuals get into just as much trouble with legal substances as they do with those prohibited. If the government can allow people to make a choice, take the risk of doing cigarettes or alcohol, why don’t they allow individuals to make the choice and take drugs? Logic dictates that they can, but they don’t, so why don’t they?

The answer I keep coming back to is that it is less about what people take, and more about the act of taking. Prohibition isn’t about the substance, prohibition is about controlling what people do. While I think this is an argument for the abolition of prohibition, it doesn’t answer the question, who actually controls the machine of prohibition?

A glimpse can perhaps be found in the preface of Richard Lawrence Miller’s Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State. “People convinced of their superiority (seek to) rescue a country threatened from within.”

What is prohibition really about? I think it’s about power. It’s a machine that allows the state to control its population.

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Premise versus premise

Over the last few weeks I have read both Robert McKee’s Story and John Truby’s The Anatomy Of Story. While reading these two books I have also been working though some ideas for redraft of Carrion. Not sure if it is a good idea to try and assimilate both treaties in quick succession while still writing, but as paid work has cut my writing time in half, I feel the need to keep pounding the keys, or lose whatever momentum I have trained into myself.

Prompted by what I have read, I started to think about the premise of Carrion. Truby assert that the premise “is your story stated in one sentence. It is the simplest combination of characters and plot and typically consists of some event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story.” On the other hand McKee asserts that the premise is simply “an open ended question: What would happen if… ?” For example. “What would happen if a shark swam into a beach resort and devoured a vacationer? JAWS.”

What Truby calls premise, McKee calls the controlling idea. “A controlling idea may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.” What McKee calls the controlling idea Truby calls the designing principle. “The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole. It is the internal logic of the story, what make the parts hang together organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”

While both notions of premise make sense, Truby’s version sounds to me like the logline, and seems too detailed to be what McKee describes as “the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story.” If Truby is right when he says “if your premise is weak, there is nothing you can do to save the story” I need to seriously rethink the foundations of Carrion.

When I first started work on Carrion. The initial inspiration came from an idea that they, the government, the powers of prohibition, genetically engineered insects to eat drugs. The whole script was written from that starting point. Characters, plot, dialogue, I now realise were built on shaky foundations. With insights I gained reading Truby, I now realise that drug eating insects was too nebulous an idea, and lacks any notion of what’s at stake in the story. With some work, and the help of McKee, I have come to another “what if” question, what if the war on drugs escalates into civil war?

According to Truby this is still not strong enough, and needs to be expanded to include the event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story. While I still have the character of Carrion’s previous draft, I know this draft has a different outcome. What it is I don’t know yet, but I do know I have a lot more work to do.

The thing I’ve realised while writing this is that while both Truby and McKee offer invaluable insights into the craft of screenwriting, neither has the definitive answer, but they are both useful as tools to clarify my own understanding.

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Drugs as a tool

I’ve been reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the intricacies of giving meaning to their story.

For those who haven’t read the book, Mr. Truby approaches story as if it were a body, and dissects it as if her were doing an autopsy. He has a chapter on technology (tools). In it he observes that within a story “tools are an extension of the human form, taking a simple capability and magnifying its power”. Why do I mention this? Because while reading Truby’s book, I have also been working through some ideas for major redraft of Carrion.

One of the ideas at the centre of Carrion is that insects have been genetically engineered to eat drugs. Within my story they are physical manifestation of prohibition. A tool that takes the ruthless unrelenting enforcement of prohibition to its merciless conclusion, the physical destruction of anyone who takes drugs. With that in mind, I started to think about drugs as a tool, and asked the question, what kind of tool are drugs?

This quickly becomes more complicated than you think. It’s all too easy to view drugs simply a tool to alter your mood. I’ve written before about the link I see between drugs and prohibition. In a previous post I outlined a paradigm that uses drug prohibition as a tool for social control.

Why they won’t stop the war on drugs

Certainly that is one function drugs play within society, but it’s not the only one. I read a paper recently by Tammy L Anderson that points to A Cultural-Identity Theory Of Drug Abuse. The paper differentiates between drug use and abuse. “The theory proposes that drug abuse is an outcome of a drug-related identity change process featuring three micro-level (personal marginalization, ego identity discomfort, and lost control in defining an identity), two mesolevel (social marginalization and identification with a drug subcultural group), and three macro-level (economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and popular culture) concepts.”

Without getting into the intricacies of a theory that describes twelve hypothetical relationships that lead to drug abuse. It does point to another way drugs are used. As a tool of cultural identity. From my own experiences I can say there is certainly an identification between those have used drugs, and those who have not. You only have to look at the way those who drink alcohol view those who do not to see a shared identity works.

Conversely in this instance, because alcohol is a socially acceptable drug, those who do not drink are the ones viewed with hostility. This binary polarisation of “us” and “them” points to the dynamics at work when looking at the way illicit drugs are viewed. Cultural-identity theory argues that drug abuse is a consequence of a multitude of marginalizing experiences. “The greater the number of marginalizing experiences… the greater the risk for drug abuse.”

If that is the case, and drug abuse is a consequence of an accumulation of negative experiences both personal and social, drugs become a consequence of negative forces that define those who eventually abuse drugs, and not the other way round. This perhaps accounts for the vicious way in which the sober world treats drug users. There’s a sense of guilt felt by the sober world, a guilt that recognises drug use is not simply people being somehow weak willed, a guilt that can not be solved, and ultimately elicits hostility.

There is a scene in David Mamet’s film The Spanish Prisoner that explains the psychological origins of human cruelty.

Steve Martin explains the psychological origins of human cruelty in “The Spanish Prisoner”

The key line comes at the end of Steve Martin’s speech, when Campbell Scott asks him why his employers will start to act cruelly toward him, Martin replies. “To suppress their guilt.”

For me, and certainly within the context of Carrion, I’m starting to see drugs as a tool of guilt, and motivating forces for both protagonist and his antagonist.