Tag: Drugs

How else can you discover a state of grace?

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Reiner and the totalitarian mindset

I’ve been thinking about Adam’s main opponent Anthony Reiner, specifically what makes him such a willing exponent of prohibition? As I pondered in the comments of my previous post, “I’m trying to figure out the mechanism of his adherence to the cause. Why does he react so violently to Adam’s need to save Christine?”

Reiner and the totalitarian mindset

Reading back over it I realised, Reiner reacts to Adam’s decision to help Christine as a betrayal of the cause, a reaction rooted in Reiner’s totalitarian mindset, a mindset that has no tolerance for ambiguity.

When he encounters the kind of complexity offered by Adam’s willingness to help Christine, he tries to impose his pre-existing frames of reference on the decision, reducing it to an us or them ultimatum.

Going back to Alfonso Montuori paper “How to make enemies and influence people” it’s interesting to note the kind of personality the totalitarian mindset attracts. Consistent attempts to suppress “complexity through maladaptive simplicity is characteristic of the closed-mindedness of the authoritarian personality”.

Montuori’s characterisation of the totalitarian mindset, as an authoritarian personality, fits perfectly with description I have of Reiner. For Reiner ambiguous situations cause anxiety, a stress he copes with by adhering to “a clear set of rules and regulations… imposed by whoever is in charge”.

While this might be described by John Truby as his psychological weakness, a weakness hurting only himself, it doesn’t describe his moral weakness, the weakness that is hurting at least one other person. It is clear to me now that Reiner’s moral weakness is explicit in his framing of drug users as an external threat. As Montuori notes “the perception of an out-group as a threat and an enemy is the glue that holds this (totalitarian) mindset together”. A distinction that’s at the very core of Carrion.

In this fiction, as in reality, drug users are universally defined as a threat, blamed for everything from social unrest to criminality. The prohibitionist routinely reduces the drug issue to a simple black and white choice, “if we sort out the drug problem everything will be all-right”.

In Carrion the threat from users becomes even more acute when they are attacked by the insects. It’s no coincidence that the government are behind the release of the insects. It serves two functions, first it’s an attack on the drug using population, uniting people against an identifiable enemy. Second it creates a crisis that allows drug users to be targeted for persecution.

In Carrion users are not only a threat to public order, now they’re a threat to public health, a threat that needs to be dealt with in the expedient, harshest, terms possible. Although it’s interesting to remember that when Hitler was asked whether he thought Jews should be annihilated he replied no. If we didn’t have them “we should have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.”

In trying to answer the question, what makes Reiner such a willing exponent of prohibition, it’s become apparent that his willingness to persecute drug users is his moral weakness, a manifestation of the totalitarian mindset, embedded in the authoritarian personality, that is his psychological weakness.

https://darrinnightingale.com/2012/08/30/weakness-and-need-and-desire/

Now all I have to do is work out his need, what he “must fulfil within himself in order to have a better life”.

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Reiner and the totalitarian mindset

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Anthony Reiner, and struggling to understand what makes him such a willing exponent of prohibition?

Within Carrion prohibition is the product of a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism is “a political system where the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life whenever necessary”.

The question I’m really asking is, what attracts a person to totalitarianism?

To answer that question we need to understand, what allows totalitarianism to flourish? The short answer is uncertainty. In his paper “How to make enemies and influence people” Alfonso Montuori characterises the “totalitarian mindset” as a response to the stress of contemporary pluralism.

Living in complex times full of ambiguity and uncertainty, we feel threatened, and when we’re backed into a corner we have a tendency to succumb to “simplistic, black-and-white solutions”. Montuori goes on to note that “individuals all over the world have sought relief from the uncertainty of a pluralistic world in the arms of absolute belief systems of a religious fundamentalist and/or political/nationalistic nature”.

Within the world of Carrion, the threat posed by drugs is lightning rod, a life-threatening danger, that allows the government to “drastically reduce ambiguity and complexity”. The forces of authority instinctively “fall back on a form of very simplistic… totalitarian thinking”.

Just as the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews, so the prohibitionist persecutes the drug user.

(I realise that this is only half finished but I’ve taken this idea as far as I can for today. My thoughts need further clarification so will have to wait for another post.)

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Sugar is a drug

The other day I had another of those discussions that crop up periodically about drugs. In my experience people usually pool into two groups. The first, containing those who’ve done drugs, escalate into a series of anecdotes about their experiences. The second, filled with those who’ve never done drugs, descends into a lecture about how bad drugs are and the harm they cause. The exponents of this view always extol the party line. They’d never do drugs and invariably view those who have as if they’re sub-mental.

At some point in the conversation I always drop in the line. If they discovered sugar now, it would be banned, categorised as a Class A drug like Ecstasy. Most of the time I do it to agitate the argument, make people think differently about what a drug is. It’s fun to watch them try and dismiss the assertion as frivolous, but in the end it’s hard to refute the argument that sugar is a drug.

Last time I Google’d “sugar is a drug” I got about 139,000,000 results. High up on the search results was an interesting post by Robb Wolf. In “Sugar is a drug” Wolf outlines some interesting facts about the addictive nature of sugar. Basically “excessive amounts of sugar can lead to the release of increased amounts of dopamine“. For those who don’t know dopamine is the substance released when you take heroine.

The pathology goes something like this. When you take heroine the body releases dopamine and something called gamma-Aminobutyric acid or GABA to counteract it. The heroine stops the GABA from doing it’s job. The brain is flooded with an unchecked surge of dopamine. This is what leads to the feelings of euphoria. The crux of Wolf’s argument is that a high sugar foods are addictive.

Most people dismiss the impact of sugar on their system. You get the odd joke about experiencing a “sugar rush” but for the most part the narcotic effects of sugar are perceived as something relatively mild.

Now imagine experiencing sugar for the first time. Most people have been using sugar since they were children. Repeated use of any drug build a tolerance to that substance. I recently started drinking coffee again after a long period of abstinence. I now feel the effects of every cup on my system.

Viewing sugar as drug creates a seismic shift in the way we understand drugs. It throws up a whole bunch of questions about the role of drugs in society, or more specifically the role of prohibition. If sugar produces the same effect on the individual as heroine, why is one controlled and the other not?

The more I think about it the more arbitrary, and politically motivated, prohibition seems. I think the next time I have one of those discussions I’ll pose the question. If society can accept the routine use of sugar, why can’t they accept the routine use of Ecstasy?

Wonder what the answer will be?

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Adam’s opponents

Recently I plotted Carrion using a variation of “The Board” described by Blake Snyder in his book Save the Cat.

Working the board has thrown up several issues relating to Adam’s opponents. One of the key problems I realise needs pinning down is Adam’s conflict with prohibition, how does a prohibitionist find himself on the wrong side of prohibition?

To understand this more fully I find myself going back to reaffirm what I think Carrion is about. I take the view, expressed by John Truby in his book Anatomy of Story, that a story is a moral argument. “Whenever you present a character using means to reach an end, you are presenting a moral predicament, exploring the question of right action, and making a moral argument about how best to live.” To make this argument the hero needs a collection of opponents (and allies) who force him to deal with the central moral problem.

To find the best opponents for Adam I first need to recognise the question at the heart of Carrion, why are drugs prohibited? The usual reason given for drug prohibition is public health. Drugs are dangerous, they cause harm, so should be banned. For me this throws up at least one glaring hypocrisy, why aren’t drugs like cigarettes and alcohol subject to the same prohibitions as MDMA? Both cigarettes and alcohol have significant health risks associated with their use, yet they are both freely available.

For me the distinction between drugs that are banned and those that are not is arbitrary, and because it arbitrary, it’s inevitably motivated by something else, something entirely political. Prohibition isn’t about public health, it’s about public control. Boiled down to its essence, prohibition is a form of oppression. An oppression that is inherently cruel, and demands the destruction of anyone who opposes it.

Faced with this insight it seems to me Adam’s only moral action in the story is to resist prohibition. This leads him to become an insurgent in ensuing civil war. For his arc to be fulfilled his opponents need to articulate the conflicting points of view present in the war on drugs.

Adam’s opponent is prohibition, but prohibition is too nebulous a concept on its own. We need to see it as something concrete, both as an institution and as a character. Actually it needs to be seen through a number of characters on all sides of the issue.

Prohibition organises society against those who take drugs. It’s the laws prohibiting use. The “Code 10” laws that stop convicted users from getting the medical attention. Sanctions imposed on those who help users. Social pressure best described by the maxim, if you’re not with us you’re against us.

The institution of prohibition are only the backdrop to Carrion, what Truby describes as the story world. Its unrelenting cruelty is personified by the drug eating insects that attack users. They are the ever-present sanction prohibition imposes on the citizenry, they can’t be argued with, articulating prohibitions intransigence, you take drugs you die.

As an opponent, the insects attack Adam indirectly through Christine. While they force him to take specific actions that contributes to the moral argument of Carrion, Adam’s real opponent, the opponent who challenges him directly, is Reiner. He’s the “character who wants to keep the hero from achieving his desire”. He’s the one who tries to stop Adam saving Christine. As Truby points out “a true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal”.

This point throws up a question, what are Adam and Reiner really competing over? Adam’s desire is to save Christine, Reiner wants to see Christine dead, but he knows the insects will do that for him, he could just wait, let them do their job.

If Adam and Reiner aren’t competing for Christine’s life, what are they fighting over? Adam’s desire represents a threat to Reiner, it confirms his fear, there’s someone out there willing to challenge prohibition. At the core of the conflict is a fight over the the kind of world they live in. They’re fighting to have either a free society or a secure society.

One of the primary arguments for prohibition is that drugs represent a threat, not just to public health but to our security. Users are dangerous, dealers are criminals, drugs tear at the very fabric of society, and prohibition is the tool that keeps us safe.

The irony is, prohibition is more of a threat to our public safety than drug use.

What if prohibition doesn’t protect public health, what if it’s a form of oppression? The choice to take drugs amounts to demand for freedom over security. Deep down they’re fighting for a world of freedom or oppression.

Another of Adam’s opponents is his sister Christine. If Reiner articulates the voice of prohibition Christine gives us the users point of view. Her strength in the story is her ability to attack Adam’s prejudices. Without her Adam would not begin to see the dangers of prohibition, he would not see the oppression. His desire to save his sister is his call to arms. Whatever he may think of drugs and those who take them, Christine makes him see prohibition as something that need to be challenged.

The final opponent to challenge Adam is Sexton, prohibition as seen by the dealer. In an earlier post “Adam’s immoral action” I contemplated another of Truby’s tenants. “In the early part of the story the hero is losing to the opponent. He becomes desperate. As a result he starts taking immoral actions to win.”

In trying to answer this problem I asked myself the question, what kind of immoral actions does Adam take? The answer can best be summed up as “not fighting back”. Only through his conflicts with Sexton does Adam start to behave in a moral way. Structurally Sexton enters the story half way through. Adam has gone as far as he can with his initial course of action, and has failed to save Christine. Then he meets Sexton, an unrepentant drug dealer who is willing to challenge prohibition by taking the fight to them. Sexton’s actions challenge Adam’s immoral action, forces him to realise the only moral action to take against prohibition is to fight it.

Structurally this collection of characters is what Truby calls a four cornered opposition. The system not only allows the moral argument to be fully explored, each character articulating a different set of values, attacking Adam’s great weakness in a different way. By pushing each of their values to the extremities of the four cornered opposition they all become as different as possible from the others.

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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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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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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.