The Social Value of Drug Addicts: Uses of the Useless

249 Pages·2013·1.56 MB·English

by  Merrill Singer

The Social Value of Drug Addicts

Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page
The
SOCIAL VALUE
of
DRUG ADDICTS
uses of the useless
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California
Left Coast Press, Inc.
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Copyright © 2014 by Left Coast Press, Inc.
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ISBN 978-1-61132-117-3 hardback
ISBN 978-1-61132-118-0 paperback
ISBN 978-1-61132-119-7 institutional eBook
ISBN 978-1-61132-751-9 consumer eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Singer, Merrill.
The social value of drug addicts : uses of the useless / Merrill Singer, J Bryan Page.
pages cm
Summary: “Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society,
and just plain useless—culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues
that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other
people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media
representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and so-
cial sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization
of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments
about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book
is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and
related fields”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61132-117-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61132-118-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61132-119-7 (institutional ebook)
ISBN 978-1-61132-751-9 (consumer eBook)
1. Drug addicts. 2. Social values. 3. Drug abuse—Social aspects. I. Page,
J. Bryan, 1947– II. Title.
HV5801.S48 2013
305.9ˇ084—dc23
2013029130
Printed in the United States of America
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Cover design by Martin Hoyem
Cover image: World Health Organization photo by C. Blackwell. Images from the History
of Medicine, National Library of Medicine, PP044736 WHO box 3, Record 101437129.
COnTEnTS
Introduction 7
ChApTER OnE
Drugs, Race, and Gender in the Social Construction of Drug
Consumers: Recognizing the Origins of Othering 25
ChApTER TwO
Drug Users through the Ages: When Did We Decide
Addicts Were a Separate Category? 53
ChApTER ThREE
Representations of Addicts and the Construction of Prohibitions 71
ChApTER FOUR
Imagine That: Drug Users and Literature 88
ChApTER FIVE
Picture This: Pictorial Construction of Drug
Users in the World of Film 121
ChApTER SIx
The Legal Construction of Drug Users: Policy, the Courts, Incarcerating
Institutions, Police Practice, and the War on Drugs 153
ChApTER SEVEn
Drug Users in Social Science: The Others We’ve Made 181
COnCLUSIOn
From the Making and Using of the Useless to Social Integration 205
References 219
Index 243
About the Authors 247

7
InTRODUCTIOn
Casual drug users should be taken out and shot.
Daryl Gates, former police chief, LAPD,
(quoted in Ostrow: 1990)
By World War I the American addict was identified as a social men-
ace and equated with the IWWs [Industrial Workers of the World],
Bosheviks, anarchists, and other fear subgroups
David Musto, psychiatrist and drug historian, 1987
The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we—our
economy doesn’t need them. . . . We pretend that we’re actually in-
cluding them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not
foolish. They get it.
David Simon, producer of The Wire, 2008
T his book explores a prevailing and consequential contradiction of

modernity. In diverse and interconnected arenas, from everyday
popular discourse, to multiple sectors of the mass media and culture
industries, to government pronouncements and reports, and to legislative
exchange and court rulings, drug users routinely are portrayed as worthless
slackers, evil doers, and lurking threats to the quality of life if not to the very
survival of civil society—in short, as outcast Social Others with no positive
value or useful contribution to society, the human rubbish of contemporary
social life (Friedman 1998). As Taylor (2008:382) stresses
[T]he news media and criminal justice policy seemingly mirror each other’s
beliefs. Indeed the reinforcement and belief in stereotypes and “outsiders”
seems to be part of what appears to be a mutually beneficial partnership.
“Drug stories (embellished with commonplace mythology) help sell pa-
pers.” . . . Especially drug stories which maintain and reinforce dominant
and stereotypical images of drugs, drug users and drug-related crime.
Drug users are, it would seem, as David Simon brands them, excess
people in America, a group of individuals that comprise a hollow surplus in
our economy and a despised burden on society. But are drug users as socially
worthless as they are portrayed?
The Social Value of Drug Addicts: The Uses of the Useless, by Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page, 7–24. ©
2014 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
8 ❋ introduction
Unpacking dominant ideologies about drug users in contemporary
society, assessing the actual social roles of drug users, and questioning the
social utility of depicting drug users as valueless (in both senses, as having
no social worth and as lacking values) are the goals of this book. This volume
seeks to address four interrelated questions, the first three of which are: (1)
What are the reigning images of drug users in the modern world across as-
sorted social domains and in the popular imaginary? (2) Are these portraits
objective representations of drug users as they live their day-to-day lives,
seemingly physically in but not culturally a part of society? and (3) How
do we account for discrepancies between image and actual, between what
anthropologists traditionally called the ideal (how we think social things
should be) and the real (how social things actually are). Ultimately, answer-
ing these questions raises a fourth unifying query: What are the uses of the
useless? Put differently, why (and to whom) is it useful to have some people
defined as socially devoid of value? Although the answers to the first three
of these questions are presented in this and the chapters that follow, the last
question is addressed in the conclusion.
TExTUAL COnSTRUCTIOn OF OUTSIDERS
Exemplary of the outcast motif are government-funded renderings of drug
users and their adverse impact on the nation. In a speech given at the Heri-
tage Foundation (Hutchinson 2002), the director of the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) stated
Drug abusers become slaves to their habits. They are no longer able to
contribute to the community. They do not have healthy relationships
with their families. They are no longer able to use their full potential
to create ideas or to energetically contribute to society, which is the
genius of democracy. They are weakened by the mind-numbing effects
of drugs. The entire soul of our society is weakened and our democracy
is diminished by drug use.
Added Thomas Harrington (2011), while Assistant Administrator and Chief
of Operations of the DEA, “[d]rug trafficking and abuse exact a significant toll
on the American public. More than 38,000 Americans—or approximately 12
times the number of people killed by terrorists on September 11, 2001—died
in 2007 as a direct result of the use of illicit drugs.” Further, the DEA stresses,
in addition to the many health and social problems experienced by drug users
themselves, those who suffer at their hands include their
introduction ❋ 9
families, the medical system, the environment. Innocent kids, caught
in the crossfire. Drivers killed or injured by those under the influence.
Babies found at meth labs, their toys covered with chemicals. Victims
of terrorists, whose acts are financed with drug profits. . . . Direct costs
include those for drug treatment, health care, costs of goods and ser-
vices lost to crime, law enforcement, incarceration, and the judicial
system fees. Indirect costs are those due to the loss of productivity
from death, human suffering, drug abuse-related illnesses, victims of
crime (Benavidez 2013:20)
In fact, if alcohol and tobacco were included as drugs in the calculation
cited above, rather than just those drugs that have come to be banned in the
United States, the actual figure in this emotionally charged statement would
be 184 times greater than the number of those who died on September 11
(Mokdad et al. 2004) and the list of “other victims” would be even longer (e.g.,
cancer patients, those who suffer from diseases due to exposure to second-
hand smoke, victims of fires sparked by cigarettes). As this carefully wrought
distinction suggests, a critical aspect of constructing drug users as Others
involves labeling; in this highly political activity some users of psychotropic
drugs are included and denigrated as dangerous outsiders while others are
excluded and protected from such representation (Becker 1963).
Othering processes are embedded in and propelled by language. As Haig
Bosmajian notes in his book The Language of Oppression (1983:6), “While
names, words and language can be and are used to inspire us, to motivate us
to humane acts, to liberate us, they can also be used to dehumanize human
beings and to ‘justify’ their suppression and even their extermination.” Thus,
with reference to the demonization of Jews, he notes that the Nazis’ “persistent
portrayal of the Jews as ‘vermin,’ ‘bacilli,’ ‘parasites,’ and ‘disease’ contrib-
uted to the ‘Final Solution’” (Bosmajian 1983:8). The words and metaphors
used to create distinction were referred to by Bosmajian as the “language
of oppression.” This is the language that characterizes much of the popular
discourse on drug users.
Although written over 50 years ago, Howard Becker’s (1953, 1955)
early studies of marihuana use and his larger examination of marihuana
users and musicians, entitled Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance
(Becker1963), remain highly relevant to efforts to understand linguistic
processes of social labeling. According to Becker, deviance is not a quality
of individuals, it is a product of social decisions. Deviance is not, in other
words, an activity engaged in by terrible individuals but rather the outcome