Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

I was thrilled. A real habit. An honest-to-goodness, high-flying, down-to-earth, real McCoy habit. Wow, man! I was a junkie. Jay-you-en-kay-eye-ee junkie. Junkie was something special, something big and important and heroic, Real Wild. A name that meant something powerful and gutsy like Annie Oakley or Wild Bill Hickok.⁵⁹

The next piece, by Isabelle Eberhardt, complements the alacrity of Hahn and Quinn, also disrupting passive, degraded, and weak stereotypes of the female addict. Eberhardt was “born in 1877 the illegitimate daughter of an Armenian scholar, who was formerly pope of the Russian Orthodox Church, and a German noblewoman.”⁶⁰ This is an excerpt from her chronicles, The Oblivion Seekers, in which she wrote of her “nomadic infusion” at the age of twenty into the Islamic culture of Tunisia in 1897. Palmer and Horowitz stated that here “she adopted the male attire of a full-length hooded robe and turban, rode and caroused freely with the Arabs, smoked kif, drank and took lovers.”⁶¹ Eberhardt’s life and work elevate addiction to a space where freedom and wisdom can be found:

The seekers of oblivion sing and clap their hands lazily; their dream-voices ring out late into the night, in the dim light of the mica-paned lantern. Then little by little the voices fall, grow muffled, the words are slower. Finally the smokers are quiet, and merely stare at the flowers in ecstasy. They are epicureans, voluptuaries; perhaps they are sages. Even in the darkest purlieu of Morocco’s underworld such men can reach the magic horizon where they are free to build their dream-palaces of delight.⁶²

The joyful volcanicity of Hahn, Quinn, and Eberhardt’s accounts of their addictions and recoveries flies in the face of the phallo-logocentric images of the female addict. They are active rather than passive, exploring rather than exploited, exhilarated rather than degraded. Each woman flies to the abyss and turns back to “look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”⁶³ By “emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down,” the writing of