Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

comprehensive analysis of drug literature can occur, providing a more complete view of the addicted subject and, hence, a more illuminated understanding of the alienation of the individual and society.

Agency in Crisis

At the foundation of drug literature, like other genres, is the relationship between the individual and society. However, it is the addicted nature of the individual in drug literature that makes an analysis of this relationship and the genre itself unique. Drug literature serves to demarcate and magnify the condition of the alienated individual through its depiction of the extremities of drug addiction. Edward Ahearn alluded to this in the article “The Sordid Sublime: Burroughs’s Naked Lunch”: “drugs and the transformation of experience they provoke…serve in Naked Lunch to generate a salacious and visionary, sometimes hilarious, universally frightening depiction of reality in America and the world.”⁶ The depiction of addicted individuals and the world in which they live can be seen to be an extremity of the relationship of the nonaddicted individual and society. It is in this sense that drug literature in general, more so than other genres of literature, more keenly illuminates the human experience.

The general intrigue of drug literature is partly based on the exploration of characters who live through or with addiction within a society that demonizes such addiction. The addicted characters are portrayed sympathetically as antiheroes whose addiction can be understood as both producing a sense of agency and at the same time used to justify a denial of their agency. That is, the concept of addiction in drug literature places the individual further underground and more removed from the controls that are set in place to limit individual agency. Yet, controlling agents within society use addiction to justify an even more oppressive response to the addicted individual. Drug addiction is seen as a scourge that must be controlled, contained, or destroyed, and so the addicted individual must be detained, cured, and made compliant. In this sense, addiction, as presented