Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively sick. So the best people were quite determined not to see Linda. And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday…Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day. “Which will finish her off in a month or two,” the doctor confided to Bernard. “One day the respiratory centre will be paralysed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can’t.²⁸

Linda was a failure as a woman and hence failed civilization. Such representations of female addiction are explored in Campbell’s book: “women who use illicit drugs are widely figured as failures of democracy, femininity, and maternity. They are represented as more socially isolated, degraded, and stigmatised even by drug-addicted male subjects.”²⁹ Furthermore, Campbell explained the paradox of how licit drugs seem to solve the social problems caused by illicit drugs: “illicit drug use signals non-conformity, licit drug use (in terms of Linda’s experience) represents compliance with cultural norms” and hence passivity.³⁰ Campbell’s research on women’s addiction and policy formation highlights that women’s addiction has greater significance than men’s. Women are expected to bind the family together and are blamed when families are fragmented due to structural and cultural factors and hence bring to the fore the demise of “civilization.”³¹ She stated that “drugs are consistently represented as about to burst their bounds, loose the flood gates, spill over, leak into, or erode the edifice of the dominant culture. Women’s thumbs are dramatically caught in the dike.”³² Campbell’s analogy resonates with Julia Kristeva’s emphasis on marginality which views the “repression of the feminine in terms of positionality rather than of essences.”³³ Such positionality—that is, the marginalization of the “drugged” feminine—necessitates and upholds the patriarchal symbolic order which