Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

raises a number of important questions, as Heyman has shown: If addiction is a chronic medical illness involving harm, there is the obvious subjective issue of what exactly harm is. Plus, spontaneous remission also raises questions around the medical model. This model is mostly about the dopamine reward system dysfunction. And, as explained in Heyman’s Addiction—A Disorder of Choice, genes affect voluntary behavior, but addiction’s genetic component does not discount choice. For Heyman, the important question is whether genes or neuroadaptations turn voluntary drug use into involuntary drug use; this is framed as a biological issue, but the biological data have not helped to solve this because the criteria for deciding whether an activity is voluntary are behavioral. Science, through the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI scanners) and other technology, will help to understand addiction further, but so will deepening the understanding of the cultures of addiction.

In chapter 1, Nycole Prowse reveals that all literature is about the individual’s relationship with society, but drug literature more fully illuminates the human experience and reveals the regulation of everyone in society than any other genre. Though the junky has been drugged and dragged to the center of discourse, this is more popularly represented as a male junky, with the junk itself anthropomorphized as female. The female addict is revealed as the contaminant, and Prowse uses Linda from Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, where addiction is state-sponsored, to show how motherhood and the body can be demonized and how the entrenched use of licit drugs brings about passivity and compliance. Some women, such as Emily Hahn, were eager to become addicts as a way into an underworld but also as an escape. In the 1940s, both William Burroughs and Aldous Huxley were seeking a path of nonattachment, but by different means. As Jay Stevens explained in Storming Heaven—LSD and the American Dream, Burroughs used speed, heroin, and marijuana to break free of the conditioning of the so-called bourgeois society. Behaviorist psychology was prevalent, and this turned into a comical addiction to all forms of talking therapy, examined in chapter 9.