the Politics of Addiction: ‘harm reduction’ as anarchist practice

Winter 2007

Contact: christopher@anarchistu.org

Course Description:

What is this thing we call ‘addiction’? Is addiction the result of moral deficiency, criminal deviance, medical pathology, or, is it primarily dictated by socio-economic factors? To what extent is the notion of the ‘addictive personality’ based in biology versus socio-economic exclusion and marginalization? How has the ‘nature’ of addiction changed with recent shifts in the social and economic structure of society? Is it possible to think of crack as an expression of contemporary hyper-capitalism?

This informal workshop course aims to engage in a critical re-thinking of the notion of ‘addiction’ through an examination of literature, philosophy and academic writing pertaining to drugs, addiction and the figure of the addict. Intended for users, former users, front line public health and harm reduction workers, as well as other individuals interested in critically exploring alternative, anarchist-oriented analyses of the notion of ‘addiction’, this course will seek to actively challenge and critique the popular perception of drug users (as dangerous, diseased, deviant, disorderly) as well as the dominant paradigms that have been used to study and understand addiction.

1. Introduction: Harm Reduction as Anarchist Practice

What is our society’s current conception of addiction and the world of drugs, in the form of policy, law, social relations and popular culture? What forms of power, discipline and control are implicated in the question of drugs and addiction, for individuals, communities and beyond? What alternative forms of resistance, critique and change are possible and/or already in existence? How can harm reduction be seen as a form of anarchist practice by questioning power relationships, hierarchy, ‘authority’ and systemic social suffering?

2. The origins of ‘addiction’

What is this thing we call ‘addiction’? What are the various ways that addiction has traditionally been seen, studied and understood?

• Alexander, Anna and Mark S. Roberts Eds. High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003.

• Brodie, Janet Farrell and Marc Redfield. Eds. High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

• Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”. October v.62 (Fall 1992): 3-41.

3. Drugs and/as ‘Disease’: tearing down the pathology paradigm

What is the relationship between addiction and modernity? What are the prevailing paradigms used to see, understand and research addiction (moral, criminal, pathological)? How and to what extent can we begin to think of this thing we call addiction as a result of complex social and economic factors existing in free market capitalist societies?

• Bruce K. Alexander. “The Globalization of Addiction”, Addiction Research (Vol. 8, No. 6, 2000), 502

• Robert Granfield, “Addiction and Modernity : A Comment on a Global Theory of Addiction”

4. ‘Junk’ and ‘Jonesing’: interrogating popular discourse re. addiction

How can we think of the ‘war on drugs’ as a ‘war of words’? How do the various ways that we as a society talk about addiction both reflect/reveal the popular paradigms for understanding this phenomenon and serve to perpetuate negative constructions of the figure of the addict? What does both media and street-level discourse re. drugs tell us about the relationship between capitalism and addiction?

• Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs” IN High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity, Anna Alexander and Mark S. Robert Eds. (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 25

5. the Politics of Drug Policy: Canadian, US & European perspectives

• Substance Use in Toronto: Issues, Impacts, Interventions (an environmental scan prepared for the Toronto Drug Strategy Initiative). March, 2005.

• The Toronto Drug Strategy: A comprehensive approach to alcohol and other drugs in the City of Toronto. October, 2005.

• Craig, Colin. “What did you do in the Drug War, Daddy?”. Changing anarchism: Anarchist theory and practice in a global age. Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004 (129-145).

6. the (bio-)politics of addiction: methadone and the biopolitics of drug policy

• Bourgeois, Philippe. “Disciplining Addictions: The Bio-Politics of Methadone and Heroin in the United States”. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. 24: 165-195 (2000).

7. Addiction and urban space: comparing the landscape of addiction in Toronto and Vancouver

• Reid Shier Ed. Every Building on 100 West Hastings. Reid Shier Ed. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002.

• Woolford, Andrew. “Tainted Space: Representations of Injection Drug-Use and HIV/AIDS in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side”. BC Studies. 129, Spring 2001 (27-50).

• Malins, Peta. “Body-Space Assemblages and Folds: Theorizing the Relationship between Injection Drug User Bodies and Urban Space”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 18.4 (2004): 483-495.

• Purdy, Sean. “Framing Regent Park: the National Film Board of Canada and the construction of ‘outcast spaces’ in the inner city, 1953 and 1994”. Media, Culture and Society 27.4 (2005):523-549.

• CanadaWild Productions. Fix: the Story of an Addicted City. Nettie Wild, Director (2004?)

• Return to Regent Park, NFB

• Farewell to Oak Street, NFB

• East Side Showdown, NFB

8. Crack and (hyper)Capitalist commodity fetishism: towards a radical political-economy of addiction

• Avital Ronell, Crack Wars : Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincon : University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 25

• Bourgeois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

• Will Self, “The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz”, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (New York: Grove Pres, 1998), 21

9. user advocacy and activism (presentations)

10. presentations?

11. Conclusion: the politics of addiction