Food For Thought

A Collection of Heretical Notions and Wretched Adages
compiled by Jack Tourette

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Copied without the kind permission of Random House from How to Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z, 1999, by Ann Marlowe (b.1958).

glamour

All writing about dope, like all taking of dope, harks back to the mythological, the glorious First Time. This is the truth behind the calumny "to write about it is to glamorize it." But to be silent about it is also to glamorize it by making it secret and forbidden. The charge of glamorization comes from those who don't consciously understand why writing about dope makes it seem appealing; it comes from the same impulse that powers all censorship: if your truth isn't ours, shut up.

When I published a cover story on heroin in The Village Voice in 1994, I got lots of nasty letters that all agreed on one thing: because I emerged from years of heroin use without noticeable health, career or financial effects, I wasn't qualified to write about dope. I didn't really have the experience, because the sign of really having the experience is ruining your life. This is a circular argument of course -- "we will only trust accounts of dope use that end in ruin, because dope use always ends in ruin." But who said Americans are rational about drugs?

Writing about heroin will ALWAYS be perceived as "glamorizing" the drug, no matter what you say. No, I don't think taking heroin is a good idea. Period. But given that I did it already, I might as well write about why and what I learned from those years. And one of those things is that doing heroin isn't as scandalous as writing about it, and this is a very interesting wrinkle in the social drama of addiction.

I think of a letter sent to The Village Voice after my cover story; the writer blamed my article's evocation of the attractions of dope for the fact that a former addict friend had started using heroin again. Several other letters also argued that any writing about heroin risked "glamorizing" the drug. But this is only plausible because the general public already has bought into a fetishization of dope according to which it is all-powerful.

Only pornography ("it causes rape!") and writing about drugs are supposed to have this ability to function as immediate incitations to action. If I wrote an article about how wonderful a time I had surfing, I doubt readers would blame me for any injuries they received trying to duplicate my experience. But accounts of heroin use (and sex), like the real thing, are supposed to be irresistible, powerful drugs in their own right. Read it, and you're lost, or changed.

People who say that pornography is an incitement to rape forget that rape is a crime of violence, not lust. Pornography may be an incitement to masturbation, but it's no more an incitement to rape than a Cartier ad is an incitement to jewel theft. And addiction isn't a hunger for a high, it's a disease, a system of thought and a way of being. Reading about dope doesn't create addicts; a combination, probably, of biochemistry and life experience creates addicts. Many people try heroin once or twice and simply decide it's not for them (as I did with cocaine). And many, if not most, people could read a thousand pages about the supposed glories of dope and never want to try it.

We distrust writing about heroin (and sex) almost more than heroin (or sex) itself. The structure of addiction is maintained by this taboo about writing about it. The more heroin is hyped as ultimately powerful and irresistible -- to the point that merely reading about heroin is thought to cause heroin use -- the more people are going to addict themselves to it. The biggest, darkest secret about heroin is that it isn't that wonderful: it's a substance some of us agree to pursue as though it were wonderful, because it's easier to do that than to figure out what is worth pursuing. Heroin is a stand-in, a stopgap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.

© 1999 by MonkeyPants Press, an imprint of Bonobo Books, a division of Consolidated Trout, Ltd.
Last update: 03-July-2015
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