Pli 9 (2000), 257-59.
Heroin is So Passé
Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs (London: Faber & Faber, 1999)
JON RUBIN
Once more, Sadie Plant has written a book that only takes an afternoon to
read. This is just as well. For the bulk of the book, the reader is presented
with little more than a list of famous and obscure people who have taken
drugs and been writers, together with their accounts of ‘what it was like’ –
writers who take drugs sometimes think and write about their habit!
Coleridge and de Quincey, unsurprisingly, feature heavily. The extent of
the analysis (which isn’t even hers) of the way drugs and the wider culture
reacted upon one another is exemplified halfway through the book:
The opiates had calmed and numbed the nineteenth century; cocaine
came on line with electricity; speed had let the twentieth century
keep up with its own new speeds. For Marshall McLuhan, it seemed
obvious that hallucinogens were performing some similar cultural
role. (126-7)
If you need to learn that many nineteenth century writers took drugs and
that ambivalence towards their effects (that they give you something to
write about but often take away your desire and ability to actually do the
writing) together with the desire to control the use of drugs is as old as
Modernity, then this will be worth reading. There are much better
quotations – given the people Plant quotes, it could not have been hard to
find them writing or saying interesting things about drugs but this just
highlights that what this book essentially is, is a primer: well written and
structured and if it gets people reading Burroughs, Foucault or Deleuze
and Guattari, then good. Though it is puzzling that Plant whilst referencing
Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts about drugs ignores that they insist
258
Pli 9 (2000)
(following Henry Miller) that the real trick is to get high without drugs, to
get drunk on a glass of water. But people who are already familiar with
these peoples’ work will find little surprising in these pages, and
irritatingly, quotations made within the main body of the text are not
referenced in any form. Indeed, quotations feature so heavily that it is hard
to know what Plant’s own thoughts are.
Two interesting points can be distilled from this book. First, that the
category of ‘drug’ is deeply problematic and has always been unstable.
Writing on Drugs does show how drugs have played an important part in
the development of our understanding of the brain’s neuro-chemistry;
Freud’s papers and experiments with cocaine are the major focus of this
section and later there is yet another account of the CIA’s involvement:
first their experiments with LSD in the Vietnam War and then in the ‘80s
their attempts to control the cocaine trade by ensuring they were the
biggest and best supplier. As a result of a century’s experimentation with
narcotics, we now know they work only because they mimic innate
chemical processes of the human body. So if you can’t afford to buy
heroin, then go jogging (and endorphins can be as addictive as heroin,
though without all the withdrawal symptoms). If drugs are such an evil,
perhaps we should ban jogging…
Secondly, and where Writing on Drugs gets most interesting, is in the
last fifth where the link between drugs and international capital is shown
not to be a twentieth century phenomenon but rather that drugs and capital
are (and always have been) inextricably linked. Opiates were an essential
commodity for the development of capital in nineteenth century Britain and
that the first ‘wars on drugs’ were fought not to limit their trade but in
order to open up the Chinese market to the British run East India company.
Similarly that American attempts to control the trade were caused by a
double movement of taxation of imports and attempts to get countries to
buy goods that America did happen to produce. Morality, as usual, turns
out to be a very late arrival on the scene of America’s attempts to control
the world.
Unfortunately, there is nothing really resembling an intoxicated Marxist
theory attempting to emerge from this book; which is annoying as the four
writers mentioned above could clearly be mined for the resources for such
Jon Rubin
259
a theory, Burroughs, perhaps being used to modify Marx’s famous formula
to: Junk-Capital-Junk?1
Writing on Drugs tells us that:
By the time Coca-Cola celebrated its centenary, the Coca-Cola
Company had become one of America’s top ten corporations,
selling nearly half of all the soft drinks in the world, and spending
some $4 billion every year on marketing and it was advertising that
allowed Coca-Cola to survive without cocaine. Adverts filled the
gap left by the drug, compensating for the loss of an ingredient that
had once allowed the drink to sell itself. Adverts were the hook with
which Coca-Cola became the first addictive commodity to contain
no addictive substance. In effect, the drink became a kind of virtual
cocaine, a simulated kick, a highly artificial paradise. Twentieth
century consumer culture learned much from this sleight of hand.
(69-70)
However, anecdotes, even amusing ones, are no substitute for analysis.
This linking of drugs, adverts and addiction begs for a chapter itself but we
are left hanging, wondering how adverts function: is it correct to say that
the drink alone functions as a ‘virtual cocaine’ or would it be better to say
that the drink-advert assemblage functions addictively? The reader will
have to write that one themselves.
The ever present danger though, of being interesting (and this is an
interesting book, in as much as it holds your interest), is the risk of being
unoriginal. Interesting points have the irritating habit of having been made
by other people and this in the last respect is the major problem with this
book: that all the links, allusions and lists that Writing on Drugs makes
have been made before and in greater depth and detail. Read it when hungover and then mainline some Burroughs.
1
“The cotton [or Junk] originally bought for £100 is for example re-sold at £100+£10,
i.e. £110. The complete form of this process is therefore M-C-M” Capital Volume 1
(251).