Radical Sobriety Montreal's response to the article 'The Revolution Will Not Be Sober'

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 04/09/2016 - 00:37

Shared from http://news.infoshop.org/opinion/radical-sobriety-montreals-response

From Radical Sobriety Montreal

Radical Sobriety Montreal welcomes the discussion initiated by Alexander McClelland and Zoe Dodd's article “The revolution will not be sober: the problem with notions of 'radical sobriety' & 'intoxication culture'”. However, we feel an obligation to clear up a number of misconceptions. While we cannot speak for all groups using the term 'radical sobriety', since the term does not refer to a unified discourse, we are able to speak for our group and the positions it holds. Please note that below, unless otherwise specified, we use the terms 'addict' and 'drug user' to also include alcoholics and people who drink. So, in no particular order:


The article states that radical sobriety plays into the criminalization of drug use. Radical Sobriety Montreal supports the total decriminalization of drug use. We feel that prohibition is, first, a primary vector of oppression for millions of people, and second, a counter-productive policy which fuels violence, does nothing to help active (or abstinent) drug users, and leads to the perpetuation of many of the conditions that lead to dangerous forms of drug use in the first place. We completely oppose prohibition, criminalization, and the savage violence of the 'war on drugs'. And we fucking hate cops.


The article states that radical sobriety uses moralizing tactics to set up a dichotomy between “good” abstinent drug users and “bad” active drug users. Perhaps this is based on a misconception about our name: we don't think we're more radical than you because we're sober, we think our sobriety is more radical than AA's and Minor Threat's. Radical Sobriety Montreal completely rejects moral value judgements based on one's status as an active or abstinent drug user. We do not promote abstinence as the only way to engage with harmful drug use patterns. We have criticisms of some forms of harm reduction but generally speaking fully support harm reduction initiatives, particularly if they are conceived of or operated by drug users or ex-drug users themselves.
Members of Radical Sobriety Montreal volunteer with harm reduction initiatives in this city. And we fucking hate people who hate drug users.


The article states that radical sobriety is opposed to all drug use, including therapeutic, traditional, medicinal, and/or various indigenous practices involving drugs, and that it considers experiences stemming from these practices to be “hollow” and “inauthentic”. Radical Sobriety Montreal is not categorically opposed to drug use, especially not in traditional or medicinal contexts, nor do we deny the very positive and authentic effects that drug use can have for people. (Believe us, we know how awesome getting high can be.) We simply acknowledge that there is very little, to put it mildly, that is traditional or therapeutic about overdoses and delerium tremens in your early twenties. We are organized on the basis that the casual, therapeutic, or recreational self-administration of mind-altering drugs is no longer a viable option for our members; this should not be understood to mean that we condemn all such use categorically and in perpetuity. Incidentally, the article also calls 12-step programs prohibitionist. Though we are not a 12-step program, in the interest of accuracy we would like to point out that this is not in fact true.


The article states that radical sobriety subscribes to the pathologizing medical approach to drug use, particularly through the use of the term 'addict', and by extension implicitly supports and condones violent state intervention which mobilizes such terminology. While we are neither doctors nor addiction scholars, we at Radical Sobriety Montreal consider ourselves experts when it comes to being addicted. We consider addiction to be an objectively real phenomenon both socially and physiologically; we believe that it is, medically speaking, a pathology; and we consider it to have many of the properties of a mental disorder or disability. However, we are immensely critical of coercive interventionist approaches, both because they are obviously repressive and ineffective and because, as drug users, we have experienced their extremely negative effects ourselves. We believe that our use of terminology like 'addiction' cannot be equated with the state's coercive intervention. We believe that we should not be held responsible for the grotesque misuse of this terminology by the state, anymore than a person self-identifying as 'homeless' rather than 'unhoused' should be held responsible for the state's violent repression of street people.


The article states that communities of queers, punks and so forth have used drugs for all kinds of reasons, some of them very positive, and that radical sobriety misses this point. Radical Sobriety Montreal would like to point out that we are in fact members of those communities and understand this point very, very intimately.


The article states that the emergence of radical sobriety should be cause for “concern”, particularly because radical sobriety apparently fails to engage with the “need to build our own ways”, create “circles of care and new forms of harm reduction support”, and “create space for people to come together to foster new forms of healing and social connection”. Radical Sobriety Montreal would like to point out that that is exactly and precisely what we aim to do. The article mentions the extremely individualized approach of 12-Step programs and the extremely medicalized approach of some rehabs; Radical Sobriety Montreal aims to provide an alternative based on interdependence, autonomy and radical social analysis. It is a circle of care. It supports people in their attempts to reduce harm to themselves. It created a space for people to come together to foster new forms of healing and social connection. We exist to support drug users who cannot use anymore and aren't willing to put all their faith in the medical system or a higher power. In short, we are exactly what the article is attacking us for failing to be.


The article states that blog posts made by random libertarians are typical of radical sobriety. Radical Sobriety Montreal is not affiliated with those libertarians, does not agree with them, and never heard of them before seeing this article. Those libertarians apparently think that “morality is central to sobriety”. Radical Sobriety Montreal dismisses that stance as harmful, hurtful, self-righteous nonsense. They apparently also think that sobriety is 'natural' and 'natural' is good; we think they don't understand history or anthropology and have a shaky grasp on ethics. They apparently think that authentic relationships can only be had while sober; our own experiences completely disprove such a simplistic notion. These people sound like straight-edge bros who swallowed an Ayn Rand book, and it is a mistake to assume that they accurately represent groups like ours.


The article states that radical sobriety is obsessed with the word 'addict' as a “static political identity”. Though we'd appreciate clarification on what they mean by this, we're pretty sure we don't do that. We're aware that identities can change over time, we're wary of relying too much on identity politics as form of activism, and we affirm the right of people to autonomously understand, negotiate, and present their own identities. Members of Radical Sobriety Montreal are not forced to adopt 'addict' as an identity.


The article states that radical sobriety, in its use of accessibility discourse, attempts to assign privilege to active drug users, and that this is basically a cynical ploy to claim more oppression points than the next white genderqueer punk kid. Radical Sobriety Montreal does not consider sobriety to be a source of oppression, because come on, no one is oppressed for being sober. Rather, we use intoxication culture theory to understand how oppression and privilege play out with regard to drug use. People who align most closely with the norm can be said to exercise privilege; in other words, people whose drug of choice is legally purchased alcohol, which they consume in safe quantities in socially sanctioned settings. Alcoholics living on shitty beer they drink alone at home exercise less privilege; if it's shitty vodka and it's on the street, even less. People injecting street drugs in public are heavily oppressed. Addicts who are abstinent are not oppressed for their abstinence; instead, they live under a form of deferred oppression. It's like being on parole. The reason why we need people to consider our needs as abstinent drug users is that if we are not abstinent we are criminalized, marginalized, oppressed drug users with patterns of use that are very dangerous for our health. The article implies that creating safe spaces for sober people is to marginalize drug users. Radical Sobriety Montreal believes that this is like saying that making sure your buddy with heavy parole conditions doesn't have to break any laws to hang out with you is to marginalize prisoners. We just want people to be considerate of our needs when possible.


The article implies that radical sobriety has not considered the implications of safer spaces for sober people. Radical Sobriety Montreal discusses this topic regularly. We are aware that making all spaces safer for us would not make the world an inherently safer place. We support drug users' access to safer spaces as well, in which they can openly use drugs without being stigmatized or criminalized. We do not equate accessibility for sober people with accessibility for disabled people because there is no equivalent of the active addict in the context of disability activism. We support initiatives that attempt to make the world safer both for active and abstinent drug addicts. We would however like to point out that in the scenes we're in, the open use of drugs and alcohol is both very commonplace and regularly promoted; we do not feel that people who casually drink and get high have any particular lack of safer spaces in the context of these communities.


The article states that radical sobriety is basically the same as other models which practice “recovery as oppression” because they understand recovery to mean learning how to fit into society. Radical Sobriety Montreal wonders if the authors of the article missed the part where we think our sobriety is “radical”. We're not interested in teaching members how to be productive consumers. Approaches like that are exactly what we exist as an alternative to.


In conclusion, we think that critical analysis is important, including towards groups like ours. We are not immune to criticism nor are we perfect. However, there can be harmful effects when this analysis is performed while employing broad generalizations and cherry-picking one's primary sources. The article makes a number of very problematic assumptions about our group, particularly about our views on, and involvement in, harm reduction; detox methods; drug users' resources; and service accessibility, as well as about our political positions on criminalization and intervention. The article treats a number of unconnected actors as interchangeable, and assumes that we have not thought about or critically engaged with the points the authors borrow from drug users' advocacy groups. We believe that this is intellectually irresponsible, potentially needlessly divisive, and, frankly, more than a little insulting.


The article makes a gesture toward civility with an admission that “some” people involved in radical sobriety have more nuanced views, and notes that the discussion can be an intensely emotional and personal one for people involved. These gestures are noted and appreciated. It is true that this is an emotional issue for us. To drive the point home, we have this to say: the main thing the authors miss is that we all sought sobriety in desperate need, literally in order to save our lives. Most of us used substances to the brink of death and for our survival we need to abstain. We are people in recovery from substance abuse, not adherents of straight-edge, or church members in disguise. The point of Radical Sobriety Montreal is to provide a support group where we can discuss our experiences as drug users, alcoholics and addicts, and as people who have radical, revolutionary or alternative political worldviews and ideologies. We wanted to make a space where people who didn't feel comfortable in AA, NA or a rehab could feel comfortable. The point of Radical Sobriety Montreal isn't to accumulate oppression points and talk shit about drug users. We ask that people please bear this in mind in the future when critically engaging with radical sobriety discourses.

In solidarity,
Radical Sobriety Montreal

An Indigenous Anarchist Against Intoxication Culture by Sarambi

An Indigenous Anarchist Against Intoxication Culture

by Sarambi

  The process of refusing intoxication is one that is long and arduous as a queer indigenous POC. The intense interlinking and bound together issues of being indigenous to land known as South America, a land being ravaged by major crop production of moncrops, but also of tobacco, coca, marijuana, and other chemicals being taken at a large rate out of context and out of balance like how people from off that land treat ayahuasca and other plants. As a queer individual now in the gilded, imperial terminal capitalist monstrosity known as the US, I see for what reasons our lands are being destroyed: it's for temporary pleasure, to numb from our suffering, because we have been told that how we exert liberation, freedom, and our sexuality and gender fuckery is at the bottom of a glass or end of a rail. I have also had to bear witness to the history of alcoholism en mi campesinx, mixed indigenous but not mestizx, familia.  I have watched too many people end up in the clutches of the state for abusing or pushing drugs only because they had nothing else to gain or lose in their eyes so they listened to what was given to us. I speak to folx about why them spending what energy, resources, and capital on substances is not liberation, it is continuing genocide, ecocide, extinction, capitalism, colonial imperialism, and is keeping them from moving beyond themselves to actually get free.


    This is a message for my indigenous relations and others: stop listening to the colonizer, stop trying to please our oppressors in every form they take. They feed off of our dead lives. We have resisted for 523 years, and often that has included abstaining from the intoxicants they push on us so we are easy and don't feel our destruction. We tell them to keep alcohol away from us, and though people die from saying no, we go on. We push governments, no matter how "leftist" or down they seem they are all gaming on maintenance of keeping nations/labor/trade for capital/systems that benefit them and must not be trusted, and narcos from lands, and even with armies against us we persist in the name of not having the substances destroy our land and people further. They have already written and foretold their demise. 

            
    To everyone else who is not yet on the same page: this is for you. You who seek to end the world and dance in the quick wild waters ready to erode the mutated fallowed earth. Why does your liberation cost the planet, other species and other humans far from you and your spectacle? Why are you seeking out making the spectacle yours instead of shedding it to embrace a real existence as an individual and collective instead of a walking dead existence? How do you justify your revolutionary revelry, subversions, or social revolt when you are still not embracing the agony and suffering of your own life let alone what your choices to consume do away from you? If you're not about capitalism, why are you acting as a consumer? If you are about decolonization, why are you promoting colonial land grabs, genocide against indigenous bodies, and destroying our connection to the environment we have always learned from? What is your cognitive dissonance with seeing suffering, extinction, and factual affects on things that you do see like the war on drugs and the incarceratory state, the military and medical industrial complexes, white supremacy, colonization of the land we are on in the US, etc.?


    This is real talk. This is the problem. There is no conscience consumerism, as we all know hopefully, because of the mechanisms that make capitalism flourish. You cannot promote use of substances without participating in the justification of capitalism, you cannot produce many ofthe recreational substances used in North America, Europe, and amongst those with the capital ability to use without the exploitation and genocide of an ecosystem. We as humans in this age have seen it in both the proxy colonial wars through the Fertile Crescent and colonially termed Latinoamérica within the last 30 years. Within the warfare against US defined "terrorism"and hunting for oil in Iraq, what gets left out is the US's want of the opium poppy fields in Afghanistan when they entered. It also happened to coincide with the increase of opiate painkiller prescriptions doled out to Americans by primarily pharmaceutical company backed doctors and the continued rise in popularity of opiates as a recreational drug. This market still exists, as does the continued occupation, where people of the land are growing and being "raided" by the US but the opium gets oveseas. Similar drug pushing and coerced production for the US was seen anecdotally in the Golden Triangle as the US was fighting in Vietnam, and committing secret operations in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Drugs benefit the US as an empire, sorry.


    But if it wasn't clear enough, look just south of the US colonial line from Mexico to Argentina - the US controlled and backed War on Drugs is not only meant to create the conditions to justify genocide in the US against Black and Brown, Indigenous and arrivant bodies, it is also a strategy to continue the legacy of the Dirty Wars, juntas, and white supremacist/Casta driven, colonially based neofascism that not even Leftists in charge and adored by American and European socialists can be found not falling under. Many people are no longer able to access their generational homelands due to violence related to the purest capitalistic motives of those who have "moved  up", forced to take work as runners, pushers, guards, etc since there is nothing else because the land is poisoned or monocropped, the water is poisoned from mining residue and pollutants or is stolen to produce alcohol or soda or to be bottled as is for resale, and all other avenues are limited due to racially backed classism and anti-indigenous sentiment, strict morality, gender and sexuality guidelines brought out by colonizers and neo-colonizing missionaries from the US (I see you Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Evangelicals), and purposefully underdeveloped status in the world. When we are given nothing, we turn to what we are granted, it seems.


   But we do fight back, Xyha people kick marijuana growers off their land before the paramilitary can come into their territory. The Emberá of Panamá, the P'urépecha of México, the Bribri of Costa Rica, the Nahua of Colombia all have fought back and have even kicked out other foreigners or outsiders as they are aware how they could be blindsided by cartel movement if they are interfered with. Autodefensas and Zapatista communities throughout Mexico not only abstain from intoxication but also fight off cartels and the paramilitary government forces who are hand-in-hand with the cartels and the US. This type of armed resistance and pushback has history in the Americas to even earlier colonial periods and to this day, even in North America, autonomous and/or sovereign indigenous lands fight and die over preventing more damage and death done by intoxication. Though this has not always been and does not need to be the case either in indigenous lands producing or in occupied lands where it is consumed.


    We can choose, and some of us do, to negate the existence of these intoxicants for political and decolonial reasons. By refusing to play into not only what pacifies but what comes up and promotes systems that are inherently based in imperialism and capitalism as well as used to bolster kyriarchy all around, one feels all the agony they should: for themselves to do what they chose or must for existence without being lulled into any false pleasure of this civilization, for other beings and the planet being destroyed near and far from them, and for the future as this continues. When you actually feel every painful aspect of living, you are more apt to resist at your fullest because you are able to sense how unyielding and sickening parasitic everything is. If you can feel that, and feel it always at the level as it is, then you have a stronger will built up to fight back as nothing is cushioning the blows any longer. Nothing is keeping your head above water, until you take the boat that civilization has given to some and smash it to bits, and float on a board. Nothing is numbing you, making you forget, making you feel pleasure when you, those around you, and other on the periphery are dying or are already dead as you are walking dead. In a framework that is against all oppression, against all control, against all passiveness, it continues that one should negate the interests of civilization and gilded pleasure at the cost of everything you think you fight for. You cannot destroy your masters without going all the way.

A Short Anarchist Essay on the Domesticating and Colonizing Effects of Addiction and Intoxication Culture

"There is no more profound way of understanding the course of history than in terms of this effort to escape from one's own 'sweating self' and to experience even temporary states of euphoria or relief of discomfort regardless of the cost."
- Nathan S. Kline


From its earliest inceptions, sedentary life brought with it a drudging misery for its inhabitants, and with such misery quickly arose the need to placate the unruly and desensitize the weary. As social beings, the disassociated conventions of civilized life have never come naturally, and these impositions into and upon our lives have induced massive, collective trauma. The infrastructure of civilization surrounds, envelops, and teaches us to embody its qualities. It's modern totality is the magnum opus of the domestication set out upon less than a dozen millennia ago, and we are it’s equally insane offspring, each generation's pathology more dysfunctional than the last. What began over ten thousand years ago when we began domesticating plants and animals to meet food demands, and from there led to the deforestation of the lands of Mesopotamia and beyond in order to meet the needs of agriculture, what meant the forcing of other peoples off the land wanted, has continued into the present today. We bind ourselves to its unreasonable and unsustainable demands, suffering a commitment to a lifestyle that demands constant production and expansion through ever-increasing and deepening levels of exploitation and an unwavering devotion to this culture as not only beneficial and enlightening, but the only way in which our species can survive. As demands increase and complicate, so do our techniques and our technologies. Exploitation is no longer enough, for we are no longer just consuming. We need hyper-exploitation for hyper-consumption. Our concept of Progress only serves to reinforce the process of converting the living to the dead.


Our every relationship is framed by through coercion. In the absence of wildness, our desire for direct experience is left unfulfilled. In its place, the hollowness of modernity: a psychically and ecologically barren monoculture of hyper-consumption makes a pathetic attempt, if any, to replace the engagement our species demands. Lacking the balance of a sustainable and natural experience, civilization deals with extremes, such as the bounce between over and under-stimulation, neither one satisfying or healthy for us in any way. In place of the forager's quest, we stand slack-jawed in the aisles of supermarkets (how many times have you heard someone say in those aisles, “there's just too much to choose from, I wish this were easier?”), a place where even the "original" hits of pop radio are replaced with tamed, detail-less muzak®, as is the warmth and light of the sun with the eerie glow of fluorescents. The conversation around the campfire is relegated to rare and novelty occurrences, if ever, as we take to replacing emotion with "emoticons," and even the voices of our friends and families over telephone lines are becoming more and more often replaced with the beeping and buzzing of text message notifications. It was once written that "our generation will go to its grave shouting its last words into a cell phone,"3 but this dying world may not hear our screams. It has become frighteningly more realistic that we will go to our deaths silently, pressing keys and holding the "send" button.


We are truly surrounded/alone. Our social networking profiles boas legions of online friends, but the reality is we are isolated as we click our way through pseudo-relationships - it's not just quantity over quality, it is, like all of domestication, the abolition of quality itself. We surround ourselves with techno-comforts whilst prisoners within our increasingly standardized and dehumanized, our experiences overwhelmingly clustered yet simultaneously crushingly separated by walls physical and emotional. Fredy Perlman passed away before the permeation of the internet, cell phones, and so much of what shapes the technological ghost limb of many in this culture today, but the writing had been on the wall long before these "advances," and his words ring truer today than ever before when he wrote that "civilization is a humanly meaningless web of unnatural constraints."4 It is in our ever widening disconnect from reality and its pervasiveness of boredom and teeter-totter of over and under-stimulation that the misery of this culture expands into every facet of our existence.


Whether bombarded or deprived, the terror has started to blend into a painful dullness, and we search desperately for comfort, for euphoria, for anything that tells us we are actually alive. At every turn, our quest for connection finds itself funneled into ever-isolating and unfulfilling activities - escapes that replace outlets for the type of ecstatic energy life should create, diverting our desires and replacing them with false engagement, framing our relationship to such experiences originally through the habitual use of intoxicants and now through nearly every mediated aspect of civilization.


This undercurrent developed with the rise of domestication, deepening and strengthening with the onset of the enveloping hopelessness of the first cities. As David T. Courtwright so keenly observed in Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World:

“After the Neolithic Revolution, most humans lived as peasants in crowded, oppressive, and disease-ridden societies. The misery and grinding poverty that were the lot of 90 percent of humanity in the early modern would go far toward explaining why tobacco and other novel drugs became objects of mass consumption. They were unexpected weapons against the human condition, newfound tools of escape from the mean prison of everyday existence."

The once-free were no longer so. Trapped inside, the now-broken were under a constant barrage of fear – the fierce coercion of the Big Man, the uncertainty of early agricultural food production, even the water that was once trusted to sustain was poisoned, diseased. It was no mere accident that the use of intoxicants grew rapidly into regular inoculations. In fact, inoculation is often what one intoxicant provided, as Bert L. Vallee discussed in Alcohol in the Western World: A History, his June 1998 Scientific American article:

“In the context of contaminated water supply, ethyl alcohol may indeed have been mother’s milk to a nascent Western civilization. Beer and wine were free of pathogens. And the antiseptic power of alcohol, as well as the natural acidity of wine and beer, killed many pathogens when the alcoholic drinks were diluted with the sullied water supply.”


As civilization expanded and complicated, so too did its connection to intoxicants and our dependency upon them. The coming of the industrial age only served to increase demands of precision and timeliness that weighed down those laborers chained (sometimes literally) to the engines of production. Concerning the constantly rising levels of alcoholism amongst workers in the early 19th century, Zerzan notes that this addiction “[wa]s an obvious register of strain and alienation, of the inability to cope with the burden of daily life.”6 Be it social control or survival, the relationship was there. Domestication and intoxication became inseparable, one augmenting the other - a vicious cycle that so suitably illustrates the functions of both.


“Alcohol has been around since the beginning of civilization. In fact, people loved alcohol so much that they forgot their nomadic ways and decided to settle down, just so they could grow the grains necessary to make beer. Just think: if it weren’t for alcohol, we’d still be wandering around pitching tents every night.”


- Drinkfocus.com, a website whose “aim is to empower consumers through providing information that may help in the development of informed decisions.”


Intoxication Culture is defined as a “set of institutions, behaviors, and mindsets around consumption of drugs and alcohol” by the author of Towards a Less Fucked Up World: Sobriety and Anarchist Struggle.7 To be clear, Intoxication Culture is not the same as intoxication itself. As mentioned earlier, many prehistoric (or is it pre-hysteric?) foraging people have, and their modern descendants continue to carry, knowledge of intoxicating plants and substances. The difference between an individual experience and our habitude is just that: what for the primal person is an individualized, conditional moment is for the civilized a compulsion. I have chosen to use the term Addiction Culture to expand and extend this concept to include other psychoactive substances, the pharmaceuticals that are pushed by mental and other conventional health industries, the aforementioned dependence upon technological mediation, and in fact the whole of domesticated existence.


In My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery From Western Civilization, Chellis Glendinning writes, “As an outgrowth of trauma, addiction is an attempt to confront the pain that lies at the heart of the traumatic experience.” Elsewhere, she cites Morris Berman when he delved even deeper into the core of the matter:

"Addiction, in one form or another, characterizes every aspect of industrial society… Dependence on alcohol (food, drugs, tobacco…) is not formally different from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world influence, wealth, the need to build more ingenious bombs, or the need to exercise control over everything."

Glendinning was one of the first to recognize not only the trauma of civilization and its relationship to literal addiction, but the similarities between how addictive behavior and civilization are rationalized. She identified the major characteristics of addiction as “an out-of-control, often aimless, compulsion to fill the lost sense of belonging, integrity, and communion” which is “shielded from awareness by denial: pretending everything is normal, not admitting pain or vulnerability,” followed by “an attraction to repeated trauma.” Let us explore theses concepts now.


An out-of control, often aimless, compulsion:
The entire natural world shudders beneath the load that our culture has created. Our entire lifeway - from our food acquisition to our social structures - has asked more from the natural world than it has ever been able to provide. At every rejection of our demands, we have thus forced our will upon the planet. We have desertified once-beautiful wild lands for our food staples: wheat, rice, soy, corn, and so on. We have thrust our drills deep within the earth to extract its black blood, and we have nearly bled her dry so that our daily activities continue. We have dredged the oceans, nearly wiping out all large sea mammals. We have blown the tops off mountains. We kill billions upon billions of land animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. We've dammed (or is it damned? the answer is most likely both) the mightiest rivers for even more power. More food, more power… we constantly extract at insanely exploitative levels so that our culture, one of what we perceive as convenience, might survive. In turn, we have spread famine, poverty, disease, and every facet of destruction thinkable – and some unthinkable. We've even created weapons that in moments can undo billions of years of planetary development, leaving a scorched wasteland as our only legacy: a vicious cycle of rapacious consumption and incomprehensible desecration.

Denial:
“We cannot go back.”
“It was here way before us.”
“We can’t take something this big down.”
“It’s too late. There is nothing we can do about it now.”
“We can change the bad things about this and keep the good things.”
“Were would we even begin if we did want to stop?”
“We’ll find a new way to make things work without it falling apart”
“You are being pessimistic.”
“You are the one who lives in a fantasy world.”
“It’s not my problem. It’s not OUR problem.”
“I don’t even want to think about this.”
… Is there any doubt about the depths of our refusal to accept the reality of our situation?

Attraction to repeated trauma:
Easter Island. Mesopotamia. Maya. Rome. Anasazi.
Waterloo Creek. Wounded Knee. The Great Purge. The Holocaust. My Lai. Darfur.
American Bison. Northern Spotted Owl. Bali Tiger. Mexican Grizzly Bear. Passenger Pigeon.
Time after time. Failure after failure. Over and over again. Forever and ever into oblivion.


Civilization is the culture of unrelenting trauma, its inhabitants helpless addicts seeking refuge from excruciating distress.


Not that our search for reprieve, however artificial, is condemnable, as the temperance and prohibition ideologies would have us believe (their intoxication being moral absolutism). Rather, such a search is only expected of a creature deprived and cut off. Erich Fromm wrote in Escape From Freedom that, “to feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.”13 All animals need engagement and without it the need for tranquilization quickly follow in hopes of survival. Courtwright again points to the confinement of domesticated life when he writes, “species seek and consume intoxicants in the wild, but they do so more often and more compulsively under conditions of captivity.” One can reflect upon the terrifying experiences of those confined in cages, from vivisection labs to psych wards to schools to Super Max prisons. Many of the more literal hostages of this culture die, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally, before their captors can administer all the appropriate tests/diagnosis/degrees/sentences - often from their implacable misery. Put simply, life is impossible without stimuli. Biologically, humans (and again, many other beings) just don't survive under such denied circumstances – in other words, even within its own scientific reasoning, we are at odds with civilization.


Our participation within this culture is driving us absolutely insane. We see the pathology playing out all around us – the news stories of people “snapping” have gone from freakish occurrences to freakishly often occurrences. Rates of autism and schizophrenia, among other mental illnesses, rise at what should be alarming rates – people turning within themselves, people tearing themselves into pieces, people unable to cope with the barrage of daily life. Perhaps these persons aren’t so much ill as more rooted in reality than the rest of us; perhaps it is the rest of us who have somehow managed to disassociate ourselves. Perhaps the real sickness is not automatically reacting with confusion or panic or dejectedness when faced with civilization.


Addiction Culture provides the context necessary for placation and pacification, to further disempower us, to more easily break us. Under its enchantment, we perpetuate a cycle of docility and destruction. That is why it is called addiction.
And that is why we must resist Addiction Culture’s promises of a lull in the torrent of civilized misery. Some may argue, as Courtwright has, that “the use of drugs to cope with fatigue and obliterate misery is in many ways a byproduct of civilization itself,” but it increasingly seems more feasible that Addiction Culture is not an unintended consequence, but rather an integral and vital part of the domesticating process. Without civilization addiction culture would not exist, but just as importantly without addiction culture, civilization could not exist. Relief from domestication through civilization has always been the mythology handed to those who would otherwise resist. The fix, whatever it may be, has always been just around the corner, requiring just another act of subservience from us.


Just as the environmental movement will never save any ecosystem, just as the worker’s movement will never abolish work, a culture of false and/or detached pleasure will never bring about a participatory experience. There never was and never will be balm in Gilead, to borrow from the western mythical tradition. Sadly, the stranglehold of addiction was in place long before our struggle to undo it, and it is to no surprise that anarchist communities suffer as much as any other from the pitfalls of Addiction Culture, amongst the many other undesirable aspects of civilization. What is surprising, however, has been the absence (and in some cases removal) of dialogue around the subject, particularly within the context of resistance to civilization and the unlearning of domestication. As Glendinning showed, denial is a central part of the addict pathology. Until we acknowledge the major deficiency of praxis our resistance suffers from by perpetuating Addiction Culture, our opposition will continue to falter, stumbling drunkenly towards abject failure, towards the realization of domestication and civilization: extinction.


As with so many of the problems facing those hoping to overcome and outlive civilization, this undertaking will not be easy, and I make no claim to have all or even any answers to this problem. I can only say that the damage wrought by this culture is deep and manifests itself widely, and the rewilding of our planet and our selves must go as deep as civilization’s despoliation. Our hopes for a life engaged and enmeshed within actual experiences lay within an attack on the totality of civilization and nothing less. The only way we will achieve total liberation from this culture is by tearing out every last vestige of the malicious roots of domestication from within our communities and ourselves. Anarchists purport to be fighting against the world that creates such wretchedness while seeking, building, and sustaining communities free of the stifling woe that is necessary for civilization to continue and that Addiction Culture numbs us to. To end oppression of all kinds, we must confront it by any means necessary and must also be willing to look critically at, speak openly about, and fight vigorously against such an omnipresent component of oppression, simultaneously seeking to heal, working to support on another in our recovery.


An anarchist world is a world of liberatory reality, of daily engagement and constant stimulation, with rewarding experiences and real relations – a world without domestication or civilization, without this web of boredom, depression, docility and misery.

This essay was shared from http://green-anarchy.wikidot.com/intoxication-culture

Intoxicating Spaces: Colonialism, Nationalism and Consumption. Presentation of, “Interrogating the Intersections of Colonization, Class, Race and Addiction.

Presentation of, “Interrogating the Intersections of Colonization, Class, Race and Addiction,” by Amelia Saunders as part of the talk, Sobriety As Accessibility: Interrogating Intoxication Culture, at the Reclaiming Our Bodies and Our Minds conference on March 16, 2013.

Shared from http://livingnotexisting.org/essays/sobriety-as-accessibility-interrogating-intoxication-culture/intoxicating-spaces-colonialism-nationalism-and-consumption/

For the next fifteen or so minutes, I will be discussing the idea of ‘intoxication culture’ as a colonizing tool that has, over time, been used to hail certain bodies in nation statehood, citizenship and patriotism while damning others to be left in the margins. Also, I aim to look at how this relationship between alcohol, drugs, nationalism and colonization is structured through space. I will be engaging with these ideas through a lens that is critical of colonialism.

My work is drawn upon the research I have done in areas of colonialism, law, race, and space theory. I mainly draw upon the work on Sherene Razack and Nick Riotfag, in tandem with the ideas and theories of Judith Halberstam as they relate to identity and space construction.

The position with which I approach my research is that of a white cis-gender, queer woman from a low-income background. I also come from a background of alcohol and drug abuse and am myself a recovering addict and alcoholic. As I am merely presenting my thoughts and ideas and the research I have done on this topic, I can only share from my position of experience and research.

The main questions of my research are: how does colonialism speak to and construct the addict and a culture of intoxication? How is this produced in time and space? How does intoxication culture continue to oppress certain populations, while rewarding others?
First, What is Intoxication culture and why is it important for the discussion of race and space construction?

I first came across this idea in Nick Riotfag’s anarchist zine ‘Towards a Less Fucked Up World’. This specific zine is titled “Sobriety and Anarchist Struggle”. I consider intoxication culture to be a culture in which intoxication is not only normalized but also expected. For the purposes of my research, I understand intoxication culture to be a culture within which spaces have been constructed in order to normalize the capitalistic enterprise of inebriation, pushing those who do not wish to engage in such a transaction to the margins of intelligibility(9 – 15).

I express that the idea of intoxication culture is important to the conversation of race as it relates to alcohol consumption and space construction, because I take the position that intoxication culture is itself a tool of white supremacy. I argue that this tool aims to encourage the passivity of racialized communities and individuals(Riotfag, 12). I argue that it does so while constructing spaces that structure the relationships with alcohol and drugs with oppressed communities and racialized indivuals as something ‘abnormal’.

Nick Riotfag addresses the prevalence of addiction within oppressed communities. Riotfag discusses drug and alcohol use in Black communities, Indigenous communities and queer communities. Nick Riotfag also acknowledges the role the state has played in the development of a dependant relationship between oppressed communities and drugs, such as the CIA involvement in the introduction of Crack in urban black communities in the United States(12).

As example of a form of resistance, that I would argue position sobriety as a tool of decolonization, the Black Liberation Movement rectified policies of prohibition within their communities; The Zapatista societies of Mexico are dry communities; Indigenous communities across Turtle island ban alcohol from their communities and reserves as a form of identity reclamation and culture regeneration(12). Riotfag quotes Frederick Douglass as stating, “when a slave was drunk, the slaveholder had no fear that he would plan an insurrection; no fear that he would escape to the north. It was the sober, thinking slave who was dangerous, and needed the vigilance of his master to keep him slave”(13). As I have stated, I think it is important to acknowledge these relationships and their utility for state rule and citizen pacification. For the purposes of my research, I have sought answers to questions that pertain to citizenship and patriotic rhetoric which I argue has been instrumental in the development of relationships of dependence and the introduction of drugs and alcohol into oppressed communities. What I find of interest here is the spaces in which the relationship oppressed communities have had with substances that, has encouraged a relationship of dependence, addiction and a larger societal stigmatization. Similarly, I have noticed that the rhetoric of recovery follows similar nationalistic, white supremacist, capitalistic discourses (which I unfortunately will not have time to go into today!).

Drawing from this, I plan to discuss racial categories and identity as a system that deciphers who can access nation, land and citizenship and how this interacts with alcohol, drugs and recovery.

Razack states that race and space are constructed through “Racial and spatial boundaries, as to keep the colonized in their place, which is to be out of place”(61). Razack is stating that the ways in which spaces are constructed specifically in our North American, white supremacist culture, is to reduce the visibility of racialized individuals and communities while selling the idea of assimilation to these communities through various means. I would argue one of these means being the ‘proper method of intoxication and substance usage’. The construction of a proper method of intoxication creates a binarism that constructs an improper method of usage, as Geoff has stated earlier in the presentation. As Razack argues that the prospects of white supremacy are reliant on the construction of space in racialized terms(*), I will, in tandem, argue that ‘improper usage’ or ‘improper inebriation’ within oppressed communities is seen as a complication for nation statehood and as a threat and problem for white supremacy.

Sherene Razack considers the relationship between alcohol policies and land settlement in British Colombia in her book, Race, Space and the Law. In Chapter two Razack states that process of colonizing British Columbia was contingent on the strict enforcement of liquor laws(65). The liquor laws enforced by white settler government dictated who could drink, where and with whom. As Razack suggests, “the regulation of liquor was about space”(65).

As such, alcohol was once only available to citizens of the Canadian state, not inclusive of Indigenous folks, before the idea of the status and non-status Indian came into existence(Razack, ). It was also available only to those citizens who could reproduce state nationalism through a heterosexual discourse. It has become evident through my research that colonialism plays an important role in the establishment and normalization of heterosexuality(Razack, 67). Upon discussing this with my colleague, Clementine she summed it up as such ‘If you control who drinks together, you control who fucks’. At first, I laughed at this thought but then realized its truth and profundity. The relationship that alcohol, colonialism and race have is such to continue a white statehood through heterosexual procreation. It is space construction that insures the continuation of a ‘pure’ white race which would continue the legacy of the nation state.
What I find interesting about this relationship is that the consumption and purchasing of liquor was once only limited to the white, heterosexual patriot subject. Where white settlers were the only ones allowed to purchase and drink alcohol, Indigenous folks and people of colour were not allowed to by legislative rule. We can see these attitudes still prevalent in the marketing of certain alcoholic products, such as Geoff mentioned earlier with a product such as Molson Canadian. Upon watching a commercial for the product, it is almost impossible to not recognize the nationalistic rhetoric prevalent in much of the companys marketing, where Canadian pride is built on the consumption of this beverage, and once having purchased and drank this product, you are able to claim ‘I am Canadian’.

We can see this nationalist discourse manifest in certain spaces constructed for the purposes of buying and consuming alcohol. For example, imagine yourself walking down King Street West on a Friday night. The bars are full, and everyone is trying to get laid. Who do you see? Who is in the bars? How old are they? What colour is their skin? What is their gender presentation? Now, how about if you walk by Queen West and Bathurst at any given time of day or night… Who do you see? How are they drinking? Are they using drugs in a public space? Are they racialized or are they white? Spaces such as these that are constructed with invisible borders, are dictated by race as constructed by white supremacy.

In her research, Razack focuses on the illegality of alcohol consumption for Native folks which defined a racial boundary that was integral to the heterosexual policing of Native folks in British Columbia; the Native identity was constructed as a non-heterosexual, non-white ‘other’ who threatened the white, Eurocentric compilation of nationalistic identity. This, in turn, was concretized as heavily policed liquor laws and laws pertaining to inter-racial sex relations.
As Razack notes in her work, liquor laws, and the construction of spaces and borders are also very much about sex(67). They are about the mixing of cultures, an idea that reiterates eugenic ideas. It is through the colonization of space that race can be managed, heterosexuality solidified and the ‘legacy of white Canadian statehood’ continued(67).

This nationalistic consumption and intoxication is undoubtedly reified through systems of white supremacy. I would argue that, as Geoff stated earlier in this presentation, that the ideology of ‘othering’ is used for people to identify as addicted or non-addicted people. The idea of ‘othering’, as David Goldberg states is used for white supremacy, constructs itself by conceptualizing order anew, and then by reproducing spatial confinement and separation in renewed terms’(*). If we apply this idea to the construct of the addict, we can see this as it relates to spatial construction in urban areas. I think that is important that we question how these spaces have come to exist, and through which process can the invisible borders, tied up in race, addiction and discrimination begin to be dismantled?

In her article, Razack discusses the legalization of alcohol for Indigenous folks in Canada and the “problem of Indian drunkenness” the state was then presented with(66). This was faced with policies that once again outlawed the sale of alcohol to indigenous folks. The anxiety the white Canadian state faced in regards to the “problem of the drunken indian” related to their desire to build and reform a respectable white society, as the pervasiveness of alcoholism and addiction in communities deeply affected and destroyed by colonialism presented a problem to the sustaining of this patriotic imaginative.
I would like to briefly use an example that I have come across in my research. In 2001 John Stackhouse, a journalist for The Globe and Mail, published an article called “Welcome to Harlem on the Prairies”. The article as discussed by Craig Proulx, a Metis professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, claims to be written to empower Aboriginal folks who live in this ‘Harlem on the prairies’, while asking the reader to be the judge of the plausibility of peaceful Aboriginal – Settler relations(143). Instead, what Stackhouse does is utilize what I have discussed here, white supremacist discourse and rhetorics of nationalism and racism, to construct both the identities of racialized folks who he silences, and the white authoritarian settler who he puts on a pedestal(147). Pictures that accompany the article are those of ‘drunk Indians being carried to police cars’ and ‘concerned white police officers looking on’ and doing their duty for the nation state by sweeping the streets of this Canadian Harlem clean of the problem of race integration in the pursuit of maintaining borders constructed around race and alcohol and drug consumption. In the article, the only racialized folks who are given voice are those who work directly for the government through judicial services. Upon investigating this relationship, Proulx quotes Jeanne Guillemin in saying “Since the police and other keepers of the peace in urban and reservation areas have the same values as the rulers of American society, they perceive public inebriation as an ultimate degradation, a fall from civilization. They judge Indians who drink publicly even more harshly than the individual white, because Indians as a group seem to have been born uncivilized with no shame about their categorical degradation”(148). I urge all you to read the article ‘Welcome to Harlem on the Prairies’ by John Stackhouse and draw your own conclusions on what is being said and what it reifies.
The privilege of those who are able to drink in certain spaces, such as at bars on weekends and Friday nights, over lunch with the buddies, or with mimosas at brunch with the girls are constructed upon their relationship within racial borders that dictate who is not allowed to access this privilege. It is this privileged relationship to alcohol and drugs that is a large part of the patriotic imagination, which boasts ‘proper consumption’ as a nationalist duty.
That statement I wish to close with is this: Given the nature of our culture as one of intoxication and seeing the connections that intoxication has with colonialism and racism, how can we work towards a community and a society that operates in a framework of accessibility? This means an accessibility for racialized folks, status and non-status Natives, immigrants, queer folks, and the addicted and the non-addicted alike. I ask what this would mean for you personally? Does this mean you interrogate your own relationship with substances and alcohol? Does it mean you are more conscientious of the spaces in which you drink? Or does it mean that you work with your community to make events dry and alcohol-free and accessible for all?

To interrogate intoxication culture we must truly investigate the ways in which intoxication, alcohol and drugs have shaped our lives and our experiences, as well as how it has worked to construct ideas, identities and the spaces associated with those identities. It has become evident to me, through my research, that to interrogate intoxication culture is to interrogate a deep-rooted racist, nationalistic, colonial discourse. If we truly want to create a culture of accessibility, then we must redefine our relationship with that which aims to render us incapacitated to do so, both individually and collectively.

Work Cited

Proulx, C., “‘An Analysis of ‘Welcome to Harlem on the Prairies”’ in Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities: Transformations and Continuities., pp.,143 – 171, Wilfred Laurier University Press, Waterloo., 2011.

Razack, S., “In Between and Out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor and the Law in British Columbia, 1850 – 1913” in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society., pp., 47 – 71, Between the Lines, Canada, 2002.

Riotfag, Nick., “Towardsalessfuckedupworld: Sobriety and Anarchist Struggle”. Independent., 199-.