stated he did not want to give the DEA too much control over the sale of âa good cold medicineâ or .... Federations of user-producers hold weekly garage sales.
b i d i n g t i m e , b i n d i n g s pace
Economy of Speed: The New Narco-Capitalism Jason Pine
“I thought I was getting more life,” writes a recovering methamphetamine addict on a blog dedicated to the drug. Ice, Glass, Tina, Crystal, Crank, Road Dope, Poor Man’s Crack, 417, Black Beauties, Tweak, P, and the Diligence Drug — these are all names for speed. It is a relatively cheap yet cherished substance that, with the utmost efficiency, floods the brain with dopamine: one hit and for up to twelve hours you are overwhelmed with unprecedented euphoria and energy, alertness and alacrity, and sexual stamina. You get more life. Speed can be traced back to ma huang, an herb used in China for millennia, from which ephedrine was first extracted in the 1880s. By the 1930s, it was used medically, particularly by the British, German, and American armies to keep soldiers vigilant, even vicious.1 In the postwar period, it was methedrine, a Mother’s Little Helper of sorts, keeping her head on straight, her housework done, and her figure fine. In the 1960s and 1970s, biker gangs were producing and distributing a
Sincere thanks to the participants of this research who opened their homes to me between the months of December 2005 and May 2006 to share their experiences. Many thanks also to Kelly Carter, Alex Carter, and Elizabeth Zerr for their expert research assistance. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of North America spring meetings, Baruch College, New York City, 2006. Interview material comes from meth users and narcotics agents in Jefferson County (south of St. Louis), the Missouri county that held the nationwide record for the highest number of lab seizures in 2003, 2004, and 2005. 1. Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom, Speed Culture: Amphetamine Use and Abuse in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); Amphetamines: Fourth Report by the Select Committee on Crime, U.S. House of Representatives Report no. 91-1807 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 2, 1971). Public Culture 19:2
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knock-off of methedrine in the rural Midwest. In the early 1990s, speed was back on the streets and faster than ever, now in its far more potent and addicting form, methamphetamine. Originally produced in do-it-yourself labs in California, it took only a few years for labs to sprout up throughout the Northwest, Midwest, Southwest, and South. Most recently, with the aid of Mexican cartels, methamphetamine has sped toward the East Coast. It is now a multi-billion-dollar industry with hundreds of thousands of diehard addicts. To understand something about this speeding epidemic economy, it is useful to start on the East Coast, in New York, on Wall Street. In December 2005, Details magazine ran an article on a change in trends among stockbrokers in their twenties and thirties.2 Instead of using cocaine to stay alert and keep an aggressive edge over their colleagues, many of these Wall Streeters now crush and snort Adderall, a designer amphetamine used to treat attention deficit disorder, or ADD. These outperforming pills are available through express mail online pharmacies without a prescription should the unlikelihood arise that your doctor does not buy your rehearsed script of symptoms — I’m unable to concentrate and bring tasks to their completion; I’m chronically forgetful and prone to distraction. The rehearsals have become embodied recitations; the number of people now playing the part of the inefficient, unproductive producer is high and rising. Baseball players use it. High school and college students take it in order to study, to stay awake in class, or to drink longer after class; they even have “pharming” parties. Even future academics and professionals who would never think of touching a drug confess that they feel they are not really competing if they don’t also pop or snort Adderall before taking the GREs and the LSAT. This is the professionalization of speed in the making of professionals. Wall Streeters snort Adderall to vigorously trade the shares of their multinational dealers at Shire Pharmaceuticals; these dealers, in turn, profit from their brokers’ self-profiting addiction to the speed of success. And the high-speed loop of consumption-productionconsumption continues to approach a maximum velocity where the only thing that remains will be speed. If that’s the case, then speed will colonize the body and render it nothing more than its vector. This version of pure speed, or speed’s limit, first combusted with the concept of labor power that Anson Rabinbach traced back to the nineteenthcentury metaphor of the human motor. Based on the laws of thermodynamics, labor power, in his words, was a paradigm that emphasized “the expenditure and
2. Ian Daly, “White Collar America’s New Wonder Drug,” Details, December 2005. 358
deployment of energy as opposed to human will, moral purpose, or even technical skill.”3 And just as it did in the age of industrial modernity, the notion of labor power, I would argue, continues to “subordinate all social activities to production, raising the human project of labor to a universal attribute of nature.”4 That is because today, like the nineteenth century, is marked by a concerted effort to come up with a vaccine for that great obstacle to boundless productivity: fatigue. Two years ago and a thousand or so miles from Wall Street, the state of Missouri had 2,788 methamphetamine production equipment seizures and lab raids. That’s 1,500 more than the number two seizure capital in the country: Tennessee. This does not mean that Missouri produces the most meth; the California superlabs far surpass Missouri on that account. And Mexico tops California, while Burma’s infamous Golden Triangle, with its factory-produced superpure, candycoated pill form of meth, YaBa (the crazy drug), tops them all. Missouri, instead, has the highest number of individual meth producers. But more on that peculiarity in a moment. In some respects, the situation in rural Missouri is uncannily similar to that of Wall Street and other sectors of the legitimated national economy. Just replace Adderall with meth and the white collar with bare hands. Randy, before brain cancer overtook his senses, described how many of his user-friends in the construction business felt meth and work to be entirely compatible: I saw what it did to people and decided, nah, I beat everything — alcohol, my wife, my dog — I can beat this, too. It was getting to a point where it was becoming part of a lifestyle, and I don’t use drugs for lifestyle. I had my horses and things to take care of, you know, and I didn’t like all the traffic. I had to get rid of the people heavily involved in it . . . I didn’t want my doors gettin’ kicked in. Wasn’t worth it. Although Randy has seen how speed overwhelms work, he also found ways to make speed and work one and the same: Yeah, we had a big tank full of, whatchacallit, industrial anhydrous. We were turning out some shit put your dick in the dirt, man. Then we decided, we all sat down and said, you know what, one more batch, we’ll break that up. I used my money to buy that deck, all the wood for the deck and some other things for the house, and you know, eh, that’s enough. And 3. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 4. 4. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 4. 359
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Burnt house. Photo: Jason Pine
the last time when I flipped out almost on it, I said nah, that’s enough, I got Dylantin, Darvisan, and all this shit in me, that ain’t good, you know. In the sparsely populated rural areas of Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, the deserts of California and the Southwest, and the hills and woods of Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia, there lies what Katie Stewart has called the “Other America.”5 There, weakened labor unions, unprofitable farming, joblessness, and Budweiser add up to a sum radically different than its combined parts: methamphetamine. Truck drivers, migrant meat packers, concrete layers, roofers, carpenters, cooks, waiters, bartenders, and exotic dancers found that meth can give you more energy, more working hours, more “life.” It enables you to work fourteen-hour days and stay awake for as long as three weeks. Users also found they could cut out the middlemen and make the product themselves. Now hundreds of do-it-yourself 5. Kathleen C. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 360
labs spring up in household kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, and garages, in motel rooms, trailers, abandoned shacks, and farmhouses. What’s more, meth labs are mobile, small, and simple enough to fit into campers and car trunks, permitting cooks to relocate deep into parklands or even cook on the run. Finally, the traces of these nomadic speed machines are found in the form of toxic waste dumps that costs up to $10,000 each to clean up. Jeffrey described the cooking process: “Well, you got your Sudafed pills, that’s the main ingredient. Gotta have, uh, anhydrous, that’s a fertilizer — fertilize the field to kill weeds, it’s a gas, and then you got, uh, ether, which is a startin’ fluid, denatured alcohol, you got muriatic acid, lithium strips out of batteries . . . that’s pretty bad stuff.” For Jeffrey and thousands of others in Missouri who have taken on the speed of “more life,” everyday consumer products have taken on a hyperreal value. Jeffrey’s products and their variants — nail polish remover, lye, liquid Dra¯no, antifreeze, paint thinner, coffee filters, and Nyquil instead of Sudafed — take on a fetishized occult value, the kind of vicarious, gambler’s value that John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff identified as millennial capital.6 And, you can find everything at Wal-Mart, where even the everyday possesses high value — or, more accurately, the everyday is possessed by value. “Believe it or not, it all starts out with that little pill. That’s a cold/allergy pill,” Jeffrey continued. In 1986, DEA deputy assistant administrator Gene Haislip attempted to make cold/allergy medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine into controlled substances.7 Allan Rexinger, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, teamed up with Republican senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and an unnamed White House staffer to successfully limit the legislation to raw ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. Almost a decade later, in 1994, restrictions on only ephedrine were passed. Hatch stated he did not want to give the DEA too much control over the sale of “a good cold medicine” or “unilaterally . . . interfere with the marketplace.” Meanwhile, the production and consumption of methamphetamine in the United States rose steadily. The rise is attributable not only to a “free market” but also to American narco-capitalism more generally. During that same decade, the American companies Nationwide Purveyors and Clifton Pharmaceutical, both located in Penn6. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 291 – 343. 7. Information regarding the DEA’s battle with the pharmaceuticals is drawn from Steve Suo, “Lobbyists and Loopholes,” The Oregonian, October 4, 2004. 361
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sylvania, moved 4 metric tons and 170 metric tons of ephedrine, respectively, to meth superlabs and drug cartels elsewhere in the country and in Mexico. In March 2006, some twenty years after Haislip’s original proposal, President George W. Bush signed the reauthorized Patriot Act, to which Senators Jim Talent (R-Missouri) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California) had tacked the Combat Meth Act, restricting the sale of medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. Nonetheless, the gamble of meth production still pays off, Jeffrey explained: Oh, you can spend $1,000 on all the stuff and can make $10,000 off $1,000. It’s good money. On one batch it takes like sixteen hours, twelve to sixteen hours, to do it the right way, the clean way. There’s faster ways but I found out the right way, the purest way, and made the best dope. You have to have like five thousand pills and you cook it down. Everything else you can buy at the hardware store. Then you gotta rob a farmer for the anhydrous. Everything, everything you can buy at the hardware store or drug store, besides the fertilizer, the anhydrous gas. You can go to Home Depot and get everything. Yeah, you can make four ounces outta one
Meth scale. Photo: Jason Pine
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batch. Thousand dollars will make ten grand. It’s a lot, it’s good money, that’s why it was hard to quit too. Real good money. Although there are similarities between Jeffrey, Randy, and Wall Streeters, there are also important differences. The restrictions placed on the sale of cold medicine have complicated rural meth production in Missouri, whereas Wall Streeters and college students continue to acquire Adderall with relative ease.8 In fact, now performance enhancers of all kinds are at once the raw material and the end products of that animist, neoliberal fetish called “the market.” From Starbucks to energy drinks, steroids to Viagra, and Prozac to Provigil (the latest all-purpose pick-me-up aimed at that pharmaceutical industry’s largest target market: the “healthy”), workplace and everyday doping have become normalized, expected, and, in some cases, even mandatory.9 Rather than a force all its own, this market is enhanced; it is tweaking on pharmacologically engineered epistemologies of activity and achievement. Meanwhile, back in Missouri, a local cottage industry has evolved to overcome the ephedrine laws: You get a whole bunch of stupid people to get hooked on it and go out and buy all the pills, basically then you ain’t gotta do nothin’. Once you get somebody hooked on it, they’ll do anything for you. Call them little gumps. A gump is somebody that’s goin’ to go out and buy the pills and run around all day just for some of the dope. That’s what cookers do, they don’t go out and buy it themselves, they ain’t stupid. Send certain people out to buy the pills, send certain people to Home Depot to get the denatured, you gotta get five cans of startin’ fluid. You just can’t keep going back to the same place and buyin’ them, you know. Loose clans of users band together around cooks, and cooks band together in even larger federations of flexible and mobile organized crime networks that continually bleed, coagulate, and bleed again. Members get busted, get cleaned up, or 8. Production has since shifted to the superlabs of Mexican cartels. 9. For more on energy drinks, see Carla K. Johnson, “Caffeine-Stoked Energy Drinks Wire a Generation, Cause Concern,” Chicago Tribune, October 29, 2006. For more on Provigil, see Miriam Karmel, “Drug for All Reason: The Pharmaceutical Industry Now Targets Healthy People as a Prime Market,” Utne Reader, July/August 2003. For an instance of mandatory doping, consider children who are expected to take ADHD medication in order to reenter the classrooms they are perceived to disrupt. I owe refinements to this discussion of performance enhancement to conversations with John Hoberman (author of Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport [New York: Free Press, 1992] and Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvination, Aphrodisia, Doping [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005]). 363
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die, while new members get hooked, join, and eventually meet one of these three fates. Gumps do the dirty work, which includes “smurfing” or stopping at each of twenty pharmacies in the county to buy the maximum allowance of two boxes of Sudafed. It also includes hunting on local farms for the much-coveted anhydrous ammonia, a cryogenic that causes unspeakable freeze burns when it accidentally gushes from its massive, clumsy tanks — the Great White Buffalo, tweakers call it. There is even a submarket for the anhydrous. Gumps who manage to steal it resell it at a premium, while some farmers, desperate to curtail meth vandals, sell it to gumps directly. Federations of user-producers hold weekly garage sales where they pool all their stolen property for resale, continuing the conversion of commodities into speed. Meth clans also have their own aesthetic ideologies. John Deere green is the fashion color of choice, and Mountain Dew is the drink of choice — containing twice as much caffeine and sugar (11 teaspoons) as other soft drinks. And then there is the range of methamphetamine colors and consistencies, capable of creating factions who prefer either snorting, smoking, ingesting, or injecting it — or simply prefer a certain taste or smell or burn. And then there’s the accidents. To travel at such high velocity also means to get high off the constant potential of combustion: “That’s why them little trailer parks blow up. Guy goes in the bathroom, they seal it off, and one idiot walks in with a cigarette — BOOM! — there it goes, you’re dead — get burned alive. Friend of mine doesn’t have a face anymore.” Even if you don’t reach the speed of an explosive flash, you still have a chance at becoming the Emperor of Speed, to morph Paul Virilio’s term for our current Empire of Speed.10 User-producers, in an act of absolute self-sovereignty, embody both supply and demand. And the more excessive the expenditure, the more productive they become. Through the most intense “unproductive expenditure,”11 they become users who consume their own energy to produce and producers who consume their own energy by consuming. And the loop of consumption-production-consumption implodes into a single instant once the body, that carrier of fatigue, is finally eliminated. And quite literally it is. Methamphetamine devours skin, teeth, lungs, kidneys, and brains. It keeps the body awake while suppressing its appetite and dehydrating it. And, as it also oversexes the body while convincing it that it is invincible, 10. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). 11. “Unproductive expenditure” has no end beyond itself and engenders “a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning.” Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 364
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speed has invited an alarming new wave of HIV infection (which requires new narcotics to stay alive).12 When users go long enough without nourishing or giving their bodies rest, or protecting it from disease, they may altogether forsake the body in the pursuit of pure speed. Maybe users achieve pure speed when they finally resort to self-consumption. Prisoners desperate for a fix vie for a shot of any new convict’s urine and eat the scabs on the wounds they’ve inflicted on themselves when they were high and scratching away at the hallucinatory meth bugs that crawl under the skin. Now with a maniacal velocity, speed tightens the production-consumption-production loop until it combusts into instantaneity, finally dissolving the body into pure speed. This is the Big Toe, to use Georges Bataille’s metaphor, of the new narco12. For a rich ethnographic account of methamphetamine, HIV, and the pharmaceutical industry, see Michael Specter, “Higher Risk,” New Yorker, May 23, 2005. 365
Fire. Photo: Jason Pine
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capitalism.13 It is that part of the political body that, when denuded, inspires both interest and revulsion — a “base” form of seduction inflected with a “burlesque” value. It is the unseemly side of America, that “Other America” you can enjoy leering at through criminalizing journalistic reports and pathologizing talk shows about loss and recovery. But if you were to amputate this Big Toe (imagine amputating, e.g., New Orleans), you would dismember the whole uniformly speeding political body for whom “all human needs, wants and comforts must be [brought] in from the market.”14 The Empire of Speed has invested a great deal in this abject Other America. It is the Big Toe that nostalgically recalls the overproductive, vanishing body. Between attempts to gum and swallow his food, Randy said, They’ll keep going and going and that’s what causes problems for everything. Then you got people have weaker wills, “Oh, I can’t go to work without my dope. Got any dope? Got any dope?” you know. Callin’ me eight o’clock Monday morning for dope to go to work. Nah, that’s gettin’ a little pushy there, you know. Yeah, leave that shit at home. And most of us did. That’s part of the past. And sure, I’d like a big old line, stay awake most of the day, energetic. . . . it’s false, you know, it’s false courage, it’s like whiskey. You think you’re ten-foot tall, but you’re not.
13. Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 14. Jeremy Seabrook, “The Poverty of America,” New Internationalist, October 2005. 366
