>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> Isn't there a large middle ground between getting
>> coerced by the
>> state and becoming "ready" out of the exhaustion and
>> ruin of many
>> years?
>>
>> Yoshie
>
>Definitely. Multiple DWIs lead to mandatory AA
>meetings; a treatment center can lead to
>dual-diagnosis and prescription drugs; other
>incentives may present themselves to make using less
>attractive so one just quits.
>
>All I'm saying is that in principle, from the official
>medical perspective on addiction as a disease (which
>incorporates AA, NA, CA, etc.), any coercion other
>than the "soft" rhetorical kind, and towards sociality
>with other addicts in a program, isn't favorable to
>treatment. This is what Dr. Shuckit's "readiness"
>suggests. This is from the major AMA perspective.
I'm not arguing for coercion. I've already said that "I think we can & should argue against (A) drug treatment as an alternative sentence to imprisonment & say that (B) decriminalizing drugs & offering free drug treatment as a service, not a sentence, are better political reforms. I'm not sure, however, that Foucault would have thought that (B) would make the state any less offensively 'therapeutic' than (A), for Foucault's criticism of biopolitics & governmentality applies indiscriminately both to (A) and (B)." I'm saying that the distinction between explicit coercion by the state (e.g., sentencing an offender to mandatory addiction treatment) and other measures (e.g., voluntary participation in support groups) can't be very well sustained on the Foucauldian grounds, since Foucault is not so much a civil libertarian as a genealogist of "the technologies of the self."
From the Foucauldian point of view, to take just one example, the self-help narrative of "hitting the bottom" & seeking salvation from the pit of addiction, through the "confession" of one's self first as an "addict" & then as an "addict in recovery," may be seen as the creation of the soul that imprisons the body, even though the body in question is outside of the literal prison walls.
>The middle ground is obviously vast between the
>medical model and the punitive measures of the state.
>"Addiction" is hardly a strictly medical matter.
>"Therapeutic jurisprudence" simply highlights the
>contradictions at work in the way drug use is dealt
>with once it hits the state correctional level, which
>takes or leaves the medical model (setting its worths
>aside) for its own purposes.
That is because capitalism as a mode of production demands that one submits (if one can) to a limited range of models of personhood compatible with capitalist class relations: utility-maximizing economic man (a la Bentham); & legal person with autonomy & free will, morally independent of causal determination, thus fully responsible for one's actions (a la Kant). When one fails to approximate the models offered by Kant & Bentham, one becomes (by default as it were) subject to the medical model: if one is not committed to utility maximization & personal responsibility, one must be at the mercy of a disease that deprives one of autonomy. In today's America, liberals tend to favor the medical model, & conservatives tend to prefer the Kantian & Benthamite models, when it come to so-called "social problems," for instance crime, poverty, addiction, homelessness, and so on. Lars Eighner writes in _Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets_ (NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1993):
***** People who do not want to help the homeless seek to blame the homeless for being homeless. These people see alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity as character flaws that somehow justify the condition of the homeless. This conservative line of thought is only one step removed from the conclusion that in addition to deserving homelessness, the homeless also deserve whatever mistreatment individuals or society may choose to mete out.
Those who wish to help the homeless, on the other hand, want to find a problem that can be fixed. Admittedly, alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity are difficult problems, but something can be done about them. What is even better, for those who take the liberal view, is that what can be done for alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity is likely to involve the creation of many jobs for social workers and administrators and other middle-class people. Although they find contradictory morals to it, both of these views subscribe more or less to a mythical history of the typical street wino. It is a myth that goes something like this: A man had a reasonably good job and reasonably happy home life. But he drank. At first it was only social drinking. But he drank more and more because he had either the disease of alcoholism or a character flaw that deprived him of the will to be sober, depending upon whether the myth is told in its liberal or its conservative version.
At any rate, he covered up his drinking for a while, but eventually everyone else realized he had a problem. Something dreadful happened at work, at home, or on the road, and the alcoholic had to admit, at last, that he might have a problem. Perhaps he tried one program or another, but without success because -- as they say in the programs -- he had not yet hit bottom. He lost his job, his family, and at last his home. And there he is, a wino clutching a brown sack, passed out in an alley. (160-1) *****
"[E]ither the disease of alcoholism or a character flaw that deprived him of the will to be sober...". In other words, either the medical model or the model of personal responsibility. Both models obscure social relations, first of all, by treating poverty, alcoholism, etc. as "social problems" compartmentalized & made independent of capitalism as the mode of production; and then by creating the paradigms of understanding that cast individuals as the causes of "social problems," be they as "victims of diseases" or "scums with the character flaw of irresponsibility."
Yoshie