Junkie Thinking

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One of the eye-opening aspects of Romancing Opiates is the very large gulf between the Hollywood version of opiate withdrawal—the version regnant in the popular imagination—and the doctor’s own firsthand observations. He introduces these quoting a passage from the standard medical textbook on the subject:

That is fortified by similar quotations from similarly authoritative sources, from The Oxford Textbook of Medicine to Emergency Management of Selected Drugs of Abuse, which was published by the American College of Emergency Physicians. This is not a bespoke, eccentric theory of Dr. Daniels’. Of his own experience, he writes:

(May I make explicit my implicit suggestion that you buy a copy of this book and read it immediately if you have not?)

There is nothing like direct experience. In one of my favorite passages from Infinite Jest, Wallace (himself an addict with mental health problems who ultimately killed himself) has one of his fictitious addicts, Don Gately, a resident at a halfway house, meditate on the sense of metaphysical entitlement that makes so many addicts unable to forge a mental link between action and consequence even in something as minor as following parking rules:

What each of these writers is getting at, each in his own inimitable way, is that the drug addict is a personality type, a familiar sort of character. The quality of being an addict does not entirely define a man or a woman, because an addict is not the only thing he or she is. But to the degree that addiction is the predominating feature of a man’s personality, he will in many ways resemble other men so afflicted, in much the same way that men who are lecherous tend to resemble one another, as do men who are religious fanatics (irrespective of dogma!) or con artists or vegans. When I remarked to a friend that a mutual musical acquaintance of ours seemed not quite right, he responded, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world: “Viola player. You know.” (In case you’re wondering: No, that friend was not Jay Nordlinger.) 

It is true of political types, too: “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been!” C.S. Lewis observed. (Yes, and: “How gloriously different are the saints.”) Tyrants even come to resemble one another insofar as taste is concerned, which is why Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump seem to employ the same interior decorator, and why the aesthetic touchstones of the Berlin that Adolf Hitler wanted to build (with its emphasis on giganticism melded to a version of classicism) also inform Trump’s aesthetic ambitions for Washington: compare and contrast. (This is not new for American political leaders: If the American Nazi Party had the funds for a decent headquarters, it would probably look a lot like Paul Cret’s fashy Federal Reserve building, dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1937.) It is difficult to tell a right-wing conspiracy kook from a left-wing conspiracy kook—really: Which one is Bobby Kennedy Jr.? What defines him is not a place on the right-left spectrum but the fact that he is a kook. And the movement he leads, like the movement Trump leads, is much less like a conventional political faction than it is like a cult. 

Infinite Jest contains some very amusing speculation about whether Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult. 

I have come to believe that AA is, as Wallace suggested, a kind of cult (I associate only with respectable cults, Levantine wine cults, to be specific, imported vintages with a minimum of 2,000 years in the cask) and that one of the 12-step articles of faith is, in the main if not without exception, true: There is no such thing as a former addict. 

Kennedy, who became a heroin user in his teens, is an advocate of 12-step programs and at one point described himself as attending support group meetings daily. But, of course, Kennedy is a habitual liar (“They’ll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else f—s with the rules, but they don’t deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules”) who often contradicts himself within the same sentence. So you never know. Asked about the role of steroid use in his famous fitness program, he denied being a steroid user, then added that he took supplemental testosterone, testosterone being, of course, the fundamental anabolic-androgenic steroid hormone. Which is to say, the secretary of health and human services said he doesn’t take steroids, except for the steroids he takes. There is not anything inherently bad about testosterone supplementation, which can provide real quality-of-life benefits to some men. But it is an abusable drug, too—it is worth keeping in mind that most people who try cocaine or heroin never become cocaine or heroin addicts. 

See if this sounds familiar at all:

Is that our Bobby they’re talking about? I think it may be.

That is from a 2005 edition of Psychosomatics (now called the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry), in an article titled “Psychiatric Complications of Anabolic Steroid Abuse.” My thesis here isn’t that the secretary of health and human services acts like a crazy person because he takes drugs—it is that he takes drugs because he is, in fact, a crazy person, one whose career as public fraud, like his career as a private junkie, is characterized by “manic-like presentations defined by irritability, aggressiveness, euphoria, grandiose beliefs, hyperactivity, and reckless or dangerous behavior.” 

Kennedy’s thinking is junkie thinking: When within the space of a few sentences he insisted that COVID vaccines kill people and that Donald Trump deserves a Nobel prize for his role in implementing Operation Warp Speed, which developed the COVID vaccines, Kennedy took umbrage (“defined by irritability, aggressiveness”) at the notion that these two positions must be mutually exclusive. He is very much like Wallace’s addicts with their sense of metaphysical uniqueness and specialness: Everything that he wants to be true must be true and true at the same time, simply because he is “exempt from the laws of physics and statistics”—and logic—“that ironly govern everybody else.”

Some of you may have experienced this: You have a friend who had a terrible drug problem or drinking problem—or, possibly, a terrible mental health issue—from which he finally recovers, at which point you make an unhappy discovery: He is still a jerk, or very needy, or manipulative, or some other kind of a mess. (Some of us even may have made that discovery about ourselves.) As it turns out, there was a problem with the heroin or the bourbon or the untreated depression or whatever, but that problem wasn’t the only problem. There is a reason most people who sometimes take drugs never become addicts but some do, why some people can enjoy the occasional cocktail and some will drink as though their goal were the extinction of consciousness (which it may be), why people who are vulnerable to addiction to one drug also are vulnerable to addiction to other, unrelated drugs or to entirely unrelated psychic salves of one kind or another, from religion to conspiracy theory (which is another kind of religion) to sexual promiscuity to shopping. There is a reason so many people who join cults join more than one over the course of their careers as cultists. Some happier types, such as a few fitness fanatics I know, are able to transfer their compulsive tendencies in some healthier direction. 

The secretary of health and human services is a man with a history of drug addiction and, it is worth remembering, a drug felon as well. There are some excellent men who have that kind of thing and more on their résumés, and they can and do play valuable roles in public life—when they have become stable, responsible, reformed men. Bobby Kennedy Jr. is not one of those—the most he could say for himself is that he doesn’t shoot up heroin anymore. It is good that he made the effort to stop using heroin, but that does not make him a reformed man. He is a crackpot, a liar, and a menace in public life. 

That Kennedy is being enabled in his destruction of critical public institutions by such figures as Sen. Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas and a doctor, is shameful. As is the fact that he has made a fool of Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who also is a doctor and who, as chairman of the Senate’s health committee, helped put Kennedy into place. During Kennedy’s confirmation he pretended to take as credible a junkie crackpot’s promises to conduct himself responsibly once in office—surely not because Sen. Cassidy is dumb enough to have believed the junkie crackpot but because he is a political coward who is so afraid of Donald Trump and a few dolts on social media that he refuses to do his job as a senator and committee chairman entrusted with oversight powers. 

Ask anyone with experience: A junkie’s promise is not worth very much. Kennedy may have stopped taking heroin but his promises shouldn’t be trusted. He did not become honest, trustworthy, or honorable—because what is wrong with him is only incidentally linked to his heroin use, and the vector of causality points in the opposite direction from what most people would assume: It wasn’t drug addiction that made him an irresponsible and dishonest fool—it was the aspects of his character that made him a certain particular kind of irresponsible and dishonest fool that also led to his chemical misadventures.  

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the kind of junkie who gives junkies a bad name.

Not great news on the labor front. From the Wall Street Journal:

Which raises the question: Whom will Trump fire this time? Surely one more lost job won’t make a difference in the stats. The U.S. economy has lost some 78,000 manufacturing jobs this year. There is a great deal of normal organic churn in manufacturing as in every other sector—but mucking up worldwide supply chains and injecting a great deal of expensive uncertainty into the marketplace cannot be helping. Trump’s trade policy is idiotic and amateurish, and his economic advisers are almost without exception either incompetents (a few) or sycophants (a whole bunch). “The buck stops here,” was Harry Truman’s slogan. Not so much Donald Trump’s. A note to the Trump policy team: You dopes are destroying everything you touch, and getting to ride along in the shiny airplane with the big man is not worth the damage you are doing to the country, to say nothing of what remains of your reputations.

Junkie is attested to as far back as 1923, with the now-discarded junker found a year earlier. Junk meaning any narcotic drug is assumed to be older but is attested to only from 1925, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Junk in the older, related sense of trash or discarded objects shows up in English in the 1300s, meaning worn-out bits of rope that were used for caulking. The origin of that word is uncertain, but it may have come from a figurative use of the French junc, meaning reed or rush, from the Latin iuncus. It seems to have persistent maritime associations and was used to mean sailors’ salted meat in the 18^th century. We get junk food in 1971 and junk bond in 1979.

Junk bond is an interesting term. The preferred euphemism in the 1980s was “high-yield bond.” Bonds that have unusually high yields pay more because there is more risk involved—a junk bond is a bond issued by a borrower without much in the way of creditworthiness. The funny thing about those junk bonds: They weren’t junk. In the 1980s, the words junk bond  were closely associated with Michael Milken and his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert (a name that sounds like something out of American Psycho, one of the many little things Bret Easton Ellis got just right), and those bonds ended up being a pretty good investment for a certain kind of investor: the kind with a diversified portfolio and the ability to ride out the inevitably volatile market for such bonds. 

From Econlib: 

Giuliani, you will have heard, went on to have a political career. He is today a disgraced figure who has been disbarred from the practice of law in both Washington, D.C., and New York, and Donald Trump recently announced that he plans to confer upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor, for his role in lying to the American public about the 2020 election and his assistance in the coup d’état the Trump gang attempted in 2021 after losing the election. 

But I’ll bet junk-bond king Michael Milken has a better credit rating these days.

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One of the things I particularly admire about Infinite Jest is the way David Foster Wallace captures the atmosphere of those church-basement Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—the burnt coffee and the cigarettes and the sloganeering and the desperation. I spent a good deal of time in lobbies outside such meetings when I was a little kid (my mother was an exceedingly poor judge of husbands) and can still remember that greasy brown film of tobacco tar on the linoleum. I had an older brother who programmatically drank himself to death for what seemed to me like no good reason—but what did I know about his reasons? I would have a hard time explaining my own, if it came to that. There is something in the way I do the math that puts hope and sympathy on opposite sides of the equation, and I’ve become to a degree more sympathetic (I know, I know: You’d need a very fine instrument to measure that degree) as I have grown more skeptical about how much practical control most of us are able to exercise over our own lives. As a certain philosopher once asked: “Why do I do the things that make me sorry?” I hope you weren’t looking for answers here.