BLOOD SUGAR - a work in progress

Over the past five years I have worked in various ways with the HIV Education and Prevention Program of Alameda County (HEPPAC) in an effort to engage injection drug users in a process of self-representation. The first phase of this collaboration involved training the organization’s staff and clients to use disposable cameras and author websites populated with their own images. During the second phase of my work with HEPPAC I have recorded many hours of conversation with a number of injection drug users who use the needle exchange and other services provided by HEPPAC. These recordings will provide much of the media the BLOOD SUGAR archives.

During roughly the same period of time I have also worked with the non-profit, human rights organization, Justice Now and 20 women incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA the largest female correctional facility in the United States. Access to prisoners and prisons by the media or human rights investigators is virtually non-existent. Several states, including California, have enacted media bans, making it illegal for the media to conduct face-to-face interviews with prisoners that are not controlled and censored by prison officials. For the past four years I have intentionally circumvented the California Prison media ban, gaining access to incarcerated women by posing as a legal advocate. The conversations recorded during these visits comprise the audio database of Public Secrets. The section on addiction in Public Secrets, comprised of recordings made in the prison with women who suffer from addiction disorders and whose incarceration is related to drug charges, will eventually link to Blood Sugar. Where Public Secrets reveals the secret injustices of the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex Blood Sugar will examine the social and political construction of poverty, alienation, addiction and insanity in American society through the eyes of those who live it.

My collaborations with HEPPAC and Justice Now are motivated by our collective desire to create a context in which the voices of marginalized and disenfranchised persons, their stories and their perspectives can be heard in the public domain. Our objectives are:

1) to enhance awareness of the relation between poverty, addiction, and HIV transmission, and the social and political implications of the “war on drugs,” including the disproportionate incarceration and subsequent political disenfranchisement of impoverished people of color, and the inherent injustice of current sentencing laws like Califorinia’s “three strikes” and,

2) to empower the participants to represent themselves in the media and, thus, to participate in and shape the public discourse around the social conditions and material circumstances they face on a daily basis.

For both of these groups, injection drug users living outside the norms of society in the shadow of the criminal justice system and women trapped inside the prison system, our recorded conversations are acts of juridical and political testimony. By giving evidence – by acting as witnesses to their own experience and making their statements public – they become the source of their own re-subjectification and stake out a claim to dignity. It is this claim to dignity and subjectivity that enables the participants to challenge the alienating effect of poverty, the inequitable principals of distributive justice, and the dehumanising mechanisms of the prison industrial complex. Together, Public Secrets and Blood Sugar, will bring the voices of homeless injection drug users and incarcerated women into dialogue with other, legal, political and social theorists as well as medical researchers and social scientists that study addiction disorders.

I have now recorded hours of conversation with over 40 current and former injection drug users both at HEPPAC and as a legal advocate in the state prisons. Here is a short example from one of the transcripts of a recording made at HEPPAC by T____, a woman who had just been released after nine months in county jail for possession of five dollars worth of heroin.

I’ve tried methadone – I’ve been on methadone many, many, times – off and on, off and on -- methadone is, I don’t know, I feel like it’s just the government’s band-aid for a gapping wound. Its just to pacify us and to push us away and they know where we are going to be today and they know where we’re going to be tomorrow morning and I, I don’t know what the cure is – I’m personally going to try B____ and I don’t know what that’s about or even if I can, being that I have been diagnosed with Hep-C -- its just an ongoing struggle and I don’t know who’s going to win, you know -- and me -- I know how heroine is, I’m going to lose every time. I’m either going to be in the hospital or I am going to be in jail. Sometimes it takes years and sometimes it takes a month, you know? It just - it just -- and I don’t know personally, how to stop - I am a pretty strong person but I don’t know how to beat this thing -- and its because the drug is so powerful it really takes over your whole – its not recreational where my body feels high and I’m having fun and I’m laughing and I’ll recuperate tomorrow and go to work on Monday -- Sunday rolls into Monday, you know, and it’s a drug used where you can deal with your life not to add to your life - like you drink alcohol at a party - Heroine is not like that, Heroine you get up with and you eat it like breakfast and then you eat it like lunch and it puts you to bed at night – and any comfortable feeling that you’re gonna have, any level of comfort that its going to give you – that’s how bad its going to make you feel when you don’t have it.

Through the voices of participants like T______, Blood Sugar will challenge us to question… “What is the social and political status of the addicted? Is the addict fully human, diseased or possessed by an “other inside”, or wholly “other” and thus rendered ideologically appropriate to her status as less than human? ”Because they must fear encounters with regimes of enforcement participants like T______ are afraid to be seen -- but they do want to be heard. Theirs are the most important voices in the discourse around addiction, public health, poverty and belonging in America.

“What can art do?” in relation to our most troubling social problems? Like Public Secrets, Blood Sugar will employ a polyphony of voices - combining theory and personal ‘micro histories’ in order to challenge audiences to re-think the paradoxes of social exclusion and othering that attend the lives of those who suffer from addictions.

Blood Sugar is in production with designer/programmer Erik Loyer.