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Pricks of Pain
Bruises of present-day life overlap each other. The bruise is an index of blows in the world. In the end, it seems there is only mitigation possible. The index is blurred through a repression of what is evident and evidential: social injustice, the wounds of exploitation and oppression. This private secret of pain encourages an individual solution, a little quiet contract between doctor and patient, some self-medication, a quick fix, fixed again and again, because it is all still broken. Such is the opioid crisis, currently besetting the USA, as elsewhere. Data from 2018 disclosed 128 Americans dying each day from opioid overdosing. In alleviating pain, this substance use expresses itself as indices within the body, metabolic ones, but also addictive ones and it affects and is affected by the body-mass index.
A case-study of opioid use in the US might follow usefully dairy farmers. Their lives are hard and ever harder. Agribusiness sets farmers on a supply-price treadmill. Gate prices for produced food fall. Even the larger farmers are cash-poor. It is impossible for small farmers to grow a way out of crisis. The megafarm is on the rise, with thousands of animals penned in one place. Increased production depresses prices further. The megafarms draw, for example, the milk from the cows and value and lives from the farmers. Monoculture clears farmers from the land. Counties turn into company towns. It is claimed that companies penalise those growers who attempt to organize among themselves. Objectors are supplied with the worst fowl or the dregs from company feed silos. Suicide and self-harm results. But for those who would try to survive, there is medication with prescription opioids. From 2006 until 2012, according to The Washington Post, 76 billion opioid pain relieving pills were prescribed in the USA. There is also self-medication with illicitly acquired drugs, or non-prescription opioids, such as heroin or illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Such is the recourse to opiates that a public health emergency has been declared. Many rural residents working in agriculture have been directly impacted by opioid abuse, either through their own usage or by knowing someone, an acquaintance or family member, who is addicted to pain-relieving drugs, legal or illicit. It has been claimed that every fifteen minutes a baby is born after exposure to opioids in the womb. In West Virginia around 14% of babies are born with drugs in their bodies. The government failed to provide treatment and aid for drug addicts, preferring instead to criminalise users. And what difference between black market fentanyl supplies and legal industrial opioids, who act like drug cartels?
Poppied Dreams
In 2500BC, the Minoan name for opium was milk of Paradise. The white liquid that came from the poppy seedpod possessed latex-derived sleep-inducing qualities. Like warm milk before bed, this fluid escorted its consumer into dreamy rest. Opium and its extract, morphine, were given out more and more by physicians. Morphine promised that each could become Morpheus, could transform into something or someone disburdened of the day’s stresses, or that the world itself might become different to itself, morphed into otherness. Morpheus sleeps in a dark cave lined with poppies and other hypnagogic plants. Morpheus is the God of dreams, who shapes and reshapes himself and our worlds of reverie. Like his brothers, he was a winged black demon, and together with them, he formed the elements of dreams, the humans, plants, the animals, the stones, and in these dreams any form may appear and any thing may transform into another. Opium’s taking became a cure-all in Europe to kill the pain elicited by urbanizing life, once morphine could be isolated, and easily, cleanly administered, by the nineteenth century, doctors, medical professionals, came to prescribe opium more and more were set on transforming a patient conceived as disordered. These disorders were many. They included chronic ailments or conditions identified as suspect: masturbation, photophobia or nymphomania. This generosity led for some to addiction and there was a significant rise in self-administered injections of widely-available opiates and opiate-based patent medicine.
Milk of Hell
Milk is a mild opiate. The dairy proteins in cheese too act as mild opiates. Fragments of cheese protein, called casomorphins, fasten to the brain receptors that to which heroin and other narcotics attach. Each bite of cheese yields a tiny hit of dopamine. It brings us pleasure. We become addicts, some of us, anyway. Dairy has been placed at the fold between food and sleep: the warm cup before bed, the brain-agitating indulgence of nighttime cheese. Milk nourishes. Milk encourages sleepiness, through its drugging effects. Milk drips into dreams.
Milk is multiple entities, as might be predicted of a substance that has been with us, for us, of us, from the species’ very beginnings. Milk spills into multiple histories, and has in each moment the capacity to be various, to appear in various forms and with diverse properties. Milk may be liquid, solid, powder, emulsion, froth or foam. It can be, has been, poured, pressed, cast, extruded. It is formless, but may take on any form, any shape – the shape of vessels or the shapes pressed into it when in solid form as butter or ice-cream – blocks or coils, or even cartoonic characters and body parts. Milk may be indexical. There is, in its solid state, a populace of high-performing avatars of milk: Mr Whippy, Dairy Queen Blizzard, Quicky, Dreaming Cow, Happy Cow, Laughing Cow, Skinny Cow, all dairy icons that parade health and the abuse of health, nature denatured in kaleidoscopic colours with additives, with sometimes techno-scientific claims (e.g. the IQ promises of baby powder milks or the muscle building capacities of body builder wheys).
Milk drips too into social fabrics and adheres to language. Current idiomatic speech is replete with spilt milk, milksops, milch cows, cash cows, sacred cows, the milk-hearted, milktoast, the milk-livered, milking it, milking it for all it’s worth, why buy a cow when the milk is free. These are all disapproving expressions, concerned with weakness and exploitation. This dairy language indicates something of a contemporary dis-ease with all that evokes dependency, in an age dominated by a capital form that despises welfare, and thrives on precarity. Recent theories of biomedicine are now countenancing the idea that the precarious conditions of late capitalism creates permanent change in a body’s reception of insulin, making it more susceptible to obesity and syndromes such as diabetes. It is not the unregulated appetites of the lax poor that cause ill health – a blame to be apportioned to improperly acting individuals - but a social circumstance that marks itself on desires and the body. What work and interference does the soothing cup of milk, the intimate gulp of breastmilk, the pleasuring sugar-crammed ice cream, the processed cheese on a burger, do in the face of an uncertainty that persists? What work the opiate that makes another precarious day flow past, as easily as carefree, or as wild, as in a dream, indexing a somewhere-somewhen else of here?
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