Heroin and cocaine may enjoy popular stigma but “I bet there is no real heroin in Peterborough” says Christopher Smith, arguing it is not the drug but the “risks carried in the methods of administration” that are problematic.
According to Smith, in Ontario, many addicts use prescription painkillers or methadone. Methadone is a synthetic opioid the government sanctions as treatment, originally developed by Nazis after the Allies cut off their supply of opium.
Smith graduated Trent in 2001, but touched back down to Scott House at Traill College. Smith is between a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania, and a tenure track position that is on the other side of the world in Australia.
Smith’s lecture “The Intoxication of Narcotic Modernity” was recently published in article form in the Journal of Transgressive Culture. An evening with Smith was a fitting addition to what were known as the Thursday “Meth” Lectures hosted by the Cultural Studies TCP (Theory Culture Politics), the grad program that used to be called ‘Methodologies’.
Smith has excellent punk manners, wearing a t-shirt reading “Hustler of Culture”, the intense blink and stare of his icy blue eyes contrasted his hair - shaved on at the back and both sides save for an orange mane he continually repositions over his forehead to rest behind one of his ears as he speaks.
Smith is the prodigal love child of Cultural Studies bad boys Alan O’Connor and Ian McLachlan. Were it not for access to these professors Smith may have derailed as an undergraduate. He credited and thanked Alan and Ian “for where I am today with a tenure track job”.
“F---, holy s---, I lost my place” said Smith as he fiddled with his Powerpoint presentation. Smith explained how late capitalist urban space makes the human body a “gap-littered space of semiotic disorientation”. For Smith the evidence can be found in expressions; scattered, falling apart, going to pieces, being misfit, out of line, out of shape, all over the place, and carried away.
To Smith, the lines of capitalist consumer culture go in the straight and narrow direction. Smith argues the everyday experience of modernity is about “transit, speed, and direction” whereas on drugs, or “prosthetic media”, you can “depart the rail lines of capitalism’s conquered frontiers”.
Smith not only reads between these lines of modern expressions but also writes, “tracing the non-linear migration of slippage, the expressions grasping for air and unable to come up for breath signal the all-too-familiar thrashing beneath the surface of normative capitalist social relations symptomatic of the everyday abstractions subsumed as ‘poverty’, ‘homelessness’ and ‘addiction’”.
Smith has spent a lot of time on the streets studying the social consequence of urban planning and has published articles such as ‘Harm Reduction as Anarchist Practice’ in the Journal of Critical Public Health.
The professors and grad students in the room seemed to be quite pleased that one of their own was on a tenure track.
