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Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I hope my thoughts didn’t come off as any kind of call-out. I just had a bad reaction to listening to the panel, and wanted to get all my thoughts down, mostly for myself. And maybe just to expose people to the harm reduction perspective.
The closest I can come to articulating what bothered me about the panel was the feeling that it was talking about drug users and assuming that drug users weren’t represented in the audience. I’m sure that wasn’t your intention, but that’s how it felt.
I believe that social and economic factors are more important than drug supply in drug epidemics. This is a very important issue for drug policy, but probably not relevant for Sherlock. Especially since the US market is peculiarly susceptible to manipulation by drug company “continuing education.”
I have a lot of thoughts on pain and the overprescription and underprescription of pain medication. Including thoughts on hospice care and assisted suicide. But again, probably not relevant to Sherlock. Except maybe to the question of whether it is ethical to prescribe pain medication to a gun shot victim with a history of drug use (I would say yes, but with careful monitoring to prevent overdose, but I am not a clinician).
In S1 and S2 I was frustrated with TPTB’s coyness about Sherlock’s drug use, but it left a space for me to imagine a coherent back story, and I think I filled it in with a lot of details from my and my friend’s lives (speaking of over identifying with a character). I could pretty much make sense of the drug use in S3 (I even wrote a meta about it) but TAB and S4 made no sense to me drug-wise. Drugs as magical plot device. But that is something that a lot of fans could probably say about lots of things in S4.
Drug use is an incredibly intimate issue for a lot of people, either because of their own history or because of a loved one. And I know that my experiences and politics are in no way universal. Even among people in recovery. I would love to be involved in TPP in any way, but I don’t want to present myself as any kind of expert.
I’m trying to articulate how I relate to drug use in fanfic. And I think the problem is that I actually want contradictory things from fanfic.
On the one hand I’m looking for something that resonates with my experience, where someone is exploring something about my life and doing it well. The feeling that something I didn’t even know I wanted to express has been expressed perfectly by someone else. I also read a lot of künstlerromane by women, and the best fanfic for me can do the same thing.
But I’m also looking for smut. Junky- and hooker-fic are usually focused on a lot my favorite tropes: vulnerable men, hurt/comfort, whump, the male gaze aimed at another man. It’s also personal. A lot of the people I was attracted to when I was younger were semi-homeless drug users and a lot of them had at least some experience in sex work. When I quit drugs and made a conscious decision to make my life less chaotic, part of that was not getting romantically involved with other people whose lives were totally chaotic. But reading fanfic is a place where I can still express that desire in a safe way.
But I just can’t read a lot of that fic. I don’t like it when the John rescues Sherlock from himself. I don’t like it when John starts out as a client and rescues Sherlock from sex work. I don’t like it when John forcibly detoxes Sherlock by locking him up somewhere (aka kidnapping). (You will also notice that some of these things appeared in the actual series, and I have Thoughts about that as well.)
The things that you need to move a romance plot along and to get your OTP together ring all my alarm bells when you apply them to drugs or sex work.
Which is a very different issue from are the drug details accurate. I am also more of a stickler than I want a be for drug accuracy. I can usually accept fictional drugs (I love sex pollen) but when people try to make something sound like a real drug and mess up I get irrationally annoyed.
In response to Three Patch Podcast #6
May. 8th, 2017 10:07 amI’m realizing, 4 years later, how much the queer round table in episode 6 changed my life. I think it was the first time that I realized that there was a thriving bisexual women’s community in fandom.
Being queer was a big part of my identity when I was in my teens and early 20s. When I was 17 (in 1991), I was in a queer youth group, and went out every weekend to either Rocky Horror or The Mix (an 18+ gay and lesbian club that didn’t card, also the first place I ever saw porn). In college I was a cochair of what was then called the BGL student association, and part of a queer peer counseling group. Me and my girlfriend marched bare breasted in the 1993 March on Washington (and I got a wicked sun burn).
But since I was 15 and first realized I was attracted to women, I have identified as bisexual. And in my 20s I felt pressure to give up fucking guys. That I was a bad feminist and a bad lesbian. And since I didn’t know where to find a bisexual women’s community, when my girlfriend and I broke up, I was floundering.
I was also doing a lot of drugs, and druggie instead of queer became my primary identification. There were a lot of bisexual and gender fluid folks in the Rocky Horror crowd and the associated coffee shop scene, and it seemed like a good fit. I started dating a bisexual guy whose gender expression was pretty similar to mine, but dating a guy set me apart from the lesbian community and I didn’t know how to bridge that gap.
And then once I wasn’t going to lesbian bars and clubs, it was a lot easier to meet men than women, and then I felt like I really didn’t have any right to identify as queer anymore.
I have always identified as bi, but it felt too complicated to be out about my sexual orientation when my partner was a man.
But through fandom I’ve connected with a lot of bisexual women who like me are married to men, and it’s given me more confidence to say that ending up with a man is consistent with being bisexual.
I’m now the cochair of my college LGBTQ+ alumni group, and though I still worry that I’m going to get push back from people who don’t want to a straight-married bisexual to be such a big part of the group, I feel all I can do is work to make the organization better and hope that people will accept my help.
In response to Three Patch Podcast #63
May. 2nd, 2017 09:03 amI want to chime in with the harm reduction/ drug policy reform perspective on the Drugs and Poisons panel. Note that my information is very US-centric.
Opioids were certainly over prescribed for in particular back pain. Drug companies seemed to be the only source of continuing education for doctors, and that’s a real problem. But also pain medication is cheaper than the effective treatment for back pain: physical therapy, which is not necessarily covered by Medicaid, depending on the state. There is also a disability epidemic, caused primarily by Welfare Reform, and people being pushed from cash assistance to disability.
There are a lot of causes for the opioid epidemic. And a lot of them have to do with underemployment and deindustrialization. The demographics of opiate use have changed, and people seem a lot more concerned now that it’s white people.
Also my understanding of the data is that only a small percentage of opioid users that turn to heroin were the ones originally prescribed the opioids.
I am more concerned about the overdose epidemic, and would like to see more focus on naloxone and opiate maintenance to fight overdose.
Opioids are not instantly addictive. Nothing is. I shot heroin off and on for five years, and was certainly psychologically addicted, but was never physically addicted. Studies suggest that the majority of people who use drugs are in that category, but they aren’t the patients that addiction specialist see.
When talking about about cocaine, I think you have to mention crack, which was once thought to be “instantly addictive”. Crack is still around and still being used, it’s just not in the news.
Meth is a drug that didn’t exist when ACD was writing, but i would be very interested to see a meth-using Sherlock. Forms of amphetamine are so widely prescribed for ADHD, that I think that meth is a drug that straddles acceptable and unacceptable usage.
My understanding is that when ACD was writing, injecting cocaine was seen as totally socially unacceptable, even though drinking and snorting cocaine were acceptable.
There is also a theory that the cocaine use was specifically toned down when the stories were printed in the US which was in the midst of a very racist cocaine panic. There was also racist associations with opium which was associated with Chinese immigrants, as opposed to to laudanum which was used by white people.
7% is pretty low. When I was injecting drugs, I aimed for each shot to be 0.05 to 0.2 ml. Historically, Holmes was probably injecting subQ, so the volumes had to be small. At 7%, that would be .0035 to .014 grams, which is very little.
Powder cocaine is very soluble in water. As is white powder heroin. Anything you can snort is water soluble. Smokable drugs (crack, Afghan brown heroin) are usually not water soluble but can be dissolved in an acidic solution. So, some drugs are heated to dissolve them, but drugs are also heated to kill bacteria.
One more comment about Sherlock Holmes romanticizing drugs. I am nervous any time someone talks about romanticizing drug use, because often it seems to mean any non-stigmatized portrayal. My drug use in my early 20s was damaging, but I am still, seventeen years later, trying to get over the stigma I felt as a drug user. I still feel embarrassed asking to use the bathroom in a public place, sure that they will assume I’m doing drugs. And I still second guess myself when I am trying to talk to medical professionals about pain, and often I try to avoid seeing a doctor if I think they are not going to believe me when I say I have a UTI or a back spasm or whatever. So I think that more nuanced portrayals of Sherlock Holmes as a flawed but brilliant drug-user are important.
Here is a very interesting podcast that covers a lot of the drug policy and media coverage issues: http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-04-14/
Also, I definitely recommend both Hallucinations and On the Move by Oliver Sacks. They give a really nuanced portrait of how a brilliant scientist can have an unhealthy relationship with drugs and then move on to focusing that intense passion on his work.
I am also open to answering specific questions people have about drug use in fic they’re writing.
In response to Three Patch Podcast #49
May. 13th, 2016 10:09 amI have a lot of thoughts about Sherlock and Mycroft.
And I guess I should say first that I don’t really like the Mycroft ex machine dynamic. I think it is based more on TPLoSH (where Holmes is totally out of his depth, and makes a huge mess of things his brother told him to stay out of) than anything in ACD canon. I’m willing to accept Sherlock fucking up literally everything but the work, but it makes me sad that in BBC Sherlock, he is always fucking up his work, the thing he is supposed to be a genius at.
But beyond the editorial decisions of TPTB, I also think that Mycroft and Sherlock’s relationship is really dysfunctional.
After S3, when people were kind of shocked my how normal Sherlock and Mycroft parents were, there was a lot of thoughtful discussion of Holmes family dynamics.
http://buffer-overrun.tumblr.com/post/104246784211/rachael-well-i-actually-have-a-question-about
There was also some discussion of how much of the bad dynamics had been set up solely between the brothers despite an otherwise loving family, but I can’t find the link to that.
The discussion of how Mycroft deals with Sherlock’s drug use also made me think about something the harm reduction activist Donald Grove said about enabling, “the weight it carries is within relationships between users and family members or loved ones who are invested in a mutual drama of control. It’s not about “oh I shouldn’t give him money, that’s enabling”. It’s about “I want to believe that someone else’s use is my responsibility or my fault”. It’s a condition which isn’t necessarily alleviated by changing actions, but by changing perceptions.“:
http://worn-smooth.tumblr.com/post/83537432691/no-matter-what-the-dictionary-may-say-enabling
Also, some of my favorite Mycroft & Sherlock fan art
http://buffer-overrun.tumblr.com/post/107003937869/meetingyourmaker-the-holmes-family-mycrofts
http://buffer-overrun.tumblr.com/post/136916225986/whimsycatcher-ill-bring-you-home-little
I’ve been thinking about the pool of survey respondants being more heterosexual and more cis than the AO3 census, and I am very interested in how that relates to the respondants’ age.
In terms of sexual orientation, the recent UK YouGov poll finds that younger people are less likely to identify as a Kinsey 0 than older people. The 2010 CDC data has similar results (though they didn’t use the Kinsey scale).
Just anecdotally, it seems like people use the framework that existed when they were in their late teens/ early 20s when deciding to self-identify as straight, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, etc.
I haven’t seen any data on gender identity, but I wonder if it follows a similar pattern (especially with genderqueer and nonbinary, which have only be talked about more recently).
Response to Three Patch Podcast #35
Apr. 3rd, 2015 10:03 amI was kind of dreading the drug use roundtable (my shoulders were literally around my ears as I was listening), but it was actually very well done (Surprisingly OK?)
I feel like implicit in what @basserist and eldritch-horrors were saying was the idea of representation. Like, obviously, people write fanfic for free. They are going to write what gives them pleasure, and they have no obligation to become investigative journalists to accurately represent drug use. But drug use is so stigmatized, and sometimes it feels like people are writing about me, and that they are not putting enough thought and care into it, and are falling back on damaging stereotypes. But usually I can just ignore the stuff that I know is going to piss me off.
Let me preface this by saying that I am leery of arguing on the internet, because it can get so mean so fast, and that I try to avoid getting caught up in Tumblr call-out culture. Then, let me say that I think I actually basically agree with you. And that I really like your writing. I particularly like the short piece about Sherlock relapsing and no one noticing.
So, that being said, here are my thoughts:
1) This may just be an issue of temperament, but I would much rather avoid bad drug fanfic than engage with it (and that’s pretty much my policy across the board on Tumblr social issues). Social media creates this weird world where public broadcasting and private conversations get short-circuited in unexpected ways, and the chance of stumbling across something terrible that that person would never actually say to your face is quite high. Though I will go out of my way to criticize bad representations of drug use in mass media (books,TV, movies, etc.)
2) You mentioned in the podcast that people’s research should include talking to someone with personal experience with drugs. But I am personally not willing to field people’s insultingly poorly researched questions about my history. I’m happy to point people in the direction of technical resources (e.g. the various Harm Reduction Coalition manuals and information sheets) and people are welcome to use anything I’ve already written as part of their research, but that’s pretty much the limit of my patience.
3) Part of the issue is that even among people who use (or have used) drugs, both their experiences and the narrative they tell about those experiences can vary wildly. It’s actually a lot easier to deal with someone who got their information from Wikipedia than someone who says, “I (or my son or my father or my 3rd cousin twice removed) used to be a junkie, and I know for a fact that all drug users are evil and manipulative.” And on such a fraught issue it’s hard to say anything nuanced (e.g. “I got really obsessive in my drug use and it distorted all my personal relationships, but I also had no idea what a normal relationship looked like,” or “I feel like my life is a lot better without speed and heroin, but sometimes I fall down a mental rabbit hole and it’s clear that my brain can get super screwed up even without drugs,”) without someone, on one side of the issue or the other, getting upset.
Taking this as an opportunity to try to organize my thoughts on this:
Sherlock Holmes in ACD canon:
- Cocaine was legal (or at least unregulated) when the early stories were written, but it was normally drunk in Vin Mariani or patent tonics, so injection was, even then, weird and medically suspect. Drinking cocaine means that most of it is destroyed in the liver before getting to the brain, so it is a much milder stimulant.
- Holmes’s explanation for his use - that his brain starts to tear itself apart when he’s bored - suggest a self-medication model
- Popular opinion on cocaine changed after the early stories were written (from an eccentricity to a vice) particularly in America, where Doyle wanted to get his stories republished
- Morphine is mentioned initially, but dropped from later stories, maybe because morphine became associated with addiction and vice earlier than cocaine
- In the later stories, Watson says that cocaine use was risking to derail his career, but this is never really demonstrated in the text
Things in Sherlock BBC that fanfic tries to explain or deal with
- Mycroft’s treats Sherlock (who by outward appearances is a brilliant and successful detective) like a child, and Sherlock is resentful
- What happened in all the years between college and meeting John?
- Did Sherlock meet the members of his homeless network when he was homeless?
- Sherlock is impulsive and thrill-seeking, unable to self-regulate, and cannot stand to be bored
- His celibacy suggests that he may have “given-up” sex along with drugs at some point in the past
Things I wish fanfic did differently
- A lot of the descriptions of both the subjective experience and the physical details of getting high, of cravings, of cocaine withdrawal seem poorly researched and don’t ring true. (This may seem petty, but I feel like a lot more good faith research goes into describing specific sex positions, firearms, shibari, etc. while pop culture tropes about drugs are taken at face value.)
- It seems weird to me that Sherlock is basically never shown smoking crack or heroin (even though UK heroin is brown, the smokable form).
- I am really uncomfortable with Sherlock being forcibly detoxed (e.g. by John or Lestrade) in ways that are essentially kidnapping, especially if Sherlock is later grateful. Sherlock being put in rehab against his will by Mycroft is still problematic, but is not actually unlawful restraint.
- I hate to hear John (a doctor) use the word junky. Unfortunately, this showed up in S3, so it’s now canon.
- Sherlock not being allowed to take pain medication when he’s seriously injured. This is unfortunately a serious issue in the real world.
- I personally find it hard to imagine Sherlock (with his mysterious disregard for where money comes from) having been homeless or doing sex work by necessity (as opposed to for research) but I have seen this scenario written well, usually involving Mycroft blocking Sherlock’s access to a trust fund.
- Only tangentially related, but a lot of the writing about sex work is pretty disturbing, particularly the Pretty Woman, Sherlock being rescued by John the john scenario
Fic recs:
Falling, Flying. (All My Love on Paper Planes) by Queertrees
Can’t Rewind Now We’ve Gone Too Far by Basser
I Hear Those Voices That Will Not Be Drowned by Eldritchhorrors
One Day at a Time and Ava Watson verse by KeelieThompson1(no subject)
Jan. 1st, 2015 09:55 am— By Fans 4 Fans (Producer). (2014, November 15). Lustful Cock Monster [Episode 30]. Three Patch Podcast. Podcast retrieved from http://www.three-patch.com/2014/11/13/1496/ 18:30-19:23
(no subject)
Dec. 4th, 2014 10:13 amShefa:Oh, yeah. Oh, they’re generally in jail or dead. Um, a low functioning sociopath doesn’t have the skill to fool people all that well. But, Sherlock? He’s not a sociopath of any kind. He’s got some narcissistic traits.
Caroline:I was going to ask you about narcissism.
Shefa: You know, again, diagnosing a personality disorder is one of those things you want to do really, really carefully. But, sociopath? No. He probably was this very defiant kid, who I’m sure got into some trouble. And what happens with these diagnoses is, you get these kids who are oppositional defiant. Sometimes they have ADHD. So, they’re kind of all over the place. They don’t follow through very well. They don’t follow rules very well. And if they’re gifted, they’re very creative in the ways they don’t follow rules. And they don’t really think they need to follow rules. So, when they get older, the kind of trouble they get into gets bigger and bigger. And so they end up, some of them, you know, if you don’t get any intervention and any help. They end up law breaking. So, once you get into law breaking, you get into the anti-social personality disorder realm, which is really what they mean when they’re talking about sociopathy. There’s no diagnosis “sociopathy” or “sociopath”; it’s “anti-social personality disorder”.
Rachael: Mhm.
Shefa: So, you can imagine Sherlock being defiant and not really caring about expectations, including those law things …
Drinkingcocoa: What are those law things?
Shefa: … you gotta follow. Just, like, what do I have to pay attention to that for. That’s boring. But that doesn’t go over well with the police, so I imagine somewhere along the line somebody suggested that he was a sociopath, and that got certain people to treat him with more caution, or to back off. It’s the kind of thing that makes people stop talking.
Drinkingcocoa: Wahhhhw.
Shefa: And perhaps leave you alone.
Drinkingcocoa: Oh the relief.
Shefa: Mh-hmh. Yeah. If I tell you I’m a high functioning sociopath, you will go away, because what I’m telling you is, I don’t want to talk to you. And then when you act obnoxiously, people just nod their heads and say well he’s a sociopath, what do you … you know.
Drinkingcocoa: It makes it a little more room for him.
Shefa: It makes a lot more room for him. Absolutely."
—
By Fans 4 Fans (Producer). (2014, December 1). Holmes for the Holidays [Episode 31]. Three patch podcast. (56:29-58:43) Podcast retrieved from http://www.three-patch.com/2014/12/01/episode-31-holmes-for-the-holidays/
Three-patch trying to make some sense out of the garbled pop psychology of Sherlock BBC.
Also going a long way towards explaining why so many of us identify with Sherlock.
In response to Three Patch Podcast #9
Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:14 am“I think [Sherlock] might have had some sort of physical contact that was sexual in nature but without mutual desire and ease and pleasure it’s not exactly a loss of virginity to me, unless it was actually going through with all sex acts and there was some ambiguity about it, but if we’re talking partial sexual contact and he was doing it with some sort of disconnected feeling or experimentally only, and if it led to the kind of dissonance he has in interpersonal relationships, I don’t feel like that’s really loss of virginity.” (Drinkingcocoa, “Sorting Fucking Sherlock” segment)
So, I think I understand where Drinkingcocoa is coming from. Probably a lot of us look at Sherlock and his particular set of issues – with intimacy, with his brother, with eating, with drugs, with his moods, his cat-line concept of personal space, his combination of peacock flirtation and disconnection from his body – and worry about a history of neglect or physical or sexual abuse. And I guess the (current) official back story is that he’s just a spoiled brat. But I think the idea of abuse resonates for enough people that when you ask, “Is Sherlock a virgin?” you have to be careful about how you define virginity. Nobody wants to give more power to the noxious idea of virginity as some kind of currency that can be taken or stolen. But I think if you go too far in the other direction, you end up excluding a lot of the awkward teenage experimenting, that is not necessarily in the context of a healthy, loving relationship, but that most people would probably consider sex.
Drinking cocoa had another post [which I’m still trying to track down] where she talks about Sherlock’s emotional development in TSo3, and how she thinks that Sherlock is a virgin because he didn’t have the skills and self-knowledge to be emotionally close to anyone. Which, again, I think depends on a very narrow definition of sex. Because, in my experience, if you’re a weird, abrasive, socially awkward teenager used to thinking of yourself as monstrous and undesirable, and you suddenly realize that older men (unlike your classmates) do find you attractive (because you’re young, but also because you’re not as unattractive as you thought), it doesn’t take a lot of social or emotional skills to have sex.
Imprinting on Sherlock Holmes
Feb. 1st, 2014 09:44 amI really think I must have had some early sexual imprinting on Sherlock Holmes as my brilliant, abrasive, emotionally unavailable, drug-using romantic ideal. I had such a ridiculous crush on the character from the moment I read Hound of the Baskervilles when I was 11, and then had to go back and read everything, and I was horrified/ fascinated with the drug use and the smoking (which honestly seemed almost as exotic and forbidden to me at that point). In the first in series of cross-dressing costumes, I dressed as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween when I was 12 (though trying to buy a pipe was kind of a challenge, even if I did look older than I was).
But all of that is kind of cute. Like, I was such a nerd I had a crush on a literary character.
But I really do wonder about the imprinting thing, because I definitely have a type, and that type is skinny and druggy and poorly socialized. The first guy I slept with, who was ten years older than me, an alcoholic and a former speed-user. My first girlfriend who didn’t actually do any drugs but had the kind of bruise-purple circles under her eyes that made me think “tweaker” the first time I saw her. And then I ended up sitting next to her at Rocky Horror one night and we covered each other in hickies. And Danny. And Kate. And Michael who seemed dangerously unstable and who was patently unable to cope without drugs, who got me a copy of the Encyclopedia Sherlockiana in that early phase of our relationship when we were getting each other gifts that weren’t drugs. And after Michael died, Ben, who seemed like my idea of a nice, safe guy, and it took a few years for me to realize that maybe it was a problem then he did speed once a week with his friends and that the one time I tried to drop by unexpectedly and see him on a Tuesday, the one time I actually saw him spun, he was weird and cold and mean and really pissed off that I was there. And, when, on the cusp on 30, I made a conscious decision to look for someone who would be a good co-parent, the first thing that got me interested in Tobias was that he’d been selling drugs in college. And, luckily, it turned out there was very little overlap in our drug histories (because I’ve never liked weed) though we probably did drink way too much red wine the first couple years we were dating.
