The Role of Sex (Eros and Thanatos; Complexities of Speed and Sex)

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The Role of Sex(Eros and Thanatos Complexities
of Speed and Sex)

• PAUL SIMONS
• YALE UNIVERSITY, SCHOOL OF MEDICINE,
• DEPT. OF PSYCHIATRY, HARM REDUCTION UNIT
• MARIA G. MESSINA, PHD
• MICHAEL C. CLATTS, PHD
• LLOYD A. GOLDSAMT, PHD
• INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH ON YOUTH AT
  RISK
• NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH INSTITUTES,
  INC.
• 71 WEST 23RD STREET
• NEW YORK, NY
• paul.simons_at_yale.edu

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• HIV Risk Among MSM Speed Injectors
• NIH R01 DA152231
• Project Officer Dr. Elizabeth Lambert
• All the men who were interviewed

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Purpose

• To examine a number of problem statements in
  light of the work of several post-modern/critical
  theorists (Foucault, Marcuse, Deleuze and
  Guattari) in order to situate and observe sexual
  desire and the public health as they confront
  each other over the issues of methamphetamine use
  and sexuality among MSM. To conjecture as to the
  reasons for the seeming ineffectiveness of
  interventions among this population and to
  recommend a line of movement towards
  interventions based on harm reduction,
  non-abstinence, or anti-abstinence principles,
  techniques and messages.

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Problem Statement 1

• The impact of methamphetamine on daily
  functioning is less well studied, although it is
  known that abusers of the drug have impaired
  decision-making abilities. These could
  potentially affect treatment and relapse
  prevention efforts, as well as things like money
  management and driving performance.
• Dr. Terry Jernigan of the HIV Neurobehavioral
  Research Center of the University of
  California-San Diego (NIH News, August 2005)

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Problem Statement 2

• Because of the heightened sex drive and feelings
  of invincibility that crystal meth causes in
  users, the potential for unprotected sex, and HIV
  infection, increases dramatically. One of the
  ironic side effects of crystal meth is that while
  it increases libido. It also causes impotence,
  leading many men to become bottoms in anal sex
  acts... One recent study indicates that MSM in
  New York City and who use crystal meth are 2.9
  times more likely to contract HIV through
  receptive anal intercourse the MSM who do not use
  the drug.
• New York AIDS Coalition Position Paper The
  Crystal Methamphetamine Epidemic and Its Impact
  on HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment.

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Problem Statement 3

• "We've had ecstasy, pot, acid--but this is the
  crack of the gay community." Jason Riggs,
  spokesman STOP AIDS Project, San Francisco (23
  January, 2005, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Lisa
  Richardson and Lee Romney)

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Problem Statement 4

• " The curse of methamphetamine, also called
  speed, crank, tina, and tweak, is not unique to
  the gay male community. As addictive as crack,
  more powerful than ecstasy and cheaper than
  cocaine, methamphetamine has become the leading
  demon in drug treatment programs nationwide." (23
  January, 2005, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Lisa
  Richardson and Lee Romney)

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Problem Statement 5

• Resp If Im going to splurge or binge, its
  going to be a fun time, one or two nights. You
  ride it high and then you let it go. The binge
  was one nightI had it sex non-stop the whole
  binge. It was sexual arousal for the whole
  experience.

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Problem Statement 6

• Resp The last binge I bought a teener of speed
  and I started doing 50 cent shots.
•  
• Q What does that mean?
• Resp Half gram shots, half gram at a time. That
  was unbelievably fun. But I did too much and I
  couldnt move after a while and I got paralyzed
  from it.
•  
• Q Did you plan it?
• Resp I knew what I was doing. I knew I was going
  to get it from the Aryan Brotherhood and I was
  getting a teener of it. I knew I was going to be
  alone to do it. I planned it so nobody would be
  around and my lover would be away.

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Problem Statement 7

• Resp That was a week from that, we bought a
  little over a quarter, so it wasnt like a binge.
  Me and my sexual partner used that for uh, you
  know to enhance the sex.
•  
• Q So was it planned?
• Resp Yes it was planned and he was thinking
  about planning it again. I dont know, people
  really like what it does for their sex life.
• Q How has speed impacted your sex life?
• Resp Oh, uh its a new world actually, I dont
  know. Theres more stamina, theres more
  sensitivity, theres more feeling. It just seems
  more deeper for some reason, I dont know.

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Problem Statement 8

• Q Describe to me the high.
•  
• Resp Well okay um, when you first do the high
  there some excitement to it, its going to
  intensify your horniness, so you look forward to
  that situation. That youre going to make your
  horniness ten times strongertheres kind of like
  a ritual involved in it. So the ritual is like
  you hooked up with someone so you know theres
  going to be some fun. And then if this someone
  happened to have porno and they say yeah so that
  makes it a little bit more exciting. So theres
  going to be some porno. And what I mean by porno
  is a video tape. And then depending on which way
  were going to do it, whether were going to use
  the needle or going to smoke it. Sometimes
  depending on that way were going to do it can
  make the excitement more exciting.

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Problem Statement 9

• Resp Injecting is much more intense, much more
  intense. Sometimes its briefer. Its more of a
  physical, more of a sexual. I feel more sexual
  when I inject it than if I smoke it.

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Excursis I Michel Foucault

• The History of Sexuality Volume 1 The
  Introduction (Vintage Books, New York, 1990)

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Excursis I Foucault

• "Four figures emerged from this preoccupation
  with sex throughout the nineteenth century- four
  privileged objects of knowledge, which were also
  targets and anchorage points for the ventures of
  knowledge, the hysterical woman, the masturbating
  child, the Malthusian couple and the perverse
  adult." (p.105)

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Excursis I Foucault

• "There is not on one side a discourse of power
  and on the other side a discourse that runs
  counter to it. In short it is a question of
  orienting ourselves to a conception of power
  which replaces the privilege of law with the
  viewpoint of the military objective, the
  privilege of the prohibition with the viewpoint
  of tactical efficacy, the privilege of
  sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and
  mobile field of force relations...because it is
  one of the essential traits of Western societies
  that the force relationships which for a long
  time had found expression in war gradually
  became invested in the order of political power."
  (p102)

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Excursis II Marcuse

• Eros and Civilization A Philosophical Inquiry
  into Freud (Beacon Press, Boston, 1966)

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Excursis II Marcuse

• "Being is essentially the striving for
  pleasure...And the 'struggle for existence' is
  originally a struggle for pleasure culture
  begins with the collective implementation of this
  aim. Later, however, the struggle for existence
  is organized in the interest of domination the
  erotic basis of culture is transformed." (p. 125)

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Excursis II Marcuse

• "...while any form of the reality principle
  demands a considerable degree and scope of
  repressive control over the instincts, the
  specific historical institutions of the reality
  principle and the specific interests of
  domination introduce additional controls over and
  above those indispensable for civilized human
  association. These additional controls arising
  from the specific institutions of domination are
  what we denote as surplus-repression." (p.37)

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Excursis II Marcuse

• "The pleasure principle was dethroned not only
  because it militated against progress in
  civilization but also because it militated
  against a civilization whose progress perpetuates
  domination and toil. Freud seems to acknowledge
  this fact when he compares the attitude of
  civilization toward sexuality with that of a
  tribe or a section of the population ' which has
  gained the upper hand and is exploiting the rest
  to its own advantage. Fear of a revolt among the
  oppressed then becomes a motive for even stricter
  regulations.'"(p. 40)

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Excursis II Marcuse

• "In a repressive civilization death itself
  becomes an instrument of repression. Whether
  death is feared as constant threat, or glorified
  as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the
  education for consent to death introduces an
  element of surrender into life from the beginning
  - surrender and submission. It stifles 'utopian'
  efforts. The powers that be have a deep affinity
  for death death is a token of unfreedom, of
  defeat. (p. 236)

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Excursis III Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

• Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia
  (University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1983)

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Excursis III Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

• "We maintain that the social field is immediately
  invested by desire, and that libido has no need
  of any mediation or sublimation...There is only
  desire and the social, and nothing else italics
  theirs. (p. 29)

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Conclusion

• "In this struggle reason and instinct could
  unite. Under conditions of a truly human
  existence the difference between succumbing to a
  disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty or
  seventy, and dying a 'natural' death after a
  fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth
  fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not
  those who die, but those who die before they must
  and want to die, those who die in agony and pain,
  are the great indictment against civilization.
  Their death arouses the painful awareness that it
  was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It
  takes all the institutions and values of a
  repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of
  this guilt.
• Marcuse, Eros
  and Civilization (p. 236)