CIAO DATE: 03/06

The Play of Pharmaceuticals in Las Vegas

Abstract

Las Vegas gambling addicts describe their city as an environment of intensified technological stimulation and themselves as organisms particularly vulnerable to this stimulation. “It feels dangerous out there. Certain things could trigger me to play at any moment,” said a man at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting. In public spaces like gas stations, pharmacies, and supermarkets, gamblers navigate a risky course through a matrix of solicitous technologies including blinking lights, automatic cash machines, and electronic gambling devices like video poker, a game whose addictive properties have earned it the title “the crack cocaine of gambling.” At the same time that such technologies compete to bind and profit from human impulses, an array of therapeutic technologies promises to unbind them— either by blocking or numbing stimulation, by arming the person with the means to resist stimulation, or by providing a less toxic substitute stimulation. These technologies include behavior modification tools, impulse management techniques, self-help mantras, Twelve Step meetings, internet recovery sites, and pharmaceutical regimens—for anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder, and mood disorders. At a local gambling addiction clinic, clients were encouraged to use the “daily craving scale” to measure, monitor, and ultimately modulate the fluctuations of their urges. At a hospital across town, video poker players were recruited to participate in a drug trial that aimed to discipline their impulses through a course of the anti-psychotic Zyprexa.

Although the goals of game design and addiction therapeutics are seemingly at odds—to trigger play, and to stop it—the entertainment industry and the recovery industry are similarly oriented to the human being as an organism whose behavior can be activated or deactivated by external technologies. Therapeutic techniques such as impulse management and pharmacological treatments are in this sense continuous with the gaming devices whose effects they aim to counter. In keeping with the tendencies of modern industrialized culture, people seek solutions to the problems produced by a given technology in other technologies. Technology is a medium for self-destruction and self-care.

This chapter focuses on technology as the common pathway of addiction and of addiction recovery in the case of Las Vegas video-poker addicts. Drawing on ethnographic narratives and anonymous postings on internet recovery sites, I address the sometimes surprising ways that gamblers use pharmaceutical technologies. Pharmaceuticals function not only as tools of recovery but as intensifiers of the addictive escape that gambling machines afford; at times gamblers enlist drugs to reduce cravings and reinforce therapeutic measures, at other times to amplify or enhance the effects of gambling machines. Their use of pharmaceuticals in the latter case follows a supplementary logic that deviates from the normative logic of the pharmaceutical industry, in pleasurable yet potentially destructive ways. Much like Derrida’s pharmakon, pharmaceuticals are simultaneously curative and poisonous; there is crossover between the therapeutic and the toxic. An exploration of the ways that gamblers incorporate different technologies into their addiction and their recovery grounds my critique of a pharmaceutical logic that tends to disavow its own continuity with the phenomena it seeks to cure.

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