Harm, Inevitable: America’s War on Drugs as Spiral in Zoë Lund’s Bad Lieutenant

Following Zoë Lund’s premature death (1962-1999), academic scholarship has merely acknowledged Lund’s long-term heroin use, overlooking its centrality to her creative output. Though best known for her starring role in the cult film Ms. 45 (Ferrara 1981), Lund was a prolific writer who produced screenplays, novels, poetry, and political manifestos. Throughout this corpus, Lund repeatedly returns to her lived experience as a Manhattan-based heroin user during the 1980s and ‘90s, consistently concerned with criminalized drug users’ bad trips and the threats to their survival. Since the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous’ addiction framework has centrally influenced how American drug discourse conflates bad trips with survival, treating drugs as ruinous and drug users’ willpower as corrupted. Conversely, Lund’s disillusioned writing neither moralizes against drug use nor makes generalizable claims about drug users’ psychology. Instead, her writing renders survival as political resistance, detailing how America’s War on Drugs violently produces drug users’ bad trips. For Lund, Manhattan is an inhospitable setting for drug users that is saturated by police brutality, imprisonment, enforced dope sickness, and HIV transmission due to unclean needles. This presentation will illuminate Zoë Lund’s drug politics, considering her one of America’s first significant harm reduction theorists.

 

Released in 1992, Bad Lieutenant (Ferrara) was Lund’s only screenplay to be produced as a feature film—she also acted in and helped edit the film. Credited as The Lieutenant, Bad Lieutenant’s unnamed central character is an amalgamation of the War on Drugs’ three central figures: police officer, drug dealer, and drug user. Throughout the film, The Lieutenant’s unceasing drug use and gambling perpetually assume greater risk, culminating with his public execution. Critics and scholars have repeatedly characterized The Lieutenant’s trajectory as a self-destructive ‘spiral,’ leveraging the term’s contemporary usage as an individuated decline in mental health. By contrast, this presentation will deindividualize The Lieutenant’s spiral, considering The Lieutenant as an allegory for the War on Drugs and the War on Drugs’ historical trajectory as a spiral. By rendering America’s War on Drugs as a spiral, Zoë Lund’s Bad Lieutenant excoriates American drug prohibition’s violent optimism by destabilizing its claims of historical progress.

 

Morgan Harper (they/them) is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Their dissertation – “Led Astray: Bad Trips, Harm Reduction, and Manhattan Drug Films” – considers a corpus of bad trip survival films produced by three Manhattan-based auteurs: David Wojnarowicz, Zoë Lund, and Khalik Allah. This dissertation analyzes how America’s War on Drugs produces destructive drug experiences through its inhospitable settings. “Led Astray” theorizes harm reduction as a pessimistic moral philosophy, treating these auteurs as significant contributors to harm reduction’s intellectual history.