A Scanner Darkly

“Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.”

Freck, desperate for his next fix, meets Donna, his source, to score more Substance D. This, in essence, is the life of a doper in Dick’s—and presumably our contemporary—universe. The score, the fix, and the subsequent high are all that matter. Every resource in a user’s life is geared toward this single goal, and their happiness is measured by this single metric.

‘“We do not know as yet,’ he continued presently, more calmly, ‘specifically who these men—or rather animals—who prey on our young, as if in a wild jungle abroad, as in some foreign country, not ours.’”

Arctor, speaking to an Orange County Lion’s Club (a service organization), tries to elicit sympathy for users, portraying them as victims of a concerted effort to ensnare them in a web of drug use and then to vilify them as “commies” or less than human. The effort is met with stunned silence, so he returns to the official agency script and demonizes them as “animals” seeking to corrupt and destroy America’s youth. The rhetoric is classic: dehumanize the enemy so that any punishment or harsh tactic can be justified in the name of saving the innocent.

“Don’t kick their asses after their on it. The users, the addicts. Half of them, most of them, especially the girls, didn’t know what they were getting on or even that they were getting on anything at all. Just try to keep them, the people, any of us, from getting on it.”

After concluding his speech to the Lion’s Club, Arctor returns to the dais for a final comment, one final plea for empathy. The real villains, he argues, are the pushers and dealers who get kids hooked on drugs in the first place by slipping them “some reds in a glass of wine” (20) and then injecting them with a toxic mixture of harder drugs after they’ve passed out.