If Burning Man Dies, Is There A Will?

Is this it for Burning Man? If they don’t get enough donations, there will be no future.

In this post I will provide a brief overview of the Civil War dividing the community, with multiple competing Burn night events; crunch the numbers with some financial analysis; and share some comments from other Burners about the current situation.

They are depending on the extraordinary generosity of “their” community…but what are they prepared to give in return?

So far it appears that Radical Inclusion does not extend to allowing We The Burners expected to fund this Giga-LARP to see what has actually been going on with their financial situation. The figures are public data and the charitable purpose of the organization is to spread Burner Culture around the world. So why not spread the public data to the Burners? Why do we only have 2018 financials to look at when it’s September 2020 and unless we raise $1.5 million in the next month, it’s all over?

This year a bunch of tickets were sold in the earlier days of the COVID-19 outbreak. Then it looked like events were being canceled all across the globe. How would They enforce social distancing when 10% of Black Rock City’s population visit the Orgy Dome alone? Could the Federal Government legitimately host the largest event on their land during COVID-19 Lockdowns?

Of course not. Burning Man was always going to be canceled, like every other big event in the world this year. The question is: will it ever come back? If the Org dies, could Burning Man live on?


Which Burning Man Is Best For Burning Man?

The different responses to the crisis from the Org and the Burner community have now created a civil war.

Black Rock City? Ocean Beach? Baker Beach? Fly Ranch? BRCvr? Some of these events were open for any Burner to attend for free. Some were theoretically free, but subject to technical challenges. Some were shut down by the authorities. Others were ultra-exclusive, invitation-only.

Who had the most fun? Who changed the world the most? What is the yardstick by which a “true Burn” should now be measured?

Source: burningman.org, Sep 2020

Sorry, Sunshine. If you really are about Burning Man, you’d know that the livestream has been available for free on YouTube to any member of the public for many years now.

This year they shifted it to Instagram. Where are all the home burns?

The BJ said there were “thousands” of home celebrations and shared a “highlight reel” of 200 of them:

It’s not quite the same. Maybe they should have come up with a hashtag. I struggled to find any on YouTube other than the erstwhile Halcyon:


Burn The Pixels

It’s funny how this year’s theme of “The Multiverse” (announced October 2019 right before the release of Microsoft’s HoloLens 2) seemed to presciently predict the move to Virtual Reality that synchs up with Silicon Valley’s latest desired direction. Enter BMorg’s new “community crisis” where they can work their “Civic Responsibility” public shaming attack vector into the promotion of their new online portal – Kindling. Just in time for Playstation 5, XBox X/S and Oculus Quest 2…

Image: Diva Marisa, burningman.org

Virtual Burning Man happened, aka BRCvr – where the Principle of “Immediacy” means you can instantly teleport in to speak to your friends in a cloud at the Temple.

Supposedly 51,000 “digital devices” tuned in for the virtual Man Burn(s).

Did you go? How was it? Did the DJs play on time? Did you have a “Peak Experience™”? Please tell us in the comments.

Burning Man’s newest project “Kindling” is a platform for live events and virtual get-togethers. This is a site where you can explore the various Bunring Man multiverses (multiversi?)

Some of this stuff looks kinda cool. How much of this year’s budget went to building these virtual reality platforms?

Larry Harvey famously said “Black folks don’t like to camp as much as white folks”. Things have moved on now we have the multiverse, and now BMorg says “Black Lives Matter”.


Radical Exclusivity

An elite group of 25 sherpas production staff and 10 owners volunteers gathered at Flysalen to burn The Man while wearing masks and practicing social distancing.

Although linked from the Burning Man Project official web site, this video is Unlisted – perhaps because of the negative ratio.

Who paid for this giant effigy, complete with fireworks and other pyrotechnic techniques? Traditionally the budget to construct and erect The Man is well into six figures.

This event was livestreamed on Instagram, but for some reason not on the Burning Man Project’s official YouTube channel.

For an IG account with 1m+ followers to only get 11,000 or so likes from the main event that brings those followers together is a disappointing ratio – implying almost 99% of followers did NOT like it. Compounding that even further, there would be few social media posts in history that garnered 11k likes and 80k views but only a dozen comments – and not a single negative one. Clearly, the BMorg Ministry of Propaganda censors have been out in full force, fooling no-one.

The Burning Man Project reassured us “we will always Burn The Man”, but Burners were skeptical:

Magnum offered one of the best comments I’ve ever seen at Burningman.org:

Source: burningman.org, Sep 2020

Getting Down on the Beach

Many SF Burners decided to go to Ocean Beach for a large celebration, perhaps 3000 people. The authorities then closed the carpark so San Francisco’s largest beach could not be used at all on Labor Day Weekend.

San Francisco’s mayor admonished these Burners as “absolutely reckless and selfish”.

No data has been shared on how many contracted COVID-19 from attending the event, so I’m going to assume it was Zero.

Source: SFgov.org

Not every politician was a hater:

A smaller group went to Baker Beach, officially the home of the first ever Burning Man (though we’ve shown evidence that earlier effigy burns had occurred at Ocean Beach and also in Sausalito). This Man was displayed but not burned.

Source: vjay3, Reddit
Source: Reddit
Snake Theater Beelzebub Burn, Sausalito 1979. Image: Bruce Forrester
Wicker Man Burn by Elder Mech, Ocean Beach 1985

Radical Self Reliance

A Rebel Alliance of Burners chose to show up at the Playa anyway. Just people camping, with sound systems and glowy shit. According to a video posted at the Reno Gazette-Journal somewhere between 2,000-5,000 people showed up at “Not Burning Man”.

Reminds me of my first Burn in 1998. They had aircraft, art cars, flamethrowers, and even port-a-potties!

Image: Tally California, YouTube

What do we need the Borg for?

The argument has always been that we need the Org because without bureaucracy, people will die. However this was one of the rare years in recent history where nobody died at Burning Man.

Well, there’s one thing we know we can rely on the Org for: hitting Burners up for donations. They’re at it again now, causing huge controversy.

Comments are disabled, because Radical Inclusion and Civic Responsibility and Immediacy and Communal Effort and Radical Self-Expression and stuff. There is only one Principle that matters now: G(r)IFTING.

The guilt trip is strong – “if you want us to live, we need $1.5 million by the end of October…this is not a drill”.

You could be forgiven for interpreting this as they need to raise $1.5 million or the event will not survive. You have to read the fine print and click through to get the actual information.

What they are really asking for is $12 million just to get them through January – March 2021. Even though the previous information we have, when they were definitely having a Burning Man later that year AND paying for event-related expenses left over from the previous one was $10 million for January – April 2020.

Source: burningman.org, Apr 2020

That’s right, they are planning on INCREASING their expenses despite not having an event – while claiming they have cut their budget 51%.

What they are saying is that even without putting on Burning Man it will cost them $32.3 million in 2020. Their “worst case scenario” without building Black Rock City, still requires a burn rate of more than $2 million per month. Por quoi?

Burning Man is so much more than a week in the dust. Our nonprofit organization spends the other 51 weeks sharing the 10 Principles, supporting community initiatives, funding artists, and elevating Burning Man culture

Source: burningman.org May 28 2020

So much more? Like, $2 million+ a month more? What is the world getting for that?

In April they told Billboard:

The vast majority of ticket revenue is spent producing Black Rock City. Some of our largest expenses include staffing, fees paid to the federal, state and local government agencies, heavy equipment rental, and porta-potties (for more details check out this pie chart of expenses).

So if there is no Black Rock City in a year, wouldn’t the “vast majority” of expenses no longer be an issue? There are no Federal, state or local government fees, no heavy equipment rental, no porta-potties, no commissary, and no event-related staffing. In their official reports they say they have around 1000 staff, but how many of those are for the event and how many are for the charitable purpose of spreading Burner culture? If spreading Burner culture gets paused for a year or two but the event survives, isn’t that better than spreading Burner culture the same way as before until you burn through all the cash and the event never happens again?

In April they told us they “Now we’re in the process of implementing salary cuts, making layoffs, and slashing expenses.” So what happened there? How many were laid off? How were they able to reduce expenses?

Source: burningman.org, May 2020

If your revenues drop 90%, you need to slash your staff by 90% and the rest of your expenses by 90% – at least. This is Business 101. Black Swan events require a re-think of the business plan.

How many fixed and variable expenses were they able to slash? How many projects were put on hold, and how many new projects were initiated? Fundraising expenses were just over $900,000 in 2018 – has this been cut?

In 2018 the amount of non-Black Rock City revenue was about $3 million. What’s happened to all that?

What did they sell in 2020? We know about the Directed Group Sale, although the Billboard article states that all they did was a first “FOMO Sale”. Did the Low Income sale happen? How many $140 vehicle passes did they sell – 20,000?

BMorg said in April “If everyone who bought a DGS or FOMO ticket asks for a full refund, we would be refunding approximately $22 million in ticket revenue”. As usual, you have to parse the wording carefully. Tickets are not the only thing they bill their customers for. Here’s our estimate:

Of the 39,000 tickets sold, 6,000 donated all or some to the Burning Man Project. This only resulted in $3 million. 3,000 more Burners donated another $1 million.

Source: burningman.org, July 2020

Then you have another $3 million in major gifts and $2.7 million in Federal government COVID assistance loans, plus donations since July – bringing the total to at least $10 million. Without “the vast majority” of expenses going to Black Rock City…surely this should be enough to survive at least a year? Why did they need to spend ANOTHER $10 million on top of that, burning through the entirety of their cash reserves in a matter of months? Why do they plan to keep spending money at this level?

Source: burningman.org “Big Picture”

What happens if their fundraising only raises (say) $10m for Q1 2021? What happens if the plague still exists in 2021 and not every Burner has been vaccinated? Are we going to have to donate $12 million every quarter in perpetuity just to keep their web site going?

$12 million in a quarter works out to $48 million a year. Their 2020 annual budget was $53.3 million. What happened to the 51% cut?

Their 2019 Annual Report says the “overhead” of the charity is 20.99% – just under $10 million for a year. 51% budget cut should get this down to $5 million, but you could argue that things could be slashed even further than that if no event is being put on for 12 months or more.


Crunching the Numbers

Source: Burning Man Project 2019 Annual Report

Since we don’t have 2019 numbers from the IRS, I’ve just taken the financial information provided in the 2019 Annual Report. If you read the tiny sideways fine print it explains that these are actually the 2018 numbers.

History suggests that every year revenue, payroll and profit tax-free cash surplus goes up.

With no more Burning Mans to plan, everyone working from home, and a financial crisis requiring millions of dollars of community help…surely somebody should do the books?

While not precise, the cumulative picture since The Burning Man Project became a 501(c)3 tax-exempt “non-profit” on January 1 2014 is certainly illustrative.

They’ve taken in more than a quarter of a billion dollars over 6 years, and paid out less than $10 million in grants – of which a large proportion went to infrastructure items like The Man, Man Base and Temple.

The Board paid themselves more than they paid the artists. And my understanding is that most Board members are doing the job for free.

Source: Burning Man Project 2019 Annual Report

The “overhead ratio” is stated as 20.99%. Presumably this is a percentage of revenues. Black Rock City is 80.1% (of expenses). With 2020 budgeted expenses of $53.3 million, this should be about $42.7 million. Call me crazy but if you don’t create Black Rock City for a week why would you have Black Rock City expenses? Even if there are some, why would they be more than a million dollars or two?

A more standard calculation of a charity’s “overhead” is how much gets taken in as revenues, and how much is given out in grants. From the cumulative data (ignoring 2020 and assuming 2019 is the same as 2018), this figure is 96%.

For every $1 you give the Burning Man Project, they give 4 cents out in art grants, keep 8.5 cents in profit, and spend 88 cents on overhead.


Radical Transparency

Burning Man were very pleased in 2015 when Philanthropy.com called them “An Unlikely Leader in Transparency”. As a businessman with an accounting degree who has looked at thousands of corporate financial statements in my life, I would say any leadership from the Org in regards to transparency is indeed unlikely.

Source: Burning Man Project 2019 Annual Report

The CEO’s commentary for the 2019 Annual Report said they handed out $1.4 million in grants in their Honoraria, Global Art Grant and Community Grant programs. If revenues were $48 million, this is less than 3%. Why the big drop from 2018? Most likely this is the cost of “internal” art projects like The Man and Man Base.

The math to calculate “grants” was altered several years back to include the construction of The Man, Man Base and surrounding sculptures, and some of the Temple costs (see Follow The Money, March 2016). They can’t hold the event if they don’t build The Man, so that should be considered Program Cost rather than a Grant. It used to be itemized as a line item in the Afterburn Reports, now it is all very murky.

“Burning Man Arts” is listed at 7.74%. I can’t reconcile that number to anything in the Form 990, so your guess is as good as mine how that’s calculated and what it actually means.

BMorg are suing the Federal Government in order to stop a FOIA request to reveal the structure of their ticket sales, something that has been redacted in previous FOIAs.

Source: Bureau of Land Management, via FOIA

They said in a Court filing in the Northern District of California that “public disclosure of the Revenue Report is tantamount to public disclosure of Burning Man’s entire pricing structure, which is one of Burning Man’s most sensitive and private business details.” Except that it’s a tax-exempt charity, not a business, and its financial information is supposed to be publicly available. Even if it were a business, the reason for commercial secrecy is to maintain competitive advantage; this event has no competitors. Not only that, but their ticket and pricing structure is disclosed publicly on their web site.

We have previously been able to establish that they oversell tickets well beyond their official maximum capacity.

Why should the number of VIP tickets to the largest event on Federal land be treated as a State Secret? Are they providing inaccurate information on their own web site about how many FOMO and how many DGS tickets they sell? What is the difference between “approximately” and “actually”?


Fuck Yer Community! P.S. Give Us Money!

In times of difficulty the community comes together: Civic Responsibility, Communal Effort, Gifting. Sadly, the community who turned this event from some Cacophonous camping to one of the world’s most famous and popular raves has been decimated under the Era of Charity.

People who gave their heart and souls to Burning Man, who made it their life’s work, who played pivotal roles in it becoming the success it is today…can barely even get any DGS tickets for their camp these days, having been shunted aside for glamorous and wealthy Instagram “influencers” flying in on the Org’s private airline to stay in $25,000 hotel rooms with porcelain toilets.

Flushing toilet at hotel camp, 2014

Why shouldn’t the tourists pay? Why does it have to be the sherpas?

Why not just roll the 2020 ticket sales forward into 2021? If 2021 is canceled to, keep them valid for 2022? If Burners want refunds, let them sell their tickets through STEP – where BMorg still gets to earn incremental revenue from handling, shipping and other fees? This would seem to be a simple solution that works for the Burners, even if it would still require some belt-tightening from the Org and possibly some of their “changing the world” projects to go on the back-burner for a year or two. Have another DGS sale in 2021 and forget about the Main Sale. Keep Burning Man for the Burners.

$1.5 million would be a lot of money for any charity to raise in a hurry, let alone an arts project. However, it’s chump change for Burning Man. I’m told by reliable sources that the Google guys have spent more than that just for art installations in their camps. Some camps have $5 million just in art cars. In the past BMorg Board members like Chip Conley and Jim Tananbaum have allegedly had camp budgets higher than that. The New York Times wrote about $2 million Burning Man camps in 2014.

Should We The Burners get our COVID stimulus and use it to support Black Rock City, the annual week-long temporary creation of the Burning Man Project? Or should we use it to support the “other” activities of the year-round staff, even if Black Rock City can’t be built for another few years? What about all the people whose homes just burned down in the worst fire season in California history? Are they less worthy than the team at the Org that’s making the world a better place on six-figure salaries?


Where There’s No Way, There’s a Will?

In March CEO Marian Goodell told us our community would be fine because Radical Self Reliance:

Like you, we’ve been watching with alarm and growing dread as the coronavirus has spread around the globe. And this week, it hit home hard for all of us at our San Francisco office, as residents of California were ordered to shelter in place for at least three weeks.

It might not surprise you though to learn that for many of us, sheltering in place wasn’t that hard of a mental reach — we already know and practice how to provide for ourselves and others. So we dusted off our playa shopping lists, hung up some blinky light strings, and got set to be home for a while.

Our extended community has in a very real way been practicing for this moment for years — how to provide for ourselves in a difficult environment, and then how to take care of each other and those in need. Just like on the playa, once you’ve provided for your own basic needs, the impulse we’re seeing so many have next is, “Who can I help? How can I contribute?”

Source: burningman.org, Mar 2020

As usual, the promises were flowery and exciting. Burners were going to solve coronavirus AND climate change:

To that end, over the next several months, we’ll be rolling out a series of updates, suggestions, and new tools, for how we will safely and responsibly come together at the end of this summer. (If someone has a design for a DIY foot pump hand-wash station, for example, we’d love to see it.)

Some have asked what if anything this means for our long-term sustainability plans. The short answer is we need to walk and chew gum at the same time. Climate change threatens the same scale of broad, deep impacts as the coronavirus, albeit over a longer time scale, and also offers similar choices to each of us as to how we acknowledge, and accept personal responsibility, for our role as a member of our global community to help solve that crisis as well.

We intend to make the annual event and global community an ever-evolving laboratory of innovation and experimentation, where the best ideas can be tried, refined, and shared in an open and collaborative way.

Source: burningman.org, Mar 2020

Six months later, what happened? What are the new tools and ideas that we can use to get through this difficult time? Virtual reality? New machines for washing hands?

If Burning Man collapses because they can’t support $18 million a year in annual salaries and consulting fees from $10 million in donations and government bailouts…what happens to all their assets? The brand, the “Burner Profiles” corporate database, the multi-million dollar real estate holdings, the royalties from movies, books, photo shoots & other commercialization of intellectual property, the stock they’ve been Gifted, the millions of dollars of cash in the bank?

The trademarks are valued on the books at $300,000. It seems a little low for a party bringing in a cool quarter billion every 6 years. They’ve spent way more than that on legal fees fighting to defend the trademarks. Goodwill is on the books at $4.2 million. This relates to the initial transaction where Black Rock City LLC got absorbed by the Burning Man Project and Decommodification LLC was spun out as a private company ostensibly controlled by the 6 official founders (although the publicly-available paperwork said something different) that owned all the IP. Technically, amortizing intellectual property over time is acceptable accounting practice. In reality, the few millions paid to buy Burning Man back off the 6 founders looks cheap. They made more than that since just in vehicle passes! The value of the intangible assets has increased dramatically.

Who gets it? Can Elon Musk or Sergey Brin step in and pick it all up for cents on the dollar? Will it be handed back to Stanford or DARPA?


Is More Gifting the Only Idea?

Here are some suggestions for them. These things could be cheesy (but Burning Man survives), or you could tap into what is probably the world’s greatest creative community for ideas and contributions to solve the current problems in a cool way that makes the event sustainable and able to grow even bigger and better in the future.

  1. Sell art – you have a community of artists and global audience of art enthusiasts
  2. Pre-sell tickets to future events
  3. Sell tickets to COVID-friendly events in the present
  4. Sell tickets to electronic gatherings in the multiverse
  5. License the brand
  6. Sell merch
  7. Sell Zoom calls with curated groups
  8. Sell advertising
  9. Sell corporate sponsorships
  10. Paid directorships
  11. Pre-sell VIP tickets to Commodification Camps
  12. Sell camp spots on AirBnB
  13. Sell timeshares
  14. Come up with a new and more expensive type of vehicle pass, “RV pass”
  15. Pre-sell Airline Tickets
  16. Pay-per-view Virtual Reality regional events
  17. Distributed fundraising – let the global Burner community run their own fundraisers
  18. Have a smaller event at Fly Ranch that requires less of a year-round team
  19. Big-ticket items at the Charity Auction
  20. Sell plant and equipment
  21. Rent plant and equipment to non-Burning Man events
  22. Sublet office space
  23. Sell real estate holdings
  24. Use some of their massive cash reserves
  25. Reduce head count
  26. Reduce work hours
  27. Reduce salaries
  28. Reduce fixed costs
  29. Reduce variable costs
  30. Sell Burner tokens in an ICO

If it was up to me, we’d do everything I just listed and more. Survival is at stake, there’s no time to fuck around with “nice to haves”. The Ten Principles were not supposed to create hills to die on.

Of course, despite the “laboratory of innovation” promised by the CEO, it’s likely that none of these ideas will be considered. The options are “a) more of the same from the same people, or b) we let Burning Man die”. If Burning Man does die out, of course it will not be the Org’s fault for financial mismanagement, it will be Burners’ fault for not Gifting enough.

You might say “the principle of Decommodification says we can’t sell things”, but we’ve debunked that here time and time again. There are more than 100 licensed vendors selling stuff on the Playa every year, which we’ve proved with FOIA requests to the Bureau of Land Management. They’ve been selling merch since practically day one and have never stopped. They have no problem coming up with new things to buy like vehicle passes and VIP tickets and increasing the price of those every year, just like the most rapacious price gouging customer-hating greedy capitalists you’ve ever seen. Profiteering at its finest, and hey, hats off to them for that – but they have some gall to then put that same hat out again for donations on top of it all. This time, the ask is to give them money just for being fabulous while “working” from home, not for throwing the party.


Conclusion

The Burning Man Project has great potential as a business turnaround story. In my opinion it has been financially mismanaged by a team who have lost touch with their customers.

The best thing for Burning Man may be to let the whole thing burn out, so we can rebuild some Phoenixes from the ashes. The Org brings an arsenal of public shaming and social capital to the Civil War; Burners bring the art cars, music, sex and drugs, and good times. Who do you want to win?

Do we need a leveraged buy-out? There are certainly enough financial wizards in the community with the Means, Motive and Opportunity to pull that off. Are the current management team up to the task?

[Featured image credit: Andy Barron, Reno Gazette-Journal]


Communal Effort & Radical Self-Expression

Some selected comments from Burners on De Interwebz:

Source: Facebook, Official Unofficial Burning Man Group
Source: burningman.org, April 2020
Source: burningman.org, May 2020
Source: burningman.org, May 2020
Source: burningman.org, May 2020
Source: burningman.org, May 2020
Source: burningman.org, May 2020
Source: burningman.org, May 2020

Louisa May Alcott: Breadwinner, Frustrated Creative and Opiate Addict

littlewomen

 

by Terry Gotham

While I was never that big of a Louisa May Alcott fan, her impact on American literature cannot be denied. Alcott is an adored and fiercely protected author, in no small part because of just how impeccably written and potentially life-changing Little Women can be.  Her eight YA novels have remained in print continuously for the 140 years since they were written. There are two anime adaptations of Little Women, plus half a dozen other adaptations. Her creative output is a fundamental piece of American literature. Today is her 185th birthday, so I wanted to tell you a story about her. You probably didn’t know she smoked hashish and used opium for most of her life to deal with the side effects of mercurous chloride to treat typhoid pneumonia, which is believed to have eventually killed her (though an alternative diagnosis of Lupus was suggested in 2007).

Previously, I was delighted to dismantle the myth that the Civil War created a flood of heroin addict veterans. However, that doesn’t mean everyone managed to escape the clutches of substance abuse. Nurses, doctors and surgeons were far more exposed to the dangers of these substances than the Union soldier who only saw the inside of a field hospital once during his service. Repeated use of alcohol in the form of whiskey and opium in the form of laudanum, morphine, and heroin to treat hundreds of soldiers a week, in addition to essentially zero oversight when it came to use was a one-two punch that created a tempting proposition for those who tended to the wounded on both sides. There are a number of isolated reports, documenting the odd doctor or surgeon who got a little too sauced at work, or needed to be relieved of his duties because he was incapacitated. This implies that there could have been more of these medical practitioners who didn’t get caught, but still ended up using to cope.

Louisa May Alcott, one of the most influential and beloved American writers of the 19th Century, was one of these medical practitioners. She worked under Dorothea Dix who administrated military hospitals as a nurse.   Before leaving for the Civil War, she’d already assumed her station at the head of the household. Her father, one of the pre-eminent thinkers of their day, couldn’t keep it together for long enough to keep them out of poverty. When she left for the Civil War, her father was reported to have said he was “sending his only son to war.”

It was during the Battle of Fredricksburg that she contracted typhoid pneumonia, an ailment that would alter her life forever. The prescription for typhoid was calomel, and to ease the side effects of literally consuming mercury every day, she started using opium, in the form of morphine & laudanum. She didn’t enter into this habit by accident. She was a very smart lady and knew the potential dangers in consuming it daily. Alcott assisted Catherine Beecher in writing The American Woman’s Home in 1869, a year after Little Women was published, in which she stated:

“The use of opium, especially by women, is usually caused by at first by medical prescriptions containing it. All that has been stated as to the effect of alcohol in the brain is true of opium; while to break a habit thus is almost hopeless. Every woman who takes or who administers this drug, is dealing as with poisoned arrows, whose wounds are without cure.”
~Alcott & Beecher, The American Women’s Home (1849), revision of A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)

But a little thing like typhoid pneumonia & a daily opiate habit didn’t stop her. She built herself into the powerhouse of an author by sheer force of will. Realizing that her success and financial stability was depending on her career as a writer, Alcott built herself and her writing into a brand that we remember to this day. While she had made money previously from writing pulp fiction, this was light years away in propriety from Little Women and the branding and recognition that followed. The pulp was published anonymously or under a man’s name (A.M. Bernard) for similar reasons to why women writers today publish using a man’s name.

By 1870, she had grown so dependent on opium that she no longer expected to be able to sleep without it, as she described at the end of this letter to her father:

Our hotel is on the boulevard, and the trees which are in really good care thanks to http://www.treeservicekingsport.com, also the foundations, and fine carriages make our windows very tempting.. We popped into bed early; and my bones are so much better that I slept without any opium or anything, a feat I have not performed for some time.
~Louisa May Alcott to her father, Hotel D’Universe, Tours, June 17,1870

As discussed in the Seattle Pi article that I’ve cited a few times, it’s important for stories like this to be told. Not because I think famous people should be knocked down off their pedestal, but just the opposite. We treat substance use/abuse as almost integral to the creative process, especially when it comes to strong drink and writing. This seems to be heavily amplified in men while minimized in women. The idea that alcoholism is this noble part of the developing male writing process has been so deeply embedded in the work that I have friends who honestly didn’t pursue significant study in writing because they were Irish and didn’t want to fall in love with Jameson. This is going on while we eulogize female writers in the exact opposite way, discussing them as pure or without stain, objectifying them in hugely problematic ways. Then, when someone like Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday or Janis Joplin struggle and die from drugs, we pretend there was nothing we could do and that it just “happened again.” That needs to stop. As a dear friend reminds me, we celebrate drug use in men and totally ignore it in women.

Creative women are no different than creative men and their processes should be laid bare for all to see, scars and stumbles included. Louisa May Alcott probably pursued her habit away from her family or those who could help her. Given her status as the household’s main income generator, I think it’s easy to see her habit in line with the alcoholism of Don Draper, or the cocaine usage of a street dealer. They use because they have to, in order to provide for the people they love. Louisa May Alcott was able to produce Little Women & Perilous Play, a story about hash, in the same year. That’s nothing if not professional. She inspired generations of women to be better than the brand she created. Which is the point of art in the first place. She may not personally be this amazing protagonist hero that she write about, but in striving to be so, even if it’s only to feed her family and take care of your idealist, lazy ass family, she created the possibility for those who looked up to her to become exactly that. As a biographer of hers said on NPR: “You don’t grow up to walk two steps behind your husband when you’ve met Jo March.”

Morphine, Myth & The Civil War: Before Cause and Effect

Editorial by Terry Gotham

Last week, we spoke about the gendering of drug use in America and how that may have led to the original wave of drug prohibition laws. This was one example of the  many times where drug use was distorted as a justification for it to be outlawed. One of the biggest myths associated with heroin usage was that the Civil War “created 500,000 addicts.” This is of course not the case, so let’s unpack the various reasons brought up to justify this erroneous attribution. An exceptional paper published in War In History by Jonathan Lewy of Harvard University helps to round up the main reasons this assumption is wrong, which I’ll be quoting from liberally.

One of the easiest ways people explain the deluge of opiate & whiskey addicts during the last quarter of the 19th century & the first 2 decades of the 20th was the invention of the hypodermic syringe. The Civil War doctor did use opium for much more than just killing pain. Opium was used for diarrhea, dysentery, stomachache, gallstones, hemorrhoids, tetanus, typhus, syphilus & “neuralgia” (an anachronistic diagnosis that loosely translates to peripheral neuropathy today). But, remember, it’s 1860. Opium powder was usually sprinkled on top of the wounds suffered by soldiers in the field. By the end of the Civil War, a little over 2,000 hypodermic syringes had been fabricated & distributed to the 11,000 surgeons employed by the Union Army, which is one of the pieces of evidence used to support the claim that the modern heroin addict was created by the Civil War.

There’s one crucial difference between a modern syringe & those that were used, especially at the beginning of the Civil War. The first syringes were dull. That’s right, doctors had to puncture your skin first using a lancet (yes, that’s where the journal name comes from), before using the dull and large gauge syringe to deliver the medicine. So, the most hyperbolic claim, that soldiers were shooting up because they were taught to do so at field hospitals and by doctors, can immediately be dismissed. If any of you had nightmares that involved Requiem For A Dream and civil war uniforms, you can put that aside.

Not only was injection drug use essentially impossible, Confederate surgeons had little to no access to spare opium. The Confederacy attempted to grow poppy fields to supply their armies with opium. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but resulted in exceptionally poor quality poppy crops and an inferior supply of pain killers for the Confederate Army. Resulted in the Confederacy relying on smugglers & blockade runners to bring it down from the North, as one of the first examples of drug running in the USA.  The North was buying opium on the world market, as their Navy gave them access to trade with Europe. And boy did they take advantage of that. The Federal Army consumed 10 million opium pills and 80 tons of opium powder & laudanum tinctures before the surrender at Appomattox was signed.

People weren’t converting pills into inject-ready substance in the field, and the Confederacy couldn’t even get its hands on syringes and medical staff/training using them. When you’re taking a small pile of opium and spreading it over a wound with a knife, the person receiving care doesn’t know they’re “doing heroin.” It’s hard to develop a drug habit when you don’t know what drug you’re craving.

There were anecdotal cases of physicians becoming addicted to the morphine, but as a record, this was always classified as misuse, not addiction. General Benjamin Butler discovered one such doctor, and relieved him of his duty. However, no note of addiction, health problems, or vice was mentioned, merely a note of dereliction of duty. This is corroborated by The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, a six-volume epic tome documenting the case histories of the various field surgeons across the US Army. 13 years of records were submitted, accounting for all of the ailments, diseases and afflictions that these doctors, surgeons and field hospital directors encountered. Zero cases of addiction, or anything resembling the modern, conventional definitions of substance abuse/addiction appear.

This isn’t to say that the maladies associated with excess substance use weren’t known. But the idea that the substance use, if continued, would cause dependence or other negative consequences, hadn’t entered the greater medical world, and wouldn’t for years. The Manual of Military Surgery, introduced in 1861, noted that morphine & laudanum (tincture of 10% opium in alcohol) should be used in managing pain and amputation-related hardship. Interestingly, and without further definition, the reader is warned to not abuse the drugs “lest they induce fatal oppression of the brain.” For serious, no other context is given, you can see for yourself on page 50:

“Reaction must be promoted by the cautious use of stimulants ;while pain is allayed by morphia orlaudanum given with more than ordinary circumspection, lest it induce fatal oppression of the brain.” ~Samuel Gross

Could “fatal oppression” be like our modern definition of “brain death?” You betcha. Will we ever know if it was, definitively, and not the fog, memory loss or other neurological side effects of opiate use described at the time? No, which is a huge problem. It’s really easy to assume, but we need confirming evidence and there simply isn’t any. And, to put this lack of information in context, in the late 19th Century, the closest thing to “addiction” most people were aware of was the “habit” (Source Bias warning: Vaguely pearl clutchy, but still relevant historical portrayal of the time).  Alcohol had been seen to be habit forming as early as 1819, but morphine wasn’t seen in the same light. Using opium was seen as roughly equivalent to swearing, paying for sex, gambling and gossiping. If you couldn’t resist the temptation of drink or poon or dope, you were a sinner, or morally weak, not sick. But in 1877, 12 years after the end of the Civil War, that changed. Die Morphiumsucht was published by Eduard Levinstein, connecting drug use with a craving for more drugs, for the first time in the wider, respected medical literature. And I do really mean for the first time. Between 1864 & 1875, when Levinstein lectured publicly on the topic for the first time, only 24 articles discussed pathology stemming from drug use. In the decade after? Over 230. It’s kind of hard to have a mass of people “addicted to drugs” when they couldn’t access the drugs, and “addiction” wasn’t a word at the time. Oh, and the people weren’t there either.

The USA documented approximately 10,000 habitual opium uses (referred to as habitues) in 1842, with that number peaking at 313,000 in 1896, according to some. However that number gets turned on its head when it’s documented in the same source that there were more women habitues than men. Grief caused by becoming a widow explains why all the women are getting high, but, if all of the soldiers are dead, where is the epidemic of strung out veterans? They weren’t in the Sanatoriums, as a casual review of the Second Annual Report to the Citizens in the Delaware County American shows. Even back in 1868, right at the end of the war, when soldiers were most vulnerable to opiates, 2 out of 26 under his care, were there for opium. The rest? Booze. Additionally, they were in there because of social use or physician prescription, not because they even fought in the war. In the “National Homes” in and around Milwaukee,  only one veteran was admitted to the entire system for non-alcoholic drug use between 1867 & 1872. To put that in perspective, 36 people have died from Fentanyl overdoses alone in Milwaukee this year

Were there people who developed habits? Absolutely. The Confederate vet Doc Pemberton was wounded at the battle of Athens, Georgia and became addicted to cocaine after being given it on the battlefield. After the war, as an unemployed chemist, he created a brew of cocaine and kola nut extract, as an attempt to keep up with the hooch being slung at the saloon across the street. Were there a giant pile of strung out drug addicts walking around after the war? No. What were there? A bunch of wounded veterans.

Lewy really does sum it up quite nicely in his conclusion, so I won’t try to out do his words:

Some contemporaries claimed their experience in the war prompted their addiction. A few decades later, Crothers and other physicians supported the notion that the war caused addiction, but not based on fact, at least statistical fact, but was due to the understanding that wars caused trauma. One can only assume that, with the amount of drugs consumed by the armies of the Civil War, a few soldiers and perhaps even a General or two became addicted to drugs, but it would be next to impossible to determine how many (were), and whether this was, indeed, a historical trend. Especially since addiction was only recognized as a full fledged disease several decades after the war.
~
Johnathan Lewy, The Army Disease: Drug Addiction and The Civil War (2013)

Finally, it’s important to note that this fear of drug zombie veterans have been used as a justification for drug laws ever since. A heroin resurgence coincided with the end of World War II, the Korean war sparked rumors that Communists were attempting to dope American youth to beguile them, Vietnam managed to vilify drafted soldiers, decrying their drug habits before they even returned, and the war in Afghanistan is already being blamed for heroin use among soldiers. There will always be people attempting to justify drug prohibition using the trope that veterans would be the most vulnerable of American citizens. Yet, this continues not to be the case, even to this day. Don’t believe the hype. Drug use is an ineffective, yet popular way to cope with trauma, whether you were part of a unit that saw incoming fire at the Battle of Gettysburg or if you’re just growing up in rural America after Bain Capital sent all of the jobs in your town away.