What are drugs and who uses them? Are legal drugs completely safe? How can drugs cause social problems?

Drugs are ubiquitous in the past and present of capitalist society. What can they tell us about our society and economy? Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the 21st century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified “war” on drugs. How did we get here? Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America’s passionate love and intense hatred for drugs has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century. Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans’ fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses. By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?

Since President Calderón declared a war on drugs in December 2006, more than 38,000 Mexicans have been murdered. Drug money is now Mexico's single largest source of income. Gibler travels across Mexico and slips behind the frontlines to talk with people who live in towns under assault on the lawless frontiers of the drug war.

Since George Bush declared his war on drugs in 1989, cocaine addiction in America has increased 15%, and narcotics have emerged as major commodities from the Third World. Focusing on US narcotics policy, Latin America's cocaine traffic and Asia's heroin trade, the essays in this book offer evidence indicating that the war is not working.

According to the contributors to this volume, the communications media deliberately blank out critical conditions and developments whose imagery would pose unacceptable challenges to the dominant structures of culture-power. Such "invisible crises" include the suppression of information about the dehumanization and stigmatization of groups of people; the drift toward ecological suicide; the neglect of vital institutions such as public education and the arts; the way in which television corrupts the electoral process; and the promotion of practices which drug, poison and kill. The book asks why the media are, in the view of contributors, withholding vital information from the public, and focuses on the increasing concentration of culture-power that, it is argued, keeps these truths from public view.

*The book that inspired Chrissy Teigen and Sex and The City's Miranda to quit drinking* _____________ 'An incredible read' - Chrissy Teigen 'Has the power to change your relationship with your entire life' - Glennon Doyle 'This thoughtful, moving book will help a lot of people get to a healthier place' - Johann Hari _____________ We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at work events, lunches, book clubs and weddings. Yet no one ever questions alcohol's ubiquity. In fact, the only thing ever questioned is why people don't drink. It is a qualifier for belonging. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some sort of magic elixir. It is anything but. When Holly Whitaker started to look for a way to recover, the support systems she found for recovery where archaic and patriarchal. Urging drinkers towards a newfound humility is great if you're a man, but if you're a woman and not in a position to renounce privileges you never had, a whole other approach is needed. Honest, witty and trenchant, Quit Like a Woman is at once a ground-breaking look at drinking culture, a call to arms, and a celebration of learning how to claim everything life has to offer.

Humans are biologically hardwired to alter their mental state, drugs are the pathway, and America is their biggest consumer. From antiquity to modernity, use and prohibition have gone hand in hand. Addicted raises the curtain to expose the lies and fill in the blanks behind America’s failed 50 year war on drugs and makes sense of the quagmire of misinformed laws and policy, blending Miller’s investigative journalism with historical narrative. In addition, Miller tells the story of nature’s three primary psychotropic plants and the history of government efforts to suppress them: Papaver Somniferum, the opium poppy, the drug of Asian mystery, which provides opium and its derivative alkaloids morphine and heroin; Erythroxylum Coca, which provides the cocaine of all night parties and glamor; and Cannabis Sativa, L., the historical intoxicant of rebellion and counterculture. These plants convert soil, water, nutrients, CO2, and light into complex chemical substances, which can elevate, intoxicate, and even heal. Addicted unravels the institutional mechanism that fuels the war’s self-perpetuation, its abject failure, and its deplorable byproduct of racial injustice. The stories in Addicted feature a diverse cast of heroes, villains, and bureaucrats as well as all the post-Nixon Presidents who failed in their version of the war.

From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history. In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today.