Quick Fixes
Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge
Published on 11. July 2023
272 pages
978-1-80429-019-4 (ISBN)
Description
This is your nation's history on drugs
Americans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics-across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first 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 blows away the pharmacological fog to take a sober look at how drugs have shaped American society. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love for and intense hatred of these sub - stances 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, affect the development and spread of medications and narcotics among the populace.
By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical com - forts, the hope is to help answer that ever-perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?
Americans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics-across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first 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 blows away the pharmacological fog to take a sober look at how drugs have shaped American society. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love for and intense hatred of these sub - stances 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, affect the development and spread of medications and narcotics among the populace.
By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical com - forts, the hope is to help answer that ever-perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?
More details
Series
Edition
Ebook UK & RoW
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Reflowable
ISBN-13
978-1-80429-019-4 (9781804290194)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
07/2023
Verso Books
€24.00
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
Benjamin Y. Fong is Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College and Associate Director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016) and co-editor with Craig Calhoun of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia, 2022). His other work can be found in Jacobin, Catalyst, The New York Times, and Damage Magazine, amongst other places.
