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Addresses the place of addiction in modern art, literature, philosophy, and psychology, including its effects on the works of such thinkers and writers as Heidegger, Nietzsche, DeQuincey, Breton, and Burroughs.


Wild Hunger
by Bruce Wilshire

In this thoughtful, earnest examination of the roots of the addictive behaviors plaguing contemporary societies, Wilshire (Role Playing and Identity) makes an impassioned plea for rediscovering our primal need for ecstatic involvement with the world and other human beings.

The Languages of Addiction
Edited by

Alcohol can be an item of diet, a medicine, sometimes an element in religious ritual. It is a valued object for the connoisseur, a traded commodity and a symbol of national pride (wine for instance in France, whisky in Scotland). The range of social and medical problems associated with alcohol and the history of related treatment methods (including the temperance movement, prohibition, AA and a range of contemporary approaches) are considered here. Already considered a classic in the field in England, Alcohol has proved to be fascinating reading for drinkers and nondrinkers alike.

Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom
by Mariana Valverde

In this broad-ranging and innovative historical-sociological investigation, Valverde explores the ways in which both authorities and individual consumers have defined and managed the pleasures and dangers of alcoholic beverages.


Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs
by Clarence Lusane

Addressing the political and racial angles, Lusane has put a new spin on the drug issue; his contention that the war on drugs is a racial battle is supported by a huge amount of research and historical background. He concludes with specific recommendation such as more treatment centers and new police methods, and with a call for political and economic power, which he shows to be the most vital weapons to win this war. - Sally G. Waters, Stetson Law Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.


Under the Influence: The Literature of Addiction
Edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse

An anthology of literary and historical writings on the subject of addiction includes a variety of fictional excerpts, memoirs, and essays by past and present authors such as Aldous Huxley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Leo Tolstoy.

High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction
Edited by Janet Farrell Brodie & Marc Redfield

High Anxieties explores the history and ideological ramifications of the modern concept of addiction. Little more than a century old, the notions of "addict" as an identity and "addiction" as a disease of the will form part of the story of modernity. What is addiction? This collection of essays illuminates and refashions the term, delivering a complex and mature understanding of addiction.


Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control
by Caroline Jean Acker

Weaving together the accounts of addicts and researchers, Acker examines how the construction of addiction in the early twentieth century was strongly influenced by the professional concerns of psychiatrists seeking to increase their medical authority; by the disciplinary ambitions of pharmacologists to build a drug development infrastructure; and by the American Medical Association's campaign to reduce prescriptions of opiates and to absolve physicians in private practice from the necessity of treating difficult addicts as patients. In contrast, early sociological studies of heroin addicts formed a basis for criticizing the criminalization of addiction. By 1940, Acker concludes, a particular configuration of ideas about opiate addiction was firmly in place and remained essentially stable until the enormous demographic changes in drug use of the 1960s and 1970s prompted changes in the understanding of addiction—and in public policy.


Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
by David T. Courtwright

Always intelligent and informed, witty and wise, Courtwright's book is the best way to get a fix on why getting drugs out of our systems would require more than abstinence; it would take another revolution in handling social and personal pain. An essential acquisition. -D Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia


Wising Up the Marks: The Novels of William S. Burroughs
by Timothy S. Murphy

"Makes a powerful claim for the centrality of Burroughs's work in twentieth-century American fiction, and is critical to our understanding of the possibilities of radical political change in the so-called 'postmodern' era of American culture. Nobody discussing Burroughs henceforth will be able to ignore Murphy's book." (Steven Shaviro, University of Washington)


Junky
by William S. Burroughs

Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground.


Leaving Las Vegas
by John O'Brien

The screenplay of the Academy Award-winning film that starred Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue-the stark romance, aching with the mercy of finding love when it is least expected, of a man hell-bent on drinking himself to death and the seemingly tough-as-nails Las Vegas prostitute who comes to care for him.


Less Than Zero
by Bret Easton Ellis

Alcoholic Thinking
by Danny M. Wilcox

Based on long-term observation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the author focuses on cultural rather than personal causes of drug dependence. The author also discusses how the symbolic action of AA language and culture is the key to recovery. This study yields critical information about the development and practice of alcoholism and other drug dependence. Through the shared linguistic and cultural interaction of AA, the U.S. cultural ideology that emphasizes individualism, personal achievement, self-control, and self-reliance is shown to result in conflict; thus the gap between the perceived ideal and reality intensifies feelings of separation, alienation, and isolation leading to dependency.

This powerful book spans the realms of Jungian psychology, existential philosophy, and literary analysis to explore the relationship between addiction and creativity. By examining the lives and works of writers such as Dostoevsky, Eugene O'Neill, Jack London, and Jean Rhys, as well as the experiences of people in recovery, Linda Leonard holds out the hope that anyone bound by addiction can reclaim the power that fuels dependency for a life of joy and creativity.

Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader
Edited by Mike Jay

Stories about alcoholism may be the best means we have of comprehending that disorder, because only stories can begin to contain alcoholism's bewildering, protean, contradictory nature. Working from this premise, Edmund B. O'Reilly examines literary texts--from Euripides' Bacchae to Donald Newlove's Sweet Adversity--as well as oral recovery narratives presented at Alchoholics Anonymous meetings. He seeks to discover what these stories reveal about the qualities and mechanisms of addiction and what they suggest about the conditions necessary for society.


Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair and Recovery
Edited by John William Crowley

A collection of revealing excerpts from the texts published by the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 1840s.


Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920
by Joseph F. Spillane

Challenging "traditional thinking about both the 'rise' and 'fall' of drug problems" (which makes legal prohibition the pivotal point in the story), Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 examines phenomena that have eluded earlier students of drug history. Joseph Spillane explores the role of American business in fostering consumer interest in cocaine during the years when no law proscribed its use, the ways in which authorities and social agents tried nonetheless to establish informal controls on the substance, and the mixed results they achieved.

In Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics
by Richard Davenport-Hines

Spanning five centuries and several continents in a sweeping portrait of addiction, The Pursuit of Oblivion traces the history of the use and abuse of narcotics, revealing their subtle transformation from untested medicines to sources of idle pleasure and, relatively recently, to illegal substances. Richard Davenport-Hines, an eminent, prize-winning historian, uncovers the centrality of drug abuse in our modern industrial society, from the drug habits of Charles Dickens and John F. Kennedy to today's $400 billion annual worldwide trade in illicit drugs (the same volume as the oil industry). A vivid portrayal of the people and events that have shaped the history of narcotics, The Pursuit of Oblivion reveals that, contrary to the assumption underlying current drug policies, our need to escape reality and our body's need for physical pleasure are both ineradicable aspects of our humanity, unchangeable by government initiative.


Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
by Thomas De Quincey

"Drinking buddy of Whitman and Twain, New York Bohemian of the Sixties (the 1860's that is), pioneer psychedelic psychonaut and frontier Pythagorean, America's first Hasheesh Eater and confessional junky - this is the definitive biography of our psychic great-grandfather - Fitz Hugh Ludlow." - Hakim Bey, author, Temporary Autonomous Zones


Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion
by R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott & Carl A. P. Ruck

Discusses the role played by psychoactive mushrooms in the religious rituals of ancient Greece, Eurasia, and Mesoamerica. Wasson, who investigated how these mushrooms were venerated and used by different native peoples, here joins with three other scholars to discuss his discoveries.

Exciting book on the spiritual benefits of the entheogens, especially to our society. Essays by Albert Hofmann, R. Gordon Wasson, the Shulgins, Terence McKenna, Dale Pendell, Jack Kornfield, Tom Roberts, Rick Strassman, others. Huston Smith says it is “the best single inquiry into the religious significance of chemically occasioned mystical experiences”.


White Lines: Writers on Cocaine
Edited by Stephen Hyde & Geno Zanetti

Blow, candy, Charlie, coke, go, ice, rock, snow, crack. Whatever you call it, thrill seekers have surrendered to cocaine’s siren call, paid their toll, and sold their souls. Its embrace can be deadly, a place of no return, the ultimate rush, public enemy number one. From the gutter to the penthouse, inner city to outer burb, from the Third World coca farmer to the executive addict, coke is the lifeblood of a global black economy and an outlaw underground. Coke has also been dark muse, torment, and theme to many of our greatest writers. White Lines gathers these literary thrill seekers in a classic and contemporary snort through the fog- and fear-filled streets of Victorian London to the dance macabre of the post-Vietnam culture of the 1970s, from the couch of Dr. Freud and the bacchanal of Mr. Magus, Aleister Crowley, to the narcotic thrill of fin de siecle casino capitalism, White Lines takes you into illicit and artificial worlds, near wild heavens and then deep, down underground. Selections from writers like Irvine Welsh, Bret Easton Ellis, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Kim Wozencraft, Terry Southern, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter Biskind, and Julia Phillips are featured.


Zig Zag Zen:  Buddhism and Psychedelics
Edited by Allan Hunt Badiner & Alex Grey

Buddhism and psychedelic experimentation share a common concern: the liberation of the mind. Zig Zag Zen launches the first serious inquiry into the moral, ethical, doctrinal, and transcendental considerations created by the intersection of Buddhism and psychedelics. With a foreword by renowned Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor and a preface by historian of religion Huston Smith, along with numerous essays and interviews, Zig Zag Zen is a provocative and thoughtful exploration of altered states of consciousness and the potential for transformation. Accompanying each essay is a work of visionary art selected by artist Alex Grey, such as a vividly graphic work by Robert Venosa, a contemporary thangka painting by Robert Beer, and an exercise in emptiness in the form of an enso by a 17th-century Zen abbot. Packed with enlightening entries and art that lie outside the scope of mainstream anthologies, Zig Zag Zen offers eye-opening insights into alternate methods of inner exploration.

French painter Michaux (1899-1984) explored the subconscious mind and the effects of such hallucinogens as mescalin not only in pigment but in poetry. Here, poet Ball offers a generous and delightful selection from Michaux's published works; his translation skills bring Michaux's words to life in English, giving them the same energy and nimbleness they have in their original French. Many of the works in this anthology are prose poems, but this is essentially a collection of verse, one that requires continual reading the way a bag of peanuts requires continual eating. Observations on human interactions, as well as the life of the mind, abound. - Library Journal


The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
by Aldous Huxley

As only he can, Aldous Huxley explores the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. These two astounding essays are among the most profound studies of the effects of mind-expanding drugs written in this century.

This translation of Du vin et du haschisch (1851) and Les Paradis artificiels (1860) constitutes the first modern English version published in this last quarter century of Baudelaire's writings on the mood-altering drugs of his time.


Points . . .: Interviews, 1979-1994
by Jacques Derrida, edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf

This volume collects 23 interviews given over the course of the last two decades by the author. One of the texts included is "The Rhetoric of Drugs."

This fascinating study examines how the CIA tested LSD on unwitting residents of Greenwich Village and San Francisco. Of particular interest are profiles of Timothy Leary, LSD chemist Ronald Stark and others.


Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason
by Jessica Warner

Jessica Warner has written a lively and accessible social history that examines the impact of Mother Gin from all perspectives -- personal, political, sociological, economic, military, and sexual. She draws on hundreds of primary sources, from the anonymous to Defoe and Dr. Johnson, guiding us through squalid back rooms, streets thronged with hawkers, raging mobs -- and the halls of Parliament. The result is a timely, revealing, utterly engrossing look at a city and a drug -- and a drug scare -- that helped shape our contemporary views of pleasure, consumption, and public morality.


Drugs: Should We Legalize, Decriminalize or Deregulate?
Edited by Jeffrey A. Schaler

This rich and diverse collection assembles a wide range of views concerning the ongoing and heated debate over drug legalization, decriminalization, and deregulation in America. Essays by William Bennett, Thomas Szasz, George Will, and many others debate the ethical questions, as well as the anthropological, sociological, economic, political, and philosophical perspectives of the issue .

The first book to prove CIA and U.S. government complicity in global drug trafficking, The Politics of Heroin includes meticulous documentation of dishonesty and dirty dealings at the highest levels from the Cold War until today. Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs.


Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
by William Styron

A meditation on Styron's ( Sophie's Choice ) serious depression at the age of 60, this essay evokes with detachment and dignity the months-long turmoil whose symptoms included the novelist's "dank joylessness," insomnia, physical aversion to alcohol (previously "an invaluable senior partner of my intellect") and his persistent "fantasies of self-destruction" leading to psychiatric treatment and hospitalization.