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Drugs, intoxication and society
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Drugs, intoxication and society

Author: Angus Bancroft
Publisher: Cambridge : Polity, 2009.
Edition/Format:   Book : EnglishView all editions and formats
Summary:
"Drugs and intoxication have been facts of human life for millennia. Across the world, many people use illicit drugs, smoke, and drink alcohol. Yet very little has been written about their experiences. Academics, politicians and media reporting on the topic tend only to consider intoxication when it manifests as a social problem. This book takes a more nuanced view, and examines drug and alcohol use from a wider  Read more...
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Details

Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Angus Bancroft
ISBN: 9780745635330 0745635334 0745635466 9780745635460
OCLC Number: 251891071
Description: xii, 220 p. ; 23 cm.
Contents: Acknowledgements --
Preface --
1. Defining drugs in society --
What's the problem? Why this book? --
About intoxication --
Sweet poisons of misuse --
Why do drugs work? --
Conclusion --
2. Drugs and alcohol in historical perspective --
Useful problems : the inescapable usefulness of drugs and alcohol for society --
Refined relief : ordering drugs and intoxication --
Narratives and origin myths in drug histories --
Social complexity and transformation --
Fermentation and distillation : the release of the spirit --
Dissolving luxuries : the Gin Craze --
Nineteenth-century political economies of intoxication --
Social order, status and the lamentation of the object --
Opium : the fall of the flaunting blossom --
Apothecaries, medicine and medicalization --
Temperance, prohibition and the symbolic order of things --
Drug scenes --
Conclusion --
3. Customs, cultures and the experience of intoxication --
Remote control for the soul --
Alcoholic disinhibition and status transition --
Sensual distortion and monstrous enhancement --
Cross-cultural chemistry --
Ritual intoxication and socially obligatory drinking --
Drinking and social exclusion --
Collective emotionality --
Learning, set and setting --
Second nature and appetite --
Consciousness and enlightenment --
Conclusion --
4. Drug problems, abuses and addiction --
Functional problems --
The uses of abuses --
Framing the drug problem --
Fried eggs and Swiss cheese : your brain on drugs --
Drug deaths, damage and side effects --
The spread of addiction --
Consuming hunger : addiction as a disease --
The experience of addiction --
Alcoholism : familiar dependence --
Vulnerable selves --
Unsafe others --
Nicotine bodies --
Commodifying addiction and selling good nicotine --
Conclusion --
5. Governing drugs and their users --
Drug controls : legislating intoxication --
Illicit drug classifications --
Enforcing prohibition --
Perspectives on prohibition and the 'drug problem' --
Alcohol, crowds and intoxication --
Illicit leisure : creating the drug menace --
Twenty-four-hour party people : the experience economy --
Knowledge, surveillance and rhetoric --
Drug maintenance as discipline --
No smoke : marginalization and manners --
Conclusion --
6. Lifestyle medicines and enhancement --
Dispassionate drugs --
Feeling sad, anxious, tired? Lifestyle medicines and branding illness --
Psychopharmacology and big pharma --
Viagra : sorting men --
Ritalin : cramming pills --
The pharmaceutical society --
Reflexive consumption, deviant consumers --
Better than life --
Inhibiting the self --
Conclusion --
7. Drugs in a culture of intoxication --
The moral economy of 'drugs' --
The chemical world and the stuff of enlightenment --
Sensual objects in material culture --
Autonomous consciousness --
Practices of the plastic self --
The organization of pleasure --
From deviant pathologies to social problems --
Abstinence and living above the influence --
Suspicious pleasures --
Bathe the drooping spirits in delight --
Bibliography --
Index.
Responsibility: Angus Bancroft.

Abstract:

Why do people use drugs? What happens when people are intoxicated? Are we being medicated into normality? Drugs and intoxication have been facts of human life for millennia. Across the world, many  Read more...

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"[A] fascinating and nicely subversive dissection of a universal behaviour - well worth reading." Alcohol & Alcoholism “Interesting, provocative and highly readable - Bancroft provides a critical Read more...

 
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