Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge

(Hardback)

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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 Drugs in American Capitalism 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

Reviews

Provocative, methodical, and righteously witty, Quick Fixes provides the fullest articulation I've seen of an argument often implied but rarely fleshed out: that 'drug problems' such as addiction and brutal drug wars are actually about capitalism rather than drugs. Under capitalism, Fong argues, drugs have been used to extract more labor from workers, to profit from workers' isolation and need for relief, and to police marginalized so-called 'surplus' populations. As a result both drug use and drug policing have become harmful compulsions. And because these compulsions are caused by capitalism, not drugs, we cannot free ourselves simply by ending the drug war. -- David Herzberg, author of White Market Drugs
Drugs are deeply integrated into American capitalism, not just American culture. 'Profit wins in the end,' as Ben Fong says, but his clear, thoughtful, and troubling account improves the odds of the fight for better, longer lives. -- Craig Calhoun, coauthor of Degenerations of Democracy
With drug use surging in the US, Ben Fong's fascinating look into America's relationship with psychoactive substances is unprecedented both in rigor and scope. It's a history you've never read before, and a desperately needed examination of where we are, how we got here, and why exactly we're all so blitzed. -- Amber A'Lee Frost, Chapo Trap House

Author Bio

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.