Writing on Drugs

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Modern culture has founded itself on drugs. Beyond their psychoactive effects, they have shaped some of the modern era's most fundamental philosophies and even helped expose the neurochemistry of the human brain. This examination of writing on drugs, including Coleridge on opium, Michaux on mescaline, Freud on cocaine and Burroughs on everything, is an exploration of the profound and pervasive influence of drugs on contemporary and historical culture. The author argues that drugs have been integral to modern politics, media and technology.

Reviews

'A fascinating cultural quest to discover how such blanket - and in the end blind - moral prohibition has come to the fore in our relationship to narcotics... she balances accessibility with intellectual rigour... she weaves writers' experiences of amazing highs with the cold, hard science of how chemicals would have interacted with their synapses to get them tripping.' Tim Teeman, The Times 'It is something of a relief to turn to the poised clarity with which Plant anatomises our species' varied relationships with stuff that makes your head go funny.' Charles Shaar Murray, Independent 'A comprehensive account of how drugs have come to shape the modern world.' The Face

Author Bio

Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham and studied at the University of Manchester, where she gained her PhD in Philosophy in 1989. She has been a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She published The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992, and Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture in 1997. Having spent much of the 1990s in the academic world, she now works independently and writes full-time.