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

by Benjamin Y. Fong

A look at drugs through the lens of societal change and a look at social change through the lens of drugs.

Drugs are ubiquitous in the past and present of capitalist society. What can looking at drugs help us to understand about our society?

From coffee to ketamine, drugs are everywhere in contemporary America.

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?

Quick Fixes 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?

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Drugs, Politics, Medicine, American, Health

331 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 11, 2023

Reviews

[Breann Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

stunningly well referenced/researched from all angles— historical, philosophical, and pharmacological. i found the “stand alone” compilation format made the subject matter quite approachable.

points of criticism:
1. with the brevity of each chapter, it was more and advertisement of other deep dive books than anything else. now i have too many other good books to read.
2. some chapters were better than others
3. the conclusion drops a solution to american drug addition and spend all of 3 seconds explaining it before the book ends. needed more deets on it/more research etc or at least more speculation on how and why we got to that conclusion.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5- a good not great book. Not my usual cup of tea but picked it up in a Verso sale as a fun read. Fong’s Quick Fixes is a popular level history of the way drugs in America are best understood as a history of capitalism, race, and politics. Fong’s orienting claims are:

1. that American work under capitalism structures drug use into a dosing regime (coffee is the quintessential example, think also of the smoke break). Under capitalism drug use is rarely a free choice we can enjoy if we so desire but a way of coping with the late stage bullshit we all find ourselves within.

2. Psychopharmacology is the science of treating atomization. This was probably the best part of the book and Fong’s history of the development of the DSM, big Pharma, and neuro/bio/physical understandings of mental health in relationship to the profit incentive of capitalism were quite good and enjoyable. A great reminder that people like the Sacklers and their despicable practices are the rule of this industry not the exception.

3. Drug producers are typical capitalist organizations. Liberals love to talk about their transcendent trust in science while remaining naively blind to the myriad ways history repeatedly shows drug producers: lobby and bribe politicians to remove or relax regulations, artificially stimulate demand through unethical advertisement, suppress or counter negative press/reports by modeling and marshaling expert opinion, and maintain exclusive patents or other advantages over the competition and inflate prices and profits.

4. Drug policy is not about drugs. As anyone who has read anything about the War on Drug’s knows, drug policy has always been about white fears around race and class before it’s actually been about drugs themselves (whether it’s fear of reefer madness, Chinese opiates, harsher sentencing for crack than cocaine, etc etc the list goes on.)

Can’t find much to disagree with here and I found the political and economic history behind the claims quite illuminating. Ultimately though I’m not a huge fan of “the history of X through Y” genre (in this case the history of drugs through american capitalism). Just leaves me wanting more information on X and more information on Y instead of the mash up of the two together.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fear and enthusiasm, prohibition and peddling have been the poles between which America has swung wildly when it comes to drugs. One projects a social utopia accomplished through the purging of demonic elements. The other retreats to a personal utopia and leaves the broader social question alone. Both demonstrate a belief in solutions to the problems of capitalist society that do not in any way challenge capitalism itself and uncoincidentally both make promises that either can't be kept or can only temporarily be fulfilled. In brief they both conjure a unique Americanism: the quick fix, anything that covers over, that allows some resumption of normalcy, that prevents a full reckoning. That's been the stuff for us for well over a century."

Highest recommendation. Ben Fong is a great dialectician and this book is a fantastic work of synthesis. Highly readable and really tight. No fat, no repetition. The book opens with the political economy of coffee and it's a tour de force - wish I had written it.

I listened to an audio book and couldn't stand the narrator. It wasn't a great experience - he seems like a robot and pronounces words the way a robot would. Not convinced they didn't just give a new name and an AI application of someone's voice to some AWS text-to-speech tool. It's a testament to the content of this book that I'll likely buy a physical copy to "actually read" again sometime.

[Morgan Hazo · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. Read as audiobook (~5%)

This book has taken me so long to actually write a review. I haven’t DNF’d a book in maybe 15 years but this feels fitting.
For one, as an audiobook, the narrator’s voice is insufferable. It’s incredibly monotonous. Next, the author kinda makes some wild claims with no actual literature or references behind them. There’s also some leaps that just felt like… leaps? It’s hard to remember exact examples, but in looking through some of the low GoodReads reviews, people have mentioned some good ones.
This book felt inherently biased. Which don’t get me wrong, that’s not always a bad thing, but in this case when drugs, capitalism, healthcare, and politics are mentioned—it’s important to be factual. A statement would be said, let’s just say “drugs are highly addictive” and then it would be followed up with “well the ups and downs of a capitalistic society drives people for ups and downs—in drugs.” Like maybe? But also maybe not? There’s no statistics here to support any of the evidence. There’s certainly a guise to make it sound like a textbook, but I can only warn caution that this feels like anything but (even if some things are true, the sweeping opinions thrown in disguised as fact feel unjust).

[Victor Ogungbamigbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while a book feels like it's made for you, and this one is mine. A book detailing the social history of the use and prohibition of different classes of drugs in the United States? Sign me up! This book was pretty accessible, heavy on content, and a truly interesting premise of why Americans are so intent on using drugs in the first place.

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh -- some chapters were interesting but didn't find the "Americans do drugs because of capitalism" argument very compelling

[Ostap Bender · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Benjamin Fong argues that the high level of drug use in America relative to other countries is tied to a stressed and depressed workforce in the extreme brand of American capitalism, and that drug policy is less about the substances themselves, and more about race, politics, and controlling the workforce. He takes the long view which is helpful, pointing out the historical cycle of the temperance movement leading to Prohibition, to more sanctioned drug use in the 50’s (amphetamines, barbiturates, etc), to the “war on drugs,” during the neoliberalism of the 80’s, to recent relaxation with the failures of neoliberalism. Somewhat bizarrely, America’s drug use is also accompanied by an “equally unique fearmongering about drugs,” making it an interesting study.

We get a glimpse early on of a writing style that falls short of ideal, as between some pretty keen insights, Fong will make statements without completely backing them up. The way he lays out his arguments often seem a little clunky. He seems to have taken the evils of capitalism in America as the central issue, but then doesn’t address the obvious question, what about capitalism in other countries, like Japan? In his response to Herbert Marcuse’s statement (cited by him) that “capitalism is not responsible for your problems with your girlfriend;” he says: “He was right that we are not excused from our personal failings, but wrong that social structure cannot be mined from the psychic depths,” then ending the section. It just feels a bit cryptic and incomplete, and there are many examples of this throughout the book.

Editing would certainly have helped, as Fong at times belabors points that he probably shouldn’t. For example, in the introduction, he oddly defends drug-related violence as logical per “market logic,” spending paragraphs explaining violent behavior as rational and not barbaric, when it seems he should have excised all this and focused on the other points he made, that drug incarceration in America is predominantly for nonviolent offenses. While admitting “the ravages of physical dependency and long-term use are real,” he doesn’t provide any statistics or comments about the casualties of drug use, those whose lives were ended or ruined because of them. As he puts it, “the ‘problem’ of drugs is never really about drugs, and so it’s always a mistake to linger too intently on either the substances themselves or the rules of their engagement,” which seems too one-sided, as if this were all just an exercise in economic theory and racism in America.

The chapters following the introduction walk through various drugs one by one, including coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, opiates, amphetamines, psychotropics, psychedelics, cocaine, and marijuana. I had a similar experience reading each: I loved the tidbits of information that Fong included about the history of all these substances and at least some of his larger points, but also felt that he had tunnel vision relative to the idea that capitalism is the great evil, and made statements without supporting evidence, or a more balanced critical evaluation.

For example, in his chapter on alcohol, Fong quotes Friedrich Engels as saying of the working man “…he urgently needs something to restore him, he must have something that compensates for his toil and makes the prospect of the next day tolerable…” It’s just not clear how accurate this viewpoint is, rooted as it is in a political viewpoint from 170 years ago, and lacking in actual data. His chapter on cigarettes includes a rather pedantic quote from Sartre and a conclusion that it’s “an internalization of the burning earth in miniature.” Here it would have been nice to see some statistics gathered from actual smokers, rather than the simplistic, unsubstantiated point that “People today smoke because they are nervous, and they smoke to lend sense to the day. But they also smoke because they are hastening an end.” In the chapter on opioids, he surprisingly avoids linking use to capitalism, but somewhat weakly states in the final paragraph that their use is due to “mostly some combination of happenstance, early trauma, and adult tragedy,” which wasn’t very satisfying.

Fong makes the point in the conclusion that between conservative movements seeking to ban various drugs and liberals seeking to naively legalize them despite big predatory corporations circling, that both are “quick fixes,” and the underlying issue needing to be addressed is people’s misery stemming from capitalism. While he proposes putting people to work on infrastructure and Medicare for all, things I happen to agree with, he never put forth alternate political solutions or addressed the failures of communism in its authoritarian forms in the 20th century. His central assertion of the root cause driving drug use is intriguing and I have to believe a piece of the puzzle, but he never examined data from other countries over time (degree of capitalism, degree of poverty or misery, and resulting degree of alcohol or other drug use), or other aspects of American culture (individualism, its naïve optimism following WWII and belief in its exceptionalism, or simply its accessibility to drugs). It just seems it’s a very complicated problem, and Fong is naïve in trying to pin everything on capitalism and wealth distribution. I have to say, I also didn’t agree with his frequent criticisms of the progressive movements of both the 60’s and today’s generation.

With all that said, it was a worthwhile read, as there were many nuggets of information I liked gleaning:

- The quote from Alasdair MacIntyre that one of the central objections to marijuana in the 60’s was that to conservatives it was a “source of pure pleasure which is available for those who have not earned it, who do not deserve it.”

- The state of the world before coffee was introduced to Europe, and the extraordinary amount of beer that the average English family consumed in the 17th century – 3 liters a day, children included, and even “beer soup” at breakfast, consisting of beer, eggs, and butter.

- In the Reagan and Bush years, as cigarettes had transitioned from “glamorous” to a “loser’s drug” in America, this was counterbalanced by pushing the tobacco trade abroad, “a move that has been rightly compared to the opium wars of the nineteenth century.”

- The shameful history of Britain forcing opium on China in the 19th century, as is the bitterly ironic demonization of Asians in “yellow peril” propaganda in American in the 20th.

- The incompetent, racist, and corrupt tenure of Harry Anslinger as the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962.

- His fantastic analysis of constitutionally shaky RICO and Comprehensive Crime Control Acts, which when coupled with the Supreme Court decisions in Illinois v. Gates and United States v. Leon, meant that the “Fourth and Fifth Amendments effectively became optional,” and that the police, based on their own “reasonable belief,” can seize assets (including one’s home) and never return them.

- The military spend on amphetamines and more recent drugs, like eugeroics (“good arousal”) or “nootropics,” the “smart drugs” that also promote alertness, and in some cases keeping soldiers awake for an astonishing 85 hours straight.

- The massive hypocrisy in a system where Big Pharma have lied about their products and bribed FDA officials for decades (certainly dating back to Senator Carey Kefauver’s work to begin exposing them in 1959), while the “war on drugs” targets people at the bottom (for example, the 49 convenience store clerks in Georgia who were charged with selling materials to make meth, 44 of whom were South Asian immigrants with little command of English).

- The shift over the last four decades to “manipulate the brain with the aid of pharmaceutical drugs” based on a simplistic, “biological” reductionist view of the brain where individual neurotransmitters and hormones like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine can be tweaked to create understood responses, and a latest iteration of the DSM that “is so broadly pathologizing of normal human behaviors that even its previous authors have come out of it in disgust.” Along with it, a shift from diagnosing neurasthenia over 1880-1930s and anxiety since the 1940s, with both “society” as the root cause, to diagnosing depression since the 1980’s, with the brain as the root case.

- The fact that “in a majority of double-blind studies, sugar pills equaled or outperformed Prozac and similar antidepressants,” but despite that, the FDA having approved the drug because they don’t need to be shown to be more effective than a placebo. The prevalence of SSRIs to treat depression, despite studies experts have shown as “clinically meaningless,” and the evidence in the incidence of depression having increased since their introduction, is mind-boggling, particularly in light of the serious possible side-effects of these medications.

- The hypocrisy and projection of the CIA in the 1950’s, accusing communist countries of using brainwashing drugs when in fact they were involved themselves in horrifying experiments with LSD and other psychadelics themselves. In one study by Ewen Cameron at McGill, patients who came for help with relatively minor issues were subjected to cruel “psychic driving” experiments, which involved ECT at 30-40x the normal strength, solitary confinement, LSD with minimal food, water and oxygen, and then messages like “My mother hates me” piped into earphones hundreds of thousands of times. If there is a hell, one only hopes Cameron is in it.

Just a couple of quotes:
On Big Pharma, from Senator Mike Gravel in 1972:
“If tomorrow, by some miracle, every source of illegally grown or manufactured drug were cut off, the U.S. would scarcely feel any withdrawal symptoms, nor would the current drug-abuse epidemic be ended. The sad truth is that our most sophisticated and profitable pushers are the nation’s largest pharmaceutical corporations.”

On politics, this from John Ehrlichman in an admission in 1994:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

[Æ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a proponent for complete drug decriminalization for nearly a decade now. I got this book to help reinforce this radical stance. But while this book didn’t reverse my stance, it did alter it into a more cohesive and holistic one.

First and foremost, the most important thing to remember when talking about drug use and drug laws is that it has almost never actually been about the drugs. Drug policies throughout the last 100+ years or so have always been primarily about:

1. Targeting & criminalizing specific minority groups for a political purpose,
2. Using the state to enrich political allies, corporate interests (AKA: the deep state running drugs, guns, money, and humans across the globe),
3. Extracting wealth from the poor via police brutality and the legalized theft of “civil asset forfeiture.

This is true still today when one half of the political duopoly rails against fentanyl coming across the US-Mexico border by “illegal immigrants” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl actually gets smuggled by white US-citizens, a fact rarely pointed out by the other half of the political duopoly, *shockingly*.

So it goes through various political scares of the last century, manufactured in whole or in part by corporate media in conjunction with law enforcement, the cycle continues.

The book goes through legal and illegal drugs, including coffee, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, coca, and the fun ones. I wish it talked more about sugar. Maybe that’s too loosely related and it already covered a lot of colonialism associated with cash crops. Its theory regarding childhood diagnosis of ADHD was described as “sounds like reactionary BS”.

The ultimate lessons this book outlines are that: people will always use drugs to cope with living in a crushing society. Criminalization doesn’t work, is maliciously enforced only against the poor and people of color, and doesn’t solve the underlying societal issues. If you actually want to reduce drug use, make society better for people through things like universal single-payer healthcare (M4A) and universal jobs programs. Also, insufficiently mentioned throughout the book, is the need for universal housing. These 3 solutions, in tandem with drug decriminalization, will greatly reduce the crushing suffering people experience in 21st-century America.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject of drug use in the US.

~~

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book and my thoughts on them. It’s ok to skip this part of the review if you want:

“American drug use today is truly world historical. At 4 percent of the earth’s population, Americans consume 80 percent of its opioids, including 99 percent of its hydrocodone, and 83 percent of its attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medications.1 One in three Americans suffers from anxiety, depression, or both (globally, that number is about one in twenty), and one in six is on a psychiatric medication.”

Remember this the next time you see a liberal roll their eyes at a conservative or a crystal mommy who thinks the drug companies have too much power and influence over the people and their “elected leaders.”

Regarding coffee markets, the US fixed coffee prices to keep them high in order to keep the market afloat in South America. “ Despite America’s reputation for free-trade fanaticism, the US was a willing participant in a new system to keep prices stable and high. The reasons were, unsurprisingly, political. The first agreement, signed in 1940, was intended to keep countries like Brazil on the right side during WWII. The second accord—the International Coffee Agreement (ICA), signed in 1962—was an explicit instrument of Cold War anti-Communism.” Capitalists will always betray their ideals of a “free market” in order to maintain power.
This artificial price inflation ended in 1989 since there was no longer an enemy in need of “defending against”:

“The ‘coffee crisis’ that followed was a massive disaster in all producing countries: dispossessed farmers turned to violence, to the guerrillas, or else to coca and opium poppy cultivation. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was preceded by the value decline of coffee, which had accounted for 80 percent of the country’s exports. Letting the ICA lapse was the functional equivalent of the United States halving its world aid budget.” Insane. No need to help out other countries when there was no longer a risk of them allying with the Soviet Union, so might as well throw them to the dogs.

The first drug control act in the US was the Harrison Act of 1914, prohibiting opium and coca products without a prescription. “In the nineteenth century, morphine use was more respectable than drunkenness, given the oppressive temperance culture. And while those drug users that fell into abuse were moral reprobates, lazy, feminine, sinful, and so on, it was only with these swift legislative actions that they became dangerous criminals—at first simply according to the new laws, but inevitably in actual fact as well. Placed on the other side of the law—‘by 1930, 35 per cent of all convicts in America were indicted under the Harrison Act’—it was only natural that users turned to actual criminal behavior to produce and consume drugs.”

While the US was criminalizing and imprisoning its own people, it had no qualms working with organized crime elements to help transport drugs back to its own people. “World War II made strange bedfellows of the Mafia and the nascent deep state: mobsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese all struck deals to help the Allies, and these connections survived the war. One of the CIA’s first projects upon its founding in 1947 was to bankroll the Corsican Mafia to disrupt Communist-led unions in France. The Corsicans just so happened to be running laboratories in Marseille that transformed Turkish and Southeast Asian opium into heroin en route to North America. The CIA not only deliberately ignored this infamous “French Connection,” but also stifled the efforts of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) agents to do much about it.”

As previously and repeatedly stated: the ‘Deep State’ is a consortium of unaccountable corporate oligarchs, banking institutions, intelligence agencies, and organized crime operating without the consent of the governed to maintain US imperial hegemony and corrupt profit maximization by any means necessary. They do this by trafficking in guns, drugs, people, and anything else.

The US government was, and arguably still is, the largest orchestrator of controlled substance trafficking on earth.

“Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the FBN (now the DEA) from 1930 to 1962, did a good deal to undermine the success of his own bureau. … In addition to being a vicious and conniving drug warrior, Anslinger was also arguably the biggest dealer around. The war had made clear how important the flow of raw materials to US pharmaceutical laboratories was, and access to those materials, along with the promotion of the consumption of American mass-produced drugs abroad, became a key priority of the FBN.” Play both sides so you’re always on top.

“In Southeast Asia, the CIA went well beyond financing and feigning ignorance.61 It was an active participant in the drug trade, building links between different crime networks and even directly transporting ‘miscellaneous cargo’ through its front airline, Air America. When drought in the Golden Triangle moved the center of opium production back to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the CIA was there once again, arming the Mujaheddin Afghan guerrillas who, in now typical fashion, grew poppies and fought the Communists.” Apropos of nothing: don’t you think it’s weird that Fentanyl came roaring in almost immediately after the US war in Afghanistan ended? Almost like there was a vacuum in the market… unfortunately the book doesn’t talk about that. I suspect there’s not enough info out about it just yet.

“In addition to establishing mandatory minimum sentences, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, the fruit of years of Biden’s and Strom Thurmond’s efforts to get tough on crime, allowed law enforcement to seize any assets on the basis of “probable cause.” … The bill also allowed police to keep the proceeds of forfeited assets. Money, cars, homes—anything associated with suspected drug use—were now all potential revenue to bolster local law enforcement budgets. But police still need enough “proof” to get search warrants, right? Yes, technically, but in the Supreme Court’s Illinois v. Gates decision in 1983, they ruled that police can get warrants based on anonymous tips. And after United States v. Leon in 1984, “evidence seized under tainted warrants is admissible provided the police met a subjective standard of ‘good faith.’” With these two precedent-altering cases, nothing prevents police from calling in their own tips or simply lying on their warrant requests. With Illinois v. Gates, United States v. Leon, and the 1984 crime bill, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments effectively became optional. … Based on little more than their own “reasonable belief,” police today can legally enter your home, take whatever they want (including your home), and not give it back—ever.”

President Genocide Joe (formerly Senator Jim Crow Joe) was the primary pusher of the legalized lawlessness that is the “civil asset forfeiture” system, a complete erosion of our constitutional freedoms from government tyranny by jackbooted thugs.

“Only one thing is certain about the causality of opiate addiction: the colder and more inhospitable the world becomes, and the more we punish people seeking refuge, the larger those holes will be.” Maybe throwing these people in jail won’t actually be of any help.

“As with opioids, methamphetamine abuse took off in many areas of the country lacking in decent healthcare. In both cases, it’s not difficult to see these phenomena as by-products of unwitting self-medication, a sensible enough option when options are few.“ This is why people use hard drugs like meth and opioids. If you give them access to real healthcare and give them purpose with a jobs guarantee program. Housing guarantee wouldn’t hurt either.

“Worried for their children’s future in a cutthroat economy, or simply wanting them to sit down and be quiet, parents easily convince doctors of the applicability of the ADHD diagnosis—the boundaries of which have grown broader over the years. They are encouraged to do so by heavy-handed pharmaceutical advertising and supported by lobbyists and ADHD advocacy organizations, themselves sometimes funded by pharmaceutical companies. The game is neatly rigged from all sides, resulting in a steady growth in the prevalence of ADHD in American children (10.2 percent in 2015–16).” The author goes on to compare this rise in ADHD diagnoses and prescription drug usage as the modern-day version of the speed epidemic in the late-‘60s/early-70’s. I’ve been told that this description of ADHD diagnosis is “

The most interesting part of the book is how psychologists have morphed describing the same problem over the last ~150 years using different terms and blaming different causes. “Neurasthenia,” coined in 1881, was the first modern term used to describe the exhaustion and worry associated with modern life:

“Neurasthenia is best conceptualized as the first instance of a diagnostic dialectic, which includes anxiety as its second pole and depression as its final one. Neurasthenia was a mess of a category: Beard and others used it to indicate such a wide range of phenomena that really the only way to concisely describe how they understood it at the time would be something like “all of the bad things that capitalist society does to our health.” The postwar anxiety that replaced neurasthenia repressed its characteristics of fatigue and enervation, but society remained the cause. The neoliberal period brought back the depressive element of neurasthenia but eliminated the social causes in order to justify pharmacological dependence. Today our brains make us sick, only able to process the degradation of society mimetically through the degradations of our prefrontal cortices.”

Same problem, different name, initially it was caused by societal pressures, now described as being caused by having a bad brain. Curious.

Then of course there’s the fact that anti-depression medications are largely ineffective for a lot of people, and for those who do benefit (barely greater than placebo), the medication has large side-effects and works in ways modern medicine barely understands. The prescription of SSRI’s is a bandaid over a societal problem of atomization, loneliness, and disconnection caused by our modern capitalist system. “If there’s one thing we know about depression, it’s that it’s caused by isolation, loneliness, and disconnection—in other words, the atomized affective state brought on by the political economic shifts of the neoliberal period. As described in more detail in the Introduction, during this time unions and membership organizations were gutted, deindustrialization tore apart working-class communities, and a wave of consumerist individualism carried us into the sea of post-politics. We are more alone than ever; no surprise that we are also more depressed than ever.”

If they work for you, good on you. Keep it up. They worked for me all through college and several years after that. But I got off them and have learned to manage my “Neurasthenia” through other means. Do what works best for you.

There’s a lot more good stuff in here but I’m tired of writing. Read the book.

[Christina Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched and brilliantly written! I had been dying to read this book ever since I heard the author on Ordinary Unhappiness. The way he pulls apart the collective fantasies we construct about drugs to understand something deeper about our society is irresistible to me as a psychoanalysis enthusiast. In the course of learning the history of drugs in the US, I came away with two major points: 1. drug policy is not about drugs; and 2. our fantasies about what drugs can do tells us more about our fears and wishes than about the drugs themselves.
In particular, the chapter “Psychotropics, or Diagnostic Creeps and Relational Paranoids” should be mandatory reading for anyone working in medicine or mental health!

[Emily Schumacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

“psychoactive drugs will never take the place of human relationships, though they can numb the pain of disconnection… they will never ultimately deliver on the twin promises of meaning and happiness, though they will often deliver quite efficiently on the promise of fun.”

Extensively and thoroughly researched, well written, and quite entertaining, Fong does an excellent job at distilling the complex problem of American drug use. He takes a measured approach at understanding the positives of psychoactive substances, while acknowledging the obvious downsides and concisely portraying the nasty history behind both the legal and illegal drug markets and trades in the United States.

Often times drugs and their use and/or abuse are often wholly vilified or wholly glorified — Fong takes a balanced approach and offers a sensible (although brief) solution to the “American Drug Binge” by digging into the reasons we do drugs: escapism, loneliness, oppression, exhaustion. This is not to say that Fong claims that drugs are only used for these purposes and reasons; rather, this is the reason we exploit and abuse them and why they rip deeper into our social fabric, often causing more harm than good, not as a function of the drug, but as a function of the need/desire to use the drug.

alright, that’s enough from me, just go read this damn book! bravo!

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

suprise it is the cia ruining the fun for everyone.

[Jess Ratnakumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like listening to this as an audiobook might have allowed me to zone out a bit when I shouldn't have, but even with that in mind, this book was interesting!
I really enjoyed learning about the history of drugs and all varieties of illicit substances. The facts left me shocked at some moments and frustrated at others- which is honestly a justified reaction.

If you are interested in the seedy underbelly of government bureaucracy surrounding drugs and profiteering, you will feel right at home in the knowledge this book provides. That being said, those very points of information can be very disillusioning and a little depressing.

Knowledge is power, but it can also highlight disenfranchisement from a corrupt state looking to profit off of the backs of the vulnerable.

Still a great book though!

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fong's book is more a collection of essays on drug use and abuse than a monograph with a single argument. There are definite themes throughout the book, however. The author's political commitments are clear and the overall argument that "arguments about drugs are not really about drugs" is well argued. It's dark. It makes drug use feel universally desperate and captured by the logic of capitalism and the profit motive. The book on the whole is well researched and well written, but I found the first three chapters on caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol the most engaging. If you think getting stoned is cool, it might be, but this book will provided a need reality check about what's behind that particular belief.

[James Townsend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely useful and timely discussion of drugs in the broad sense. I have been wanting to see a volume like this for a long time. I appreciate the willingness to apply an even analysis to both licit and illicit drugs throughout the text, but the only reason this isn't 5 stars from me is that I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't more of a biomedical/biochemical line of inquiry in the text. I also appreciated that this book threads the needle well of being a comprehensive introduction to the topic while still having a lot of fascinating details that will interest a more well-versed reader. Also the charts and other forms of summary data included in the text were great.

[Rob M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Convincing research, convincing argument, accessible presentation.

Avoids the twin pitfalls of right wing moralism and left wing libertinism. The narrative strikes a pitch-perfect pathway between two basic argument, namely: "drugs are really bad for you and for society" and "most of the people claiming to crack down on drugs are actually trying to crack down on you and society".

The conclusion is relatively banal and social democratic - the best way to fight drugs is to fight poverty and social alienation - but the journey there is fascinating and jam-packed with interesting insights and anecdotes.

Would definitely highly recommend.

[Mark Dickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was heavy, but wildly interesting and informative. The insane irony of the US government & the FDA’s swinging between prohibition to involvement in distributing drugs is pointed out with humour, along with horribly aged quotes. The advertisements and PSA posters included were also an awesome inclusion. I found the book to be thoughtful and really well done! The most mind blowing chapters for me were on psychotropics- the creation of neurology and the drugs prescribed for anxiety and depression, and the chapter on coffee.

[Jacob Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-researched, thorough analysis of the political economy of drugs. I’d recommend this to anyone who’s been dragged through the mental health industrial complex or anyone who’s interested in critical analysis of American drug use. In my opinion, the conclusion is lacking- the text would be much stronger if Fong would’ve expanded upon his vision for the future; as it stands, it’s a tacked-on “so what now?” That being said, I appreciate how each of the chapters can be read as a standalone essay: seems like a teachable text to me.

[Kate Ridgeway · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone studying public health, psychology, and political science, this book peaked my interest when I saw it in the bookstore, especially because of its sick cover. While it was certainly interesting, this book did not capture my interest or attention very well. It focuses far more on the history of specific types of drugs in America, rather than diving into policy analysis, which was what I kind of expected going into it. Perhaps this was not the right assumption to have going into the book. However, it was a short read, and I still learned some things.

[Hai Vu · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book.

The book mainly talks about the historical facts of the most popular drugs/drug-like products in the US (coffee, tobacco, opioids). It also presents an interesting case: these products are produced and consumed mainly based on greed for capitalism.

[Kyle Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well researched and entertaining read on the role of drugs history, culture, and society today

[Kyle McCormick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply researched, equal parts academic and entertaining - feels like taking your medicine hidden in peanut butter.

[desperatebicycle · Rating 4 out of 5]

great overview of drugs in the USA, every chapter makes you feel like “oh shit I bet there’s three 700 page books I can go read about this” about four times each

[Rolin · Rating 4 out of 5]

very helpful to think of drug use and abuse as a reflection of the social demands of a changing capitalist society than a matter of personal failing or indulgence

[Shruthi Ashok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well researched and thought provoking re: how both licit and illicit drugs are simultaneously the problem and “the solution” in the US and so tied to the American identity.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must-read for Harm Reductionists, Users, Policy Makers, and their Friends Everywhere. just awesomely readable too

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and enjoyable, although not particularly surprising. The author has a well defined perspective, so it was very coherent. Not as many juicy facts as I'd have liked.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Interesting and accessible.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

short and sweet

interesting shit

[George Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good! Maybe a little shallow but it doesn’t pretend to be more. I’m still waiting for my 900+ page The Prize-style history of heroin.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

spoiler alert; it's capitalism. Jk it's the news media.

A fun breezy read. Love how Fong makes connections. He occasionally moves too fast and fails to support (or even coherently articulate) his arguments.

Demonstrates how capitalism and control function in tandem on us via media narratives. Illuminates how all stigma about drugs has always been a farcical method to legitimize prejudice, and obscure the structural forces of oppression (and racism) by in the USA by depicting drugs users as selfish and lazy individuals.