1st Edition
Why We Take Drugs Seeking Excess and Communion in the Modern World
Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Sacrificing the Rational Body: The Transgressive Economy of Intoxication 3. Seeking the Impossible: Expenditure Beyond Necessity 4. Traditional Time and Modern Time 5. From Bodies in Time to Time in the Body 6. Theorizing Community 7. Intoxication Liminality and Community Formation 8. Conclusion Appendix A: How the Interviews Were Conducted and Interpreted Appendix B: Who Was Interviewed Appendix C: Interview Schedule
Biography
Tom Yardley is currently working on a collaborative project looking at the changing boundaries and new convergences between prescription medicines, herbal remedies and legal and illegal recreational drugs.
'In asking why we take drugs, Tom Yardley poses the question that is crucially excluded from the familiar discourse of drug control and finds answers that open the subject up in powerful and original ways. Intoxication, he argues, is not deviant or pathological but a quintessential component of modernity: a corrective to a risk-averse society, an unmediated experience in an increasingly virtual world, a technology for reclaiming control of time and creating a subculture of reciprocity and community. Combining lucid critical theory with vivid oral testimony, Why We Take Drugs provides a compelling framework for understanding the enticements, epiphanies and excesses of modern drug culture.'
- Mike Jay, author of High Society
