Book Review Essay: Intoxicating Culture: Culture on Drugs: Narco-Cultural Studies of High Modernity, Drugs and Popular Culture: Drugs, Media and Identity in Contemporary Society, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs

Abstract

Culture on Drugs: Narco-Cultural Studies of High Modernity by Dave Boothroyd, (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 240 pp., $26.00.Drugs and Popular Culture: Drugs, Media and Identity in Contemporary Society by Paul Manning (Ed.), (Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2007)), 304 pp., $49.95.Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs by Kane Race, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009), 280 pp., $23.95.These three books each address the question of drug influence, in both senses of the term. On the one hand, they discuss the intoxicating effects of drugs, especially illicit drugs, consumed by individuals and collectives - of people the influence. On the other hand, they take up drugs' influence on sociological, cultural, and philosophical events, suggesting that have not only been present at the scene of significant political and theoretical events in recent decades, but have made significant contributions to them.Twenty years ago Fredric Jameson (1991) noted that the tendential immiseration of American society is filed away under the rubric of 'drugs', and since that time the use of drugs as a cultural shorthand for poverty, trauma, risk, and morbidity has become more entrenched. Yet a strange double optic is also evident. For every use of as a signifier of social crisis there seems to be another as a signifier of creativity, meaningful social change, or a way of being. The importance of alcohol and other drug consumption to artists and musicians is so well known as to be a cliche; the centrality of Ecstasy to rave culture no less so. Stoner jokes are a recognized genre, robust enough to sustain entire films (think of The Big Lebowski) and even to generate subgenres (Wikipedia describes Pineapple Express as a stoner action comedy). It is perfectly usual for newspapers to feature serious, even panicked, articles about drug addiction in the news sections, and cocaine jokes in the lifestyle and entertainment pages. With the possible exception of mental health, it is difficult to think of another social category represented so seamlessly in such contradictory, polarized terms.To their credit, Drugs and Popular Culture, Culture on Drugs, and Pleasure Consuming Medicine all intervene, in various ways, in this peculiar configuration. Drug consumption is so available to cliches that it seems a notable achievement when, as they often do, the books avoid these cliches. Their strengths are in developing new accounts of as both cultural referent and biological agent, rather than reinscribing them as one or the other. They provide, in short, new insights into the mutual constitution of and culture, and raise possibilities for taking these insights into newer territory still. This is important for our understanding of alcohol and other legal drugs, and even more so for our understanding of illicit drugs, which are so often denied any meaningful role in the construction of culture.Drugs and Popular Culture is a collection of disparate chapters, whose contributors are mostly based in British universities. Structurally, it pivots on inquiries around the normalization thesis (Parker, Aldridge, & Measham, 1998). These include: Whether illicit drug use is now regarded as normal even though most people do not, in fact, take drugs; or, conversely, whether drug consumption is now statistically normal even though it is still regarded as deviant; and how policy responses, cultural texts, and social discourses construct and constrain normality. The normalization thesis in the context of could serve a number of purposes, but the primary interest taken here is classically sociological. If more people take than is normally assumed, then the role of in constituting social rituals and social groups is more important than, or at least different from, what is normally granted. The presence of at the scene of mainstream culture has different implications from the presence of at marginalized or scarifying minorities. …