Abby and Patrick welcome academic and writer Ben Fong, author of the new book
Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge as well as
Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism. They discuss the many different reasons people take drugs; American exceptionalism with respect to drug consumption; how drug policy and drug discourse is never really just about drugs; what the distinction between legal and illegal drugs both illuminates and obscures; the fundamental fantasies that accompany drug prohibition as well as the fantasies that surround particular drugs themselves; the very near future of psychedelic therapy and its relation to current treatments for anxiety and depression; individual versus social drug experiences; cocaine and neoliberalism; the not-necessarily-liberatory politics of psychedelics; how drug advertising has changed throughout the course of the last century; and the biomedical turn in psychiatry and its relation to shifting social, political, and economic conditions.
Ben’s new book
Quick Fixes is here:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2981-quick-fixes
His previous book
Death and Mastery is here:
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/death-and-mastery/9780231542616
You can read his recent article, “Who Deserves Amphetamines? A Social History of Stimulants” about the amphetamine shortage here:
https://thepointmag.com/politics/who-deserves-amphetamines/
And his new essay, “The Jobs and Freedom Strategy” is here:
https://catalyst-journal.com/2023/08/the-jobs-and-freedom-strategy
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