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9780415696104

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'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 '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 '...a very insightful, thoughtful and thorough text on intoxication, which takes into account the role of drugs in community formation, as a transgressive act and as a sacrificial gesture; intoxication as a social function as opposed a social menace.' 'There is a bubbling political undercurrent to this phenomenological analysis. The 'war on drugs' is often cited for its inability to provide a victory or resolution and indeed, as this text claims, could in fact be the cause of the dangers surrounding intoxication. Why We Take Drugs, however, goes a step further by bringing to light a number of important functions that drug intoxication can offer the social in itself; in both being part of an accepted social model and as a method of transgressing existing political boundaries. Overall, an excellent book that every student of drug theory should own.'-Rob Dickins, Psychedelic Press UK, 10 April 2012

'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

'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

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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.

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