Lawrence Driscoll's fresh examination of the meaning of drugs from the Victorians to the present asks us to listen to historical and current voices whose positions on drugs are at variance with our "truths." Driscoll draws on the work of figures as diverse as William Burroughs, Sigmund Freud, Conan Doyle, and Anna Kavan to shed light on different or silenced ways of talking about drugs and to offer us a historical counter-memory. The result of his work is to unsettle and disturb the familiar parameters that frame our discussion of drugs, revealing that others are available: positions which expose our own constructions as surprisingly limited.

About the author

Lawrence Driscoll is Lecturer in English at Santa Monica College.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Reconsidering Drugs
Book Subtitle: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses
Authors: Lawrence Driscoll
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62239-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave History Collection, History (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2000
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-312-22272-7Published: 01 January 2000
eBook ISBN: 978-1-349-62239-9Published: 30 April 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 199
Topics: Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, multidisciplinary

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Authors:

Sections

Buy it now

Buying options

Other ways to access

Table of contents (7 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction

“Unpopular Everywhere,” or Forgetting the Self, Remembering Drugs

“A Creature Without Species”: Constructing Drug Users

“Pleasures Impossible to Interpret”: Freud and Cocaine

“The Doctor Does a Good Job”: William Burroughs’s Critique of Control

Planet Heroin: Women and Drugs

Up from Drug Slavery?: Drugs and Race in Contemporary America

Back Matter

About this book