Reconsidering Drugs

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.

First published in 1979, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered is regarded by many as the most comprehensive, accurate, and accessible analysis of psychedelic drugs for the general reader. It records the extensive history of scientific research on, and societal experience with, psychedelic drugs. The Lindesmith Center reprint edition features a new introduction by the authors on recent developments in psychedelic research, as well as a preface by Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith center.

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.

-- Are patients aware of the fact that pharmacological therapies stress the brain in ways which may prevent or postpone symptomatic and functional recovery ? ==================================================== Rethinking Psychiatric D

This is an original book on the philosophy of medicine. It considers philosophy of medicine as a subdiscipline of philosophy of science. This volume is grounded on an epistemological bottom-up account that arises from the clinical situation, the epidemiologic, and the resulting public health account. It is not a review of the literature, and it is not intended to frame the debates, or to analyze and compare the various number of viewpoints. Medicine is the human activity, which begins by a linguistic act that identifies the negative norms of health: it begins with a first distinction that splits biological processes into three conventional parts, normal, abnormal and pathologic. Neither of them is a natural kind. Being abnormal is intrinsically bad and admits of degrees, while being pathologic is dichotomous. Being normal is factitious and counterfactual much the same as frictionless planes in physics. Leaving apart the ethical aspects, this book endeavors to uncover the implicit conceptual network, the chief junctures of medicine, should they be found, and their articulations with clinical and community medicine. It results that medicine is pervaded with dichotomous concepts such as scientific vs pragmatic discourse, function and malfunction, abnormal and pathologic, needs and wants, causation and explanation, clinical vs community-oriented care, physical vs psychiatric diseases, mental illness vs deviancy, and so on. Medical thinking has two dimensions intrinsically interweaved, namely a constant amalgam and admixture of biological and normative aspects, so that this essential hybrid nature of the grammar of medicine endorses opposite approaches, naturalistic or normativist, biological or value-laden, realist or instrumental, reductionist or holistic, phenomenological or analytic.

First published in 1979, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered is regarded by many as the most comprehensive, accurate, and accessible analysis of psychedelic drugs for the general reader. It records the extensive history of scientific research on, and societal experience with, psychedelic drugs. The Lindesmith Center reprint edition features a new introduction by the authors on recent developments in psychedelic research, as well as a preface by Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith center.

2021 Prose Award Finalist A long-overdue and sober examination of President Ronald Reagan’s racist politics that continue to harm communities today and helped shape the modern conservative movement. Ronald Reagan is hailed as a transformative president and an American icon, but within his twentieth-century politics lies a racial legacy that is rarely discussed. Both political parties point to Reagan as the “right” kind of conservative but fail to acknowledge his political attacks on people of color prior to and during his presidency. Reconsidering Reagan corrects that narrative and reveals how his views, policies, and actions were devastating for Black Americans and racial minorities, and that the effects continue to resonate today. Using research from previously untapped resources including the Black press which critically covered Reagan’s entire political career, Daniel S. Lucks traces Reagan’s gradual embrace of conservatism, his opposition to landmark civil rights legislation, his coziness with segregationists, and his skill in tapping into white anxiety about race, riding a wave of “white backlash” all the way to the Presidency. He argues that Reagan has the worst civil rights record of any President since the 1920s—including supporting South African apartheid, packing courts with conservatives, targeting laws prohibiting discrimination in education and housing, and launching the “War on Drugs”—which had cataclysmic consequences on the lives of Black and Brown people. Linking the past to the present, Lucks expertly examines how Reagan set the blueprint for President Trump and proves that he is not an anomaly, but in fact the logical successor to bring back the racially tumultuous America that Reagan conceptualized.

Addiction & therapy.