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Mission and Index of Articles

Mission and Index of Articles for Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D

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  Wild Flesh:  Explorations in Critical Drug Studies A Blog of Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Mission Wild Flesh explores drugs and altered states through sociology, autoethnography, queer phenomenology, and critical drug studies. Here, drug use is reframed as ritual, survival, resistance, and ecstatic practice — not just pathology. The blog weaves together lived experience and classic scholarship to challenge stigma and reimagine drug cultures as sites of knowledge, spirituality, and care. Index of Articles What is Critical Drug Studies? A Deeper Excursion (https://wildflesh.blogspot.com/2025/09/what-is-critical-drug-studies-deeper.html) My Four Blogs (https://wildflesh.blogspot.com/2025/09/my-four-blogs.html) Addiction, Modernity and the “Urge to Use” (https://wildflesh.blogspot.com/2025/07/addiction-modernity-and-urge-to-use.html) Caught in the Open: Why My Friends Keep Going to Jail While I Stay Free (https://wildflesh.blogspot.com/2025/07/caught-in-open-why-my-friends-...
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Neither Demonology nor Romanticism by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

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Neither Demonology nor Romanticism: A Critical Drug Studies of Entanglement This essay is a response to my critics, and it takes both sets of objections seriously enough to let them shape its structure. Some readers of this project find it too spiritual to count as serious sociology — a theology dressed up in footnotes. Others find its refusal of drug-war categories too sympathetic to drug use to reckon honestly with addiction, psychosis, and death — a romance with the underworld that forgets who doesn't come back from it. I answer these objections by examining where my framework is most vulnerable: institutional responsibility, pharmacological difference, romanticized accounts of ritual, the limits of lived experience, and the clinical risks of mythic language. The underlying argument is this: no single vocabulary — neurological, psychiatric, sociological, political, experiential, or spiritual — exhausts what happens when people alter consciousness. Each vocabulary makes certain r...
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The Shamanic Wisdom Traditions of Controlled Use by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

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  Shamanic Wisdom Traditions of Controlled Use Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Dedicated to my new student David on 3 June 2026 In this essay I advance a sweeping argument that cuts against the grain of contemporary prohibitionist culture. At its heart lies a deceptively simple claim: that human beings once possessed elaborate, socially transmitted knowledge of how to consume powerful psychotropic plants safely, purposefully, and with profound spiritual benefit, and that the destruction of those traditions is the deepest root of the modern drug crisis. This is not primarily a pharmacological or policy document. It is a work of critical social theory and emerging theology, written from within the framework of Religious Naturalism, specifically my own constructive theological project, Dionysian Naturalism — a nature religion grounded in scientific naturalism that refuses to suppress the ecstatic, embodied, and wild dimensions of human spiritual life. The Problem Stated I open with a pr...
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