Wild Flesh: A Critical Interactionist Approach to Drug Use Identity and Liberation by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

                             Wild Flesh: 

A Critical Interactionist Approach to 

Drug Use, Identity, and Liberation

Wayne Martin Mellinger, PhD

Book Prospectus

OVERVIEW

Wild Flesh is a feral hymn against the mechanized soul of empire, a defiant offering from the margins of a society unraveling in the grip of carceral logic, Christian nationalism, and corporate anesthetics. It speaks in the voice of the wounded healer, the ecstatic seeker, the addict and the outreach worker, refusing to be pathologized or silenced. This book does not ask permission. It tears open the myths that govern our understanding of drugs, of users, of healing, and of power—revealing the raw and radiant truths beneath. Against a rising tide of authoritarianism that demands submission, categorization, and purification, Wild Flesh insists on the sacred disorder of embodied life, the wisdom of altered states, and the radical act of telling one’s story with unflinching honesty. It calls not just for policy change, but for spiritual reformation, cultural reckoning, and a rewilding of our understanding of what it means to live, to suffer, to seek joy—and to use. This is not just a book about drugs; it is a manifesto for liberation.

Wild Flesh is a bold, interdisciplinary contribution to the emerging field of Critical Drug Studies. The book challenges dominant narratives of addiction and drug policy through a hybrid form of storytelling, scholarship, and experiential testimony. Blending autoethnography, critical interactionism, cultural critique, liberation theology, and shamanic spirituality, it investigates the layered realities of drug use, stigma, addiction, pleasure, harm reduction, and sacred ecstasy in late capitalist society. This is not simply a study of drug use; it is an inquiry into the social, spiritual, and political conditions that produce suffering and possibility. It insists on the body as archive, on memory as method, and on theory as a tool of liberation.

AUTHOR POSITIONING

The book is grounded in the lived experience of the author—a queer, working-class, formerly homeless methamphetamine user turned harm reductionist, sociologist, and spiritual practitioner. This unique positionality allows for a perspective that bridges academic theory with embodied knowledge, offering insights inaccessible to purely observational research. The author’s voice, informed by years of outreach work, spiritual practice, and addiction recovery, becomes a vital witness to realities marginalized in dominant discourse.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Wild Flesh draws upon the methodological foundations of critical interactionism, which extends classical symbolic interactionism by embedding micro-level encounters within broader historical and structural contexts. While early symbolic interactionism focused on meaning-making and the co-construction of the self through interaction, critical interactionism insists that these interpretive processes are shaped by the weight of history, ideology, and institutional power. This framework foregrounds how power, domination, and institutional arrangements shape interpretive acts; reveals how individual meaning-making is often infused with dominant ideologies; shows how drug use exists within a web of social meanings produced in historically specific contexts; and illuminates how identities like "addict" or "recovering user" are constructed through discourse and interaction. It also draws upon liberation theology’s concern with the oppressed and the spiritual possibilities within struggle, and engages assemblage theory, affect studies, queer theory, and critical phenomenology to frame drug use as an embodied, relational, and contextually emergent practice.

METHODOLOGY

The methodological approach is deeply rooted in autoethnography, extended through participant observation, media analysis, and cultural interpretation. Stories of personal drug use and recovery are woven with thick descriptions of chemsex scenes, needle exchanges, psychedelic rituals, and everyday encounters with addiction and bureaucracy. This is a work of engaged scholarship that merges the analytic with the visceral. The book draws from interviews with dozens of drug users, drug dealers, counselors, and harm reductionists; from fieldnotes collected over years of street outreach; from encounters with sacred medicines and club drugs; from organizational and governmental documents; and from films, news stories, and recovery narratives. It uses a grounded, iterative, and relational research style in the spirit of gonzo autoethnography, symbolic interactionism, and cultural studies.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE FIELD

This book advances Critical Drug Studies by refusing to treat drug use as individual pathology, instead embedding it within social, historical, and structural contexts. It reveals how drug users navigate, internalize, and resist dominant ideologies. It attends to micro-level practices while connecting them to macro-level systems of power. It expands the methodological horizon of drug research through a fusion of narrative and theory. And it advances a liberatory, embodied lens through which we might reimagine drug use not only as crisis but as calling, resistance, and sacred search. It contributes to a shift in how we understand drug users—not as problems to be solved, but as storytellers, seekers, and citizens deserving dignity and voice.

DISTINCTIVE CONTENT AND APPROACH

While scholarly in scope, Wild Flesh is radically experiential in voice. The book:

1. Treats drugs not as abstractions but as forces that move through bodies, shape identities, and animate subcultures of resistance.

2. Combines intimate vignettes of Santa Barbara's chemsex scene with historical genealogies of prohibition.

3. Offers spiritual reflections on Dionysian ritual alongside critiques of criminalization.

4. Reframes drug use as a portal into deeper questions of meaning, identity, embodiment, and collective liberation.

5. Uses autoethnography not only as method but as epistemology—insisting that lived experience is a valid source of knowledge.

CHAPTER SUMMARY (Two-Sentence Format)

1. Sacred Flesh: Toward a Critical Autoethnography of Drug Use

This opening chapter introduces the book’s central themes—embodied research, ecstatic healing, Dionysian spirituality, and the sacred dimensions of drug use. It lays the methodological and epistemological groundwork for understanding drug use as both a personal and collective rite, challenging dominant medical and legal frameworks.

2. Becoming an Addict

Using symbolic interactionism and narrative theory, this chapter traces the social construction of the addict identity. Drawing on interviews, treatment experiences, and self-reflection, it shows how this identity is negotiated, imposed, and sometimes resisted.

3. Becoming a Dealer

This chapter explores the author's lived experience of dealing drugs, analyzing how stigma, criminalization, and street-level economic survival interweave. It critiques the moral binaries surrounding sellers and examines the informal ethics and solidarities within underground economies.

4. Chemsex in Santa Barbara

Offering a thick description of queer methamphetamine use in sexual settings, this chapter examines the pleasures, risks, rituals, and community logics of chemsex. It draws on fieldwork, interviews, and queer theory to interrogate narratives of deviance and pathologization.

5. The Will to Party

This chapter examines the cultural and existential dimensions of drug-fueled celebration. It explores party culture as a site of resistance, liberation, and communal effervescence, grounded in Durkheim, Bataille, and contemporary rave studies.

6. Tripping with the Gods: On Entheogenic Spirituality

Focusing on psychedelics, this chapter reconstructs a naturalist vision of sacred ecstasy and shamanic healing. Drawing on anthropology, religious studies, and Dionysian ritual, it reclaims altered states as paths to insight rather than illness.

7. A Genealogy of Drug Abuse and Addiction

This chapter applies Foucauldian genealogy to trace the shifting meanings of addiction across different historical epochs. It explores how religious, medical, and legal discourses constructed the modern addict subject.

8. Critical Drug Use Theory

Here, the author introduces a new theoretical intervention that merges symbolic interactionism, assemblage theory, and affect studies. Critical Drug Use Theory rejects essentialist models of addiction and insists on contextual, dynamic understandings of drug use.

9. Becoming Moderate

This chapter explores the difficult, often stigmatized process of becoming a controlled user. It draws on harm reduction and behavioral studies to explore how some users navigate between abstinence and addiction.

10. Becoming an Ex-Addict

The focus shifts to recovery and the ways people leave problematic drug use behind. It considers recovery as a performative, situated, and ideologically contested identity transformation.

11. Harm Reduction as Praxis

This chapter grounds harm reduction in radical ethics, grassroots movements, and public health. It critiques technocratic versions of harm reduction and reclaims it as a philosophy of care and survival.

12. Sacred Madness and Controlled Frenzy

Integrating Dionysian theory and mad studies, this chapter defends the spiritual and therapeutic potential of altered states. It invites readers to imagine a re-enchanted relationship to madness, ecstasy, and visionary experience.

13. Psychoeducation and the Drug User's Mind

This chapter advocates for widespread education about pharmacology, pleasure, harm, and recovery. It challenges fear-based drug pedagogy and centers the drug user as a knowing subject.

14. Listening to Drug Users

A defense of ethnography, narrative inquiry, and user-centered research. This chapter argues that listening to drug users' stories is essential to ethical scholarship and effective policy.

15. The Revolving Door

An autoethnographic account of cycling through jails, shelters, hospitals, and treatment centers. This chapter critiques the system’s failure to support those with co-occurring disorders and offers grounded alternatives.

16. Wild Flesh: A Manifesto for Liberation

The closing chapter gathers the book’s threads into a call for post-prohibitionist futures rooted in sacred experience, social justice, and the wisdom of lived struggle. It is both a manifesto and a ritual, honoring the ecstatic, the wounded, and the wise.

AUDIENCE AND MARKET

Wild Flesh will appeal to:

- Scholars in Critical Drug Studies, cultural studies, queer theory, and medical sociology

- Practitioners in harm reduction, addiction treatment, and public health

- Students in courses on drugs and society, deviance, qualitative methods, and social theory

- General readers interested in alternative perspectives on drug use and policy

- Members of drug-using communities seeking frameworks to understand their experiences

VISION AND CONCLUSION

Wild Flesh builds toward a vision of a post-prohibitionist future rooted in harm reduction, ecstatic healing, and spiritual reintegration. This is not a call to use drugs—it is a call to tell the truth about why we use them, how our society treats those who do, and what other stories might be possible. The book emerges as a howl from the edges of empire, a hymn to altered states, and a reckoning with the ruins left by the War on Drugs. It speaks for the ecstatic and the exiled, the moderate user and the shamanic seeker, the queer partier and the wounded healer. We need new maps, new myths, a theology of the high and a politics of care. This book is that offering.

Wild Flesh is a howl from the edges of empire, a hymn to the wild gods of altered states, a reckoning with the ruins left by the War on Drugs. It emerges from the streets, the shelters, the trip tents, the jail cells, the dancefloors, and the therapist’s chair—a map drawn in blood and glitter, grief and revelation. This book insists that drug use is not simply a medical condition or a criminal act, but a deep human yearning—for connection, for healing, for rupture, for flight. At a time when overdose deaths mount, when psychedelic capitalism blooms, and when stigma still strangles truth, this book tears through the silence with stories, theories, ethnographies, and sacred disobedience. It speaks for the ecstatic and the exiled, the moderate user and the shamanic seeker, the queer partier and the wounded healer. We need new maps. We need new myths. We need a theology of the high and a politics of care. This is my offering.

is a bold, interdisciplinary, and deeply personal contribution to the emerging field of Critical Drug Studies. Blending autoethnography, interactionist sociology, cultural critique, liberation theology, and shamanic spirituality, this book investigates the layered realities of drug use, stigma, addiction, pleasure, harm reduction, and sacred ecstasy in the late capitalist West. Grounded in the lived experience of the author—a queer, working-class, formerly homeless methamphetamine user turned harm reductionist, sociologist, and spiritual practitioner—Wild Flesh challenges dominant narratives of addiction and drug policy through a hybrid form of storytelling, scholarship, and ecstatic testimony.

While the book is scholarly in scope, it is radically experiential in voice. These essays do not treat drugs as abstractions but as forces that move through bodies, shape identities, and animate subcultures of resistance. Combining intimate vignettes of Santa Barbara’s chemsex scene, historical genealogies of prohibition, spiritual reflections on Dionysian ritual, and critiques of criminalization, Wild Flesh reframes drug use as a portal into deeper questions of meaning, identity, embodiment, and collective liberation.

Drawing on Critical Drug Studies, symbolic interactionism, mad studies, eco-ritual theory, and religious naturalism, the book builds toward a vision of a post-prohibitionist future rooted in harm reduction, ecstatic healing, and spiritual reintegration. This is not a call to use drugs—it is a call to tell the truth about why we use them, how our society treats those who do, and what other stories might be possible.

Audience

Wild Flesh will resonate with multiple audiences. Scholars and students in sociology, anthropology, drug studies, religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, and public health will find its theoretical contributions and empirical richness valuable. Activists, harm reductionists, and people who use drugs will see their lives reflected in its pages. Readers of queer theory, radical spirituality, and experimental ethnography will be drawn to its hybrid voice. And general readers seeking new perspectives on addiction, drug use, and spirituality will find it deeply compelling.

Author Background

Wayne Martin Mellinger, PhD, is a sociologist, public intellectual, and harm reductionist who has lived at the intersections of addiction, homelessness, madness, and queer resistance. He is the founder of the Longest Night Homeless Memorial in Santa Barbara and the creator of Dionysian Naturalism, a spirituality grounded in sacred ecstasy, naturalism, and liberation. His previous writings blend symbolic interactionism, autoethnography, religious studies, and social justice, and have been published in academic journals, activist blogs, and progressive media outlets.

Structure and Chapter Outline

1. Sacred Flesh: Toward a Critical Autoethnography of Drug Use

A manifesto for the book, introducing core concepts like sacred madness, ecstatic healing, Dionysian naturalism, and the methodological commitment to embodied, subjective truth.

2. Tripping with the God: Shamanic Drug Use and the Long Arc of Human History

A deep dive into the prehistoric and historical uses of entheogens, with an emphasis on Indo-European, Norse, and Celtic shamanic practices. Frames drug use as a human universal shaped by ecological and cultural evolution.

3. The Will to Ecstasy: Drug Use as Sacred Rebellion

Introduces the concept formerly called the Will to Party as a sacred drive toward altered consciousness, grounded in anthropology, Nietzschean theory, and personal experience. Contrasts modern pathologization with the ancient ritual contexts of ecstatic states.

4. Becoming an Addict: Identity, Moral Career, and the Drug War

Autoethnographic and interactionist exploration of how one becomes an addict under the gaze of prohibitionist ideology. Draws on Howard Becker, Goffman, and Foucault to analyze labeling, self-fulfilling prophecy, and structural violence.

5. Becoming a Dealer: Drug Markets, Trust, and the Everyday Moralities of Illegality

Draws on the author's own conviction for methamphetamine distribution to humanize and demythologize the figure of the drug dealer. In conversation with Odis E. Bigus's The Milkman and His Customer.

6. Chemsex in Santa Barbara: Pleasure, Intimacy, and Risk

An intimate ethnography of the local chemsex scene. Examines how methamphetamine intersects with sex, trauma, desire, and queer community. Explores concepts like controlled frenzy, sacred shame, and the mass psychology of misery.

7. A Genealogy of Addiction: From Sacred Use to Medicalized Morality

Builds on the work of Bruce Alexander, Jonathan Ott, and Terence McKenna to trace how colonialism, capitalism, and Protestant morality transformed drugs from sacraments to sins. Proposes a cultural evolution of drug ideology.

8. Harm Reduction as Sacred Practice: Entheogenic Preparation and Integration

Combines practical advice, ethnographic vignettes, and spiritual reflection on how harm reduction and psychedelic integration function as modern rituals. Draws on the wisdom of Ralph Metzner, Erowid, MAPS, and contemporary psychonautics.

9. I Just Wanted to Dance with Dionysus: Addiction as a Spiritual Emergency

Originally published as a standalone essay, this chapter reframes addiction as a failed shamanic initiation. Explores the metaphor of the wounded healer and introduces the Amethyst Path as a shamanic model for recovery.

10. Critical Drug Studies: Theories, Scholars, and Narcofeminism

A literature review and field survey. Introduces Critical Drug Studies as a theoretical movement. Explores contributions from Carl Hart, Craig Reinarman, Nancy Campbell, Darin Weinberg, Narcofeminists, and interactionist ethnographers.

11. Deconstructing Drug War Ideologies

A critique of drug prohibition, mass incarceration, and the pharmacratic inquisition. Examines the symbolic, moral, and political foundations of the drug war as a war on bodies, desire, and sacred ecstasy.

12. Wild Futures: Toward a Dionysian Liberation Theology

The closing vision. What would a society look like that honored ecstatic experience, healed addiction with love, and treated entheogens as sacraments instead of contraband? Builds toward a queer, anarchic, naturalist, liberatory spirituality.

Glossary and References

The book will include a glossary of key terms including but not limited to: sacred madness, entheogen, Dionysian naturalism, pharmacratic inquisition, will to ecstasy, controlled use, sacred frenzy, moral career, narcofeminism, psychonautics, ecstatic healing, harm reduction, sacred shame. APA-style bibliography with over 150 sources including academic texts, autoethnographies, zines, blogs, and spiritual writings.

Length

Estimated 90,000 words

Timeline

Final manuscript projected by September 2025

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