Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies

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...