Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies

  A Prayer for International Overdose Awareness Day Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love, Spirit that moves among us when we refuse to abandon one another— Today we remember those we have lost. We remember their names, their faces, their laughter, their struggles, their unfinished lives. We remember the empty chair at the table, the unanswered phone, the bedroom left unchanged, the place in a family that no one else can fill. We remember Rafael. We remember Paco. We remember Tina. And we remember the countless others whose names we never learned, whose lives ended too soon and too often alone. We remember that behind every number was a human being—someone with hopes and fears, someone who struggled, someone who loved and was loved. And let us confess: we have tolerated systems that sort the suffering into the deserving and undeserving and call it care. We have reduced human lives to diagnoses, case files, and numbers, and too often mistaken the paperwork for the person. May we have the c...

  Remarks for International Overdose Awareness Day Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Presented at the 25th annual International Overdose Awareness Day vigil held in the Sunken Garden of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse on 31 August 2026. A few years ago, I was called to an encampment behind a strip mall just after sunrise. A young man was already gone. What I remember most is not the sirens or the paperwork, but his shoes — carefully placed side by side at the entrance of the tent, as if he had planned to step back into them and return to a life still waiting for him. No one returns for those shoes. Overdose does not only take a life. It rearranges the lives of everyone who remains. Thank you for being here. Somewhere in this county to e breaking. There is a friend who still has a phone number saved that will never be answered again. There is an outreach worker — and I am one of them — who carries a list of the dead the way other people carry photographs. We carry these names becau...

Mission and Index of Articles for Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies by 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 After "Dual Diagnosis" Neither Demonology nor Romanticism The Shamanic Wisdom Traditions of Controlled Use Awakening Fire and Luminous Form: A Comparative Phenomenology of Psilocybin-Induced Kundalini Drug War Ideologies: Exposing the Propaganda Tensions and Possibilities for a Narcofeminist Sociology , by Fay Dennis, Kiran Pienaar & Marsha Rosengarten Desiring Assemblages: A Case for Desire over Pleasure in Critical Drug Studies ,...

            CODA After “Dual Diagnosis” Madness, Intoxication, and the Right to Name a Life A new concluding essay for I Just Wanted to Dance with Dionysus Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Draft • August 2026  Returning to a Story I Once Told Five years after beginning the work that became  I Just Wanted to Dance with Dionysus , I return to it with gratitude and uneasiness. I still recognize the man who wrote that story. I recognize his grief, his exhilaration, his hunger for a language large enough to hold what happened to him. I recognize why he turned toward Dionysus and Chiron, James Hillman and Joseph Campbell, soul loss and soul retrieval. Clinical vocabulary had reduced a convulsive passage through love, sexuality, intoxication, madness, incarceration, homelessness, and spiritual searching to a pair of diagnoses. Archetypal psychology returned depth, image, mystery, and moral seriousness to experiences psychiatry had flattened into symptoms. The H...