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Introduction
Jason Lee
Sex and drugs and rock and roll—all my brain and body need?
—Reworked Ian Dury lyric
Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?—
It is almost the history of “culture,” of our so-called high culture.
—Nietzsche
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise
that we ought to control our thoughts.
—Darwin
What choices do people really have? The near addiction to reworking conceptions of addictions is really concerned with asking who and what are in control. This book delves into a deeper fundamental question: What, if anything, is driving people’s sense of being and Being, or the notion of Being-on-drugs, as Avital Ronell put it? Addiction is a trap that paradoxically offers freedom; it is a mini-death offering a temporary release