Why ‘war on drugs’?

Feb 19th 2022

Here are three books you should read, if you are interested in drugs, treatments and drug policy.

The latest one is The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher, and the link takes you to the review in The Guardian by David Nutt, the professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and the former chair of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Here a link to The Guardian bookshop, where you can buy the book.

Fisher is a psychiatrist and former addict, so he has experience and knows what he is talking about. And, I really do not need to add anything to Fisher’s view on the topic:

“Addiction is profoundly ordinary: a way of being with the pleasures and pains of life, and just one manifestation of the central human task of working with suffering. If addiction is part of humanity, then, it is not a problem to solve. We will not end addiction, but we must find ways of working with it: ways that are sometimes gentle, and sometimes vigorous, but never warlike, because it is futile to wage a war on our own nature.”

The other two books are by Martin Booth: Opium: A History and Cannabis: A History, both detailed, well researched and well written. No scaremongering, but clear-eyed factual history and information on the drugs and societies they were, and are, produced and used in.

(The links are to Amazon, but you can probably find them in other places as well, like real life bookshops.)