FREE TO ATTEND. No reservations required.
Join us Thursday, September 14th at 7pm at Pegasus Downtown when we welcome Benjamin Y. Fong in celebration of the release of his new book, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st-Century Binge, from Verso Books.
About the book:
Quick Fixes blows away the pharmacological fog to take a sober look at how drugs have shaped American society. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America’s passionate love for and intense hatred of these substances has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century. Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans’ fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes, it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, affect the development and spread of medications and narcotics among the populace.
By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever-perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?
About the author:
Benjamin Y. Fong is Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College and Associate Director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016) and co-editor with Craig Calhoun of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia, 2022). His other work can be found in Jacobin, Catalyst, The New York Times, and Damage Magazine, amongst other places.