Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingQuick Fixes
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreAmericans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?
Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love and intense hatred for drugs 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, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses.
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?
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 and coeditor with Craig Calhoun of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work. His other work can be found in Jacobin, Catalyst, the New York Times, and Damage Magazine, amongst other places.
Stephen Caffrey has been a stage actor in New York, Los Angeles, and across the country for over thirty years. On film and television he directed and starred in the series Tour of Duty for over three seasons on CBS. He received an Emmy nomination for his year on All my Children. He has had leading roles in many TV movies and miniseries, as well as the Sundance Film Festival winner Longtime Companion. He also has had numerous guest star appearances, including on the famous "Yada Yada" episode of Seinfeld. He was more recently seen in Bosch, Cinema Verite on HBO, and recurring on NBC's American Odyssey. His stage work includes shows at New York Theatre Workshop, Classic Stage Co., Mark Taper Forum, Geffen Playhouse, Geva, Seattle Rep., Cleveland Playhouse, Cincinnati Playhouse, American Conservatory Theatre, Berkeley Rep., Old Globe, Hartford Stage, Royal George/Chicago, and many others.