Drugs & Media New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption, and Consciousness

We all of course know the cliche 'don't judge a book by its cover.' But to anyone who is perusing this cover and reading this note, you would be well advised to heed the following extension of that cliche 'Do not be too quick to judge this book by its title.' This is by no means a book that treats of media like Cheech and Chong's movie Up in Smoke or Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled journalistic endeavors, or what happens when music fans fuel up on Ecstasy and rave all night at a club. It is a book that takes on, in a deeply serious and scholarly way, the serious matters that: (a) drugs are media in that they come between us and our ways of being in and experiencing our world; (b) our uses of and gratifications from media in certain ways smack of and parallel the use of and addiction to drugs; and (c) both drugs and media operate on our consciousness at the same time our consciousness operates on them - in significant ways, for significant reasons, and with significant effects. Thom Gencarelli, Associate Professor of Communication, Manhattan College