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Reviews
"This highly original and fully appropriate title, something we have come to expect from Szasz's books, heralds an excellent sociological analysis of man's past and present relationships with drugs. . . . Szasz takes the reader through a religious scenario as imaginatively symbolic and insightfully analytic as any morality play can be."
Ronald K. Siegel, Contemporary Psychology
Description
Thomas Szasz suggests that governments have overstepped their bounds:
- in labeling and prohibiting certain drugs as "dangerous" substances and
- incarcerating drug "addicts" in order to cure them.
Szasz asserts that such policies:
- scapegoat illegal drugs and the persons who use and sell them, and
- discourage the breaking of drug habits by pathologizing drug use as "addiction."
Readers will find in Szasz's arguments a cogent and committed response to a worldwide debate.
Author
Thomas Szasz is professor emeritus of psychiatry at State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His books include The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement; The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience; and Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide, all published by Syracuse University Press.
