Ginsberg was a ceaseless experimenter, constantly pushing boundaries whether personal, social, or literary. Drug use was one such privileged means of attaining the transcendent states that Beat writers such as Ginsberg coveted. Ginsberg began his experimentations while at Columbia, keeping detailed notes of his experiences and remaining vigilant that his experimentation did not turn into addiction. Exploring psychedelics with Timothy Leary alerted Ginsberg to the wider social possibilities of its use, and he became famous worldwide as an advocate of drug experimentation. While his use waned later in life, Ginsberg was a firm believer in the power of drugs to challenge current depictions of reality, all the while remaining honest and open about their deleterious effects. Ginsberg openly called for the legalization of many drugs, broader experimentation both socially and scientifically, and castigated US drug policies and their negative consequences. This chapter explores the reasons for Ginsberg’s use of drugs, his advocacy for them, and the various poems he wrote while under the influence of substances collected mainly in Kaddish and Other Poems (1961).

Overshadowed by other international journeys, Ginsberg’s six months traveling alone through South America in 1960 have been relatively neglected by biographers and critics. However, recent editions and new research enable a better understanding of the literary and political significance of his geographic and drug trips in the region. The long-delayed publication of his South American Journals in 2019 reveals how prescient Ginsberg was to see the visionary value of ayahuasca (aka yagé), the indigenous psychedelic, set against the policing of reality by a materialistic world. His journals also show the full extent of his spiritual crisis in South America and his difficulties in finding a poetic form to express his experiences. Although The Yage Letters has been neglected by Ginsberg scholars, the complex backstory of the book of South American trips he coauthored with William S. Burroughs reveals a much greater role in its creation.

The control of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) is an important feature of the global public policy landscape. There is widespread recognition that the ‘war on drugs’, rooted in international systems of drug control, has failed both on its own terms and because of the harms it has visited upon users and their communities. Although some states have moved towards liberalisation, the vast majority continue to heavily invest in punitive measures. Importantly, however, key ideas about drugs are coming under sustained pressure, and in some instances, beginning to break down, including the idea that drugs inevitably produce harms, including illness, injury and death, or that they produce other predictable, stable and consistent ‘effects’ (Fraser and Moore, 2011). There is evidence of this change in specific contexts including drug policy, health promotion and service provision. But what is happening in law courts? How are drugs being conceptualised in legal cases around the world? Scholars from a variety of disciplines have taken a keen interest in the ‘drug problem’, but there has been little scrutiny of how key cases in different jurisdictions have influenced the ways in which we understand, respond to and punish the use of various substances. The importance of such decisions extends beyond criminal matters and affects outcomes in a variety of legal spheres including immigration, welfare, family justice, education and employment law. Judging Drugs is the first book to chart the impact and significance of those cases in different parts of the world, and to consider how ideas about drugs are (or might be) changing across our courts. It thus comprises an important and distinctive addition to a body of scholarship that has sought to understand the ways in which drugs and ‘addiction’ have been subject to varying degrees of control and opprobrium. Importantly, contributors to this edited collection do not simply identify and summarise important legal cases from around the world. In this sense, the collection is not a ‘textbook’ of important case law. It is also not a textbook of cases with apparent precedent value.

The field of drug studies is increasingly challenged by the rapid digitalisation of drug markets, raising the importance of reconsidering how drug laws and policies respond to the role of technologies in the drug trade, and their social impact. This chapter considers the famous case of Maximilian Schmidt, who was accused of setting up Germany’s largest digital drug shop under the alias Shiny Flakes and became the subject of media stories and Netflix TV productions. The case offers an opportunity to explore how the move to digitally mediated drug supply has altered the ways in which phenomena such as the ‘dealer’ and ‘dealing’ are constituted in socio-technical and legal contexts.1 Research shows that digital drug markets pose serious challenges to jurisdictional and regulatory frameworks and governments require costly and laborious police operations to adapt to the rapid development of these markets (EU Drugs Strategy 2021–2025, 2021; UNODC, 2022). Following the transition of drug markets and traditional dealer activities to digitally mediated formats, it has become important to consider how drug dealers and dealing are constituted and handled in law, and whether the technological means of dealing are reshaping how questions of responsibility, ‘harm’ and entrepreneurship are being understood.

Methadone maintenance therapy arose as a treatment for opiate use in the mid 1960s. At the time, neither drug use nor treatment for it were considered disabilities. When Vincent Dole, the Rockefeller Institute metabolic researcher who was one of the progenitors of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT), asked, ‘What kind of disablement does a drug produce?’ (Courtwright et al., 1989, p. 334), this was a prescient question.1 Dole’s team stabilised patient-subjects on methadone, hoping to displace reliance on shorter-acting opiates, and explored dosages that would enable ‘cooperative relationships with patients’ (Courtwright, et al., 1989, p. 336). Opposing detoxification and abstinence as the sole basis for treatment, Dole saw opioid use disorder as a metabolic condition that required ongoing pharmacological stability. Contrasting the stabilising effects of one opiate (methadone) to another (heroin), Dole emphasised that drugs should be judged in terms of their social effects – did they improve or undermine capacity for stable relationships with family members, treatment providers or employers? Did they produce ‘disablement’ or did they instead ‘enable’ capacities for productive citizenship? Such questions dominated the social contexts into which methadone maintenance was inserted. Making stable, productive citizens was adopted as the goal of methadone maintenance.

Supervised consumption sites (SCS) are spaces where people can use pre-acquired drugs under the supervision of trained staff who monitor for overdose and administer medical assistance, if necessary.1 By providing sterile drug use supplies, referrals to various services and education about safer injection practices, SCS function as harm reduction apparatuses for reducing overdose and the transmission of blood-borne infections like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C (HCV) and other harms associated with drug use such as skin and soft tissue infections.2 While at least one unsanctioned SCS exists in the United States (Kral & Davidson, 2017), there are currently only three government-authorised sites in the country; two opened in 2021 in New York City and one opened in 2024 in Rhode Island. Another SCS was poised to open years earlier in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, until the US federal government sued Safehouse, the organisation set to manage the site, to prevent it from opening. The government argued that Safehouse would violate federal law if it opened an SCS because the US Controlled Substances Act (CSA) (1970) prohibits the operation of places where drugs are made or used illicitly.

The research for this chapter was undertaken on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. As is customary in the country in which I live and work, or so-called ‘Australia’ (see Watego, 2021), I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of country, as well as elders past and present. I acknowledge that sovereignty over these lands was never ceded, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain strong in their enduring connections to land, sky, water and culture.

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

‘What is an e-cigarette?’ This ostensibly simple question is central to the classification and regulation of these popular and contested devices. From their first development, e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine via vaporisation of a liquid solution, were marketed and presented as like conventional cigarettes in crucial ways. Not only were they called electronic cigarettes, that is, a type of cigarette, but early models were designed to look like conventional cigarettes, including a tip which lit up when inhaled (Ozga et al., 2022). Moreover, the clouds of vapour they produced resembled smoke. Public health and tobacco control organisations quickly identified e-cigarettes as a threat to individual and population health. They emphasised the devices’ capacity to produce nicotine addiction (just like cigarettes), to undermine the denormalisation of smoking and to enable tobacco industry expansion (Bell & Keane, 2012; Berridge et al., 2023). The rapid rise of e-cigarette use (or vaping as it is now known) among young people has solidified and intensified this emphasis on harm. In contrast, supporters of their harm reduction potential highlight the fundamental difference of e-cigarettes from cigarettes: there is no combustion of tobacco involved in their use.

The day after launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in a public speech addressed to multiple audiences, Putin called for the ‘overthrow’ of the Ukrainian government, which he labelled a ‘gang of narcomany (‘drug addicts’) and neo-Nazis’ (Roth, 2022). We will return to the significance of this speech later; here we would add to the picture that after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, in all territories under Russian occupation, opioid agonist therapy (OAT) programmes were immediately shut down, reflecting their status as being also banned in Russia.

This chapter investigates the ‘bass music’ genres of dubstep and trap at massive North American festivals in the 2010s, an era in which DJ sets were characterised by a sensationalised moment known as ‘the drop’. It begins by demonstrating that the sense of rupture delivered by the drop is emmeshed with social and musical disputes (especially in online festival groups). The chapter then examines the gendered dimensions of the bass music drop. It ends by considering bass music’s #MeToo moment of reckoning regarding alleged sexual misconduct by the dubstep producer-DJ Datsik. In doing so, the chapter suggests that despite previous and ongoing associations with unity, transcendence, and escapism, EDM is sometimes unable to escape the divisions and ills of the world as it is. Rather than ignoring the dark sides of EDM culture through affirmative scholarship, our field would benefit from a critical turn and methodological innovation.

Medical care treatments can cause harm or even death. Healthcare workers assess vital signs of individuals to gauge their health. Medical care treats cells and organs while ignoring the plight of that person. Improvements in sanitation and standard of living over the last century are responsible for having longer lives. Economic growth leads to longer lives, but after a plateau of around $10,000 per person, more growth does not lead to better health. The US is an outlier with a high GDP but considerably lower health measures than many other countries. Recently, when comparing Americans with their counterparts in other rich nations, Americans demonstrate worse disease outcomes, no matter their skin color or wealth. US life expectancy declines result in almost 800 excess deaths per day here that aren’t present in comparable countries. US well-being and happiness similarly rank behind those of many other nations, despite the happiness industry telling Americans that they can make themselves happy

Rites typically labelled Mysteries allowed for some of the most emphatic pursuits of religious conviction in ancient Greece. This chapter explores Mystery cults from the viewpoint of personal religion. It starts from a discussion of the miniature Mystery cult of Lykosoura, which, according to Pausanias, speaks vividly to the dissemination of mysteria in Greece across time and space. Exploring the fascination with the ritual script, the author explains how this particular genre of cult practice invited various affordances. He unravels the embodied excitement of participating in Mysteries: the discussion of evidence from Eleusis allows for an ideal-type recreation of the experience made by initiands into the rites. The third section extends this inquiry, exploring the religious goals participants sought to realize. The Mysteries drew their religious meaning both from sensual cognition and the inaptitude of knowing, rather than a set theology. In conclusion, three areas in which the category of personal religion helps to unlock new perspectives on the Mysteries emerge: individual embodiment, group experience, and the omnipresent force of ritual that lent religious depth to both.

In late 2006 and early 2007, the Bush administration recognized that Afghanistan was deteriorating sharply and undertook a series of strategy reviews. The reviews led to more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy with attention to training Afghan security forces and improving governance, reconstruction, and counternarcotics. As in 2003, the new approach ran into the buzzsaw of bureaucracy, the fog and friction of war, unanticipated challenges, and, now, a far stronger and more resilient enemy. The problems with the American war effort in 2007 and 2008 were less problems of strategy than of implementation. Having blundered badly in the early years and created huge problems for itself, the American effort was now playing catch up, trying to adjust rapidly to a deteriorating situation.

Results from studies on brain activity in situations of hypoxia, application of anesthetics and other psychoactive drugs, epileptic seizures, electrical stimulation of brain areas, lucid dreams, and dream-like hallucinations of several geneses have shown that the reports of people who had perceptions and experiences related to these situations showed strong accordance with NDE reports. NDE themes can be reproduced experimentally, often in a predictable way. Such contexts and situations can be used as scientifically appropriate models for NDE release. Knowledge about and control of brain activation during the occurrence of NDE-like phenomena can be essential for understanding their generation.

National narcotics agencies are a feature of law enforcement for drug crimes worldwide. They exist in most Southeast Asian nations that retain the death penalty for drug offences, including in Indonesia (Badan Narkotika Nasional); Singapore (Central Narcotics Board); Thailand (Narcotics Control Board); and Malaysia (Agensi Antidadah Kebangsaan). This chapter undertakes a comparative study of national narcotics agencies in Southeast Asia. Each of the aforementioned four agencies plays an outsize role in shaping both public opinion and government policy on the death penalty for drugs and on punitive responses to non-capital drug crimes more generally. Previous NGO reports and academic studies on Southeast Asian drug policy have failed to consider the institutional dimensions of drug control: this chapter aims to rectify this particular gap in the literature. Comparing relevant institutions across the region, this chapter accounts for organisational similarities and differences, explores the relationship between anti-drugs and other state institutions, and suggests modest policy recommendations.

The Singapore Government is well known for its stout defence of the use of capital punishment in the face of international criticism. It recently released studies to support claims of its effective deterrence against drug offending. However, domestic support for the death penalty, evidence for its effectiveness in controlling drug offences, and case law on capital drug offences are more nuanced than what appears at first sight. This chapter examines recent social, political, judicial, and regional developments, which may shape Singapore’s future death penalty policy and practice for drug offences.

This chapter covers the complex topics of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics, core topics for anaesthetic exams and for practising anaesthetists. This includes route of drug administration, bioavailability, metabolism and elimination. We discuss one, two and three-compartment modelling for total intravenous anaesthesia including target-controlled infusion models. Pharmacodynamics covers drug-receptor interactions and their mechanism of action. This extends to drug isomerism, agonism and antagonism, and pharmacogenetics.