Ceremonial Chemistry
The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers Revised Edition

Paper $19.95   |   ISBN 0-8156-0768-7   |   2003

A polemical response to the controversy about drug use and drug criminalization.

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.

51/2 x 8, 320 pages, appendix, bibliography, index