Chilling Out: The Cultural Politics of Substance Consumption, Youth and Drug Policy

This book critically examines the assumptions underlying drug prohibition and explores the contradictions of drug prevention policies. For the first time in this field, it combines a wide-ranging exploration of the global political and historical context with a detailed focus on youth culture on the basis that young people are the primary target of drug prevention policies. It provides a critical map of drugs, bringing together work on drugs as a source of political state repression and regulation of morality through medical discourse, work on drugs as cultural commodities in film, popular music, advertising and tourism, work on 'drug normalisation', subcultural deviance and the politics of drug education. This clear and enlightening text for sociology and applied social science courses argues for an holistic understanding of drugs in society, which can be a basis for a more coherent approach to drug control.