Drugs & Addiction – An Anarchist Perspective

I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Drugs & Addiction – An Anarchist Perspective.

This book challenges many of the assumptions that dominate public and political thinking about drugs, addiction and recovery. Rather than treating addiction as a personal failure or a purely chemical problem, it asks how fear, trauma, punishment, prohibition and social disconnection shape both drug use and compulsive behaviour.

The central argument is simple but uncomfortable: the war on drugs is not a war on substances, but a war on feeling, autonomy and altered states of consciousness – and it consistently produces more harm than it prevents.

What the book covers

• How fear is manufactured through language, media and moral panic
• Harm reduction, restorative justice and care without command
• Recovery as autonomy, integration and relationship – not obedience or lifelong abstinence
• The role of community, ritual, pleasure and mutual aid in healing

Throughout the book, personal experience is woven into wider analysis – not as confession or testimony, but as evidence that addiction is inseparable from social conditions and structures of control.

Read, watch, or join the discussion

This book is not about defending drug use, nor about promoting abstinence. It is about asking better questions – about freedom, care, responsibility and how societies might respond to suffering without fear or coercion.

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