Departing from the scholarly treatment of addiction as a form of rhetoric or discursive formation, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America focuses on the material, lived experience of addiction and the ways in which it is shaped by a ‘metaphor of waste’, from the manner in which people describe the addict, the experience of inebriation or his or her systematic exclusion from various aspects of American culture. With analyses of scientific and popular cultural texts such as novels and films, scholarly or medical models of addiction, reality television, TV drama, public health and anti-addiction campaigns, and the lives of celebrities who struggled with addiction, this book recovers the sense of materiality in which the experience of substance abuse is anchored, revealing addiction to be a set of socio-cultural practices, historically-contingent events and behaviours. Exploring the ways in which addiction as an identity construct, as a social problem, and as a lived experience is always and already circumscribed by the metaphor of waste, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America advances the idea that addiction constitutes a site of social control beyond the individual, through which American citizenship is regulated and the ‘nation’ itself is imagined, demarcated, and contained. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, cultural and media studies, performance studies, sociology and American culture.

Alarming, amusing, disarmingly simple and to-the-point, The Population Fix describes the causes and the effects of America's addiction to population growth and explains how average citizens can regain control over misguided policies and politics.The Population Fix is an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of the single most important factor affecting America's future. In plain English, this short volume demonstrates how out-of-control population growth exacerbates every problem facing America today and will necessarily rob future generations of an acceptable quality of life tomorrow. -Joseph L. Daleiden, author of The American Dream: Can It Survive The 21st Century?I approached The Population Fix expecting a dry dissertation. Nothing of the sort! This was a fast read. It addresses immigration-legal and illegal-but also, more broadly, the effects of rapid population growth upon Americans' quality of life. The upbeat style and hopeful countenance of the author keep the reader energized. I recommend this book to any American who cares about America's values, America's future, and the lives of future Americans.-Mark Krikorian, Executive Director Center for Immigration StudiesThe Population Fix asks: How many Americans are enough? That's the question every American should ask. This book paints the picture clearly for us; this is what America looks and feels like as we approach one billion residents. One billion! The author methodically pleads for each victim of runaway growth: the working commuter, the family struggling to find affordable housing, the unemployed engineer, the migrant living without protection or dignity, the disappearing farmland and the threatened wildlife. The Population Fix carefully draws out the human story behind our damaging immigration, tax, and legal policies and structures and begs the questions: "Why have we ignored this for the past two decades?" and "What can we do now?" -Richard D. Lamm, co-director of the Center for Public Policy & Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver

A provocative look at our nation's dependency on the automobile and how its potential impact on urban design will either make or break our health, economy, and quality of life. In this thought-provoking work, author and urban planning expert Chad Frederick scrutinizes the use of automobiles in cities, investigating its role in exacerbating urban inequalities and thwarting sustainability of modern society. Through a comprehensive, thoughtful discussion, Frederick illustrates how the automobile is fundamentally at odds with the very nature of cities. He shows how cars impose huge burdens on our health, equity, environment, local and national economy, and quality of life. Most of all, he shows how automobile dependency has put our entire society at risk. The book delves into the monumental role of automobiles in the development of cities after the Great Depression, impacting the American identity and affecting the way we produce and manage urban spaces. Frederick provides compelling evidence that cities with more diverse modes of transportation are greener, healthier, more prosperous, and even more enjoyable places to live than automobile-dependent cities. He identifies one institution responsible for our inability to improve our cities: the social sciences, and examines the root cause of our inability to make progress toward more multi-modal cities. In conclusion, the author offers a radical solution for moving beyond the underlying logic that forces us to create automobile-dependent cities.

America's war on drugs. It makes headlines, tops political agendas and provokes powerful emotions. But is it really worth it? That’s the question posed by Steven Duke and Albert Gross in this groundbreaking book. They argue that America’s biggest victories in the war on drugs are the erosion of our constitutional rights, the waste of billions of dollars and an overwhelmed court system. After careful research and thought, they make a strong case for the legalization of drugs. It’s a radical idea, but has its time come?

Heroin was only one drug among many that worried Progressive Era anti-vice reformers, but by the mid-twentieth century, heroin addiction came to symbolize irredeemable deviance. Creating the American Junkie examines how psychiatrists and psychologists produced a construction of opiate addicts as deviants with inherently flawed personalities caught in the grip of a dependency from which few would ever escape. Their portrayal of the tough urban addict helped bolster the federal government's policy of drug prohibition and created a social context that made the life of the American heroin addict, or junkie, more, not less, precarious in the wake of Progressive Era reforms. Weaving together the accounts of addicts and researchers, Acker examines how the construction of addiction in the early twentieth century was strongly influenced by the professional concerns of psychiatrists seeking to increase their medical authority; by the disciplinary ambitions of pharmacologists to build a drug development infrastructure; and by the American Medical Association's campaign to reduce prescriptions of opiates and to absolve physicians in private practice from the necessity of treating difficult addicts as patients. In contrast, early sociological studies of heroin addicts formed a basis for criticizing the criminalization of addiction. By 1940, Acker concludes, a particular configuration of ideas about opiate addiction was firmly in place and remained essentially stable until the enormous demographic changes in drug use of the 1960s and 1970s prompted changes in the understanding of addiction—and in public policy.