Cultural ecstasies: Drugs, gender and the social imaginary, by Ilana Mountian

Abstract

Cultural ecstasies: Drugs, gender and the social imaginary, by Ilana Mountian, London, Routledge, 2013, 168 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0415583831 This book reviews and interprets the discourse analyses on drugs, drug users and drug policy that focus on gender, class and race; it proposes that much of society's understandings on drug issues are based upon essentially moralistic underpinnings. The book takes a value-free approach to study the social history that informs our present knowledge and understanding of drugs in society.Drugs and drug use, therefore, are looked at in their specific historical locations, understanding the phenomena within its specific economic, political and moral backdrop. Discourses around drugs and gender formulate society's views and our generally accepted moral standpoints lie within. Mountian attempts to deconstruct some of these assumptions in order to provide the reader with another gaze -away from a comprehension of drug matters that is constructed, formed by morals and power relations.Two very interesting chapters on the history of drug discourses, and how this links to our present view of treatment and addiction, should be useful to all students of addictive behaviour. These chapters offer students a critique furthering the works of Berridge and Edwards' (1998) medicalisation process and Courtwright's (2005) good drug/bad drug dichotomy, and the subsequent effects on drug policy. The penultimate chapter on drugs and gender should be a valuable addition to students of sociology, alcohol and drug studies or behavioural psychology who have an academic interest in gender politics and bias.The final chapter focuses on how policy is influenced by these social constructions, arguing that policy is flawed, and that prohibition is central to this failure. Illegality of drugs enhances both the constructed discourse and perpetuates associated harms, and Mountian illustrates how these harms affect gender, class and race.This book is a useful and insightful contribution to our knowledge of drugs in society that adds to the body of work that challenges present political standpoints. It offers a fresh perspective on drug use and genderattempting to analyse how women are represented in the discourse, and offers the reader an objective view on historical perspectives. It should provide students in many academic disciplines an innovative view on how dominant discourses shape and affect potentially harmful outcomes.