Drugs & Media

Media addiction is quietly acknowledged but never discussed, for obvious reasons. It is a "dirty little secret" which could revolutionize every aspect of innovation and marketing if it were known. Such a revolution would have the most beneficial effects on preservation of culture and the easing of social and individual unrest...It gives the reader, for the first time, some means of ascertaining how media do and will affect his life and society and culture. --Eric Mcluhan, Independent Scholar and co-author of The Laws of Media We all of course know the clich 'don't judge a book by its cover.' But to anyone who is perusing this cover and reading this note, you would be well advised to heed the following extension of that clich: 'Do not be too quick to judge this book by its title.' This is by no means a book about media like Cheech and Chong's movie Up in Smoke or Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled journalistic endeavors, or what happens when music fans fuel up on Ecstasy and rave all night at a club. It is a book that takes on, in a deeply serious and scholarly way, the serious matters that: (a) drugs are media in that they come between us and our ways of being in and experiencing our world; (b) our uses of and gratifications from media in certain ways smack of and parallel the use of and addiction to drugs; and (c) both drugs and media operate on our consciousness at the same time our consciousness operates on them - in significant ways, for significant reasons, and with significant effects. --Thom Gencarelli, Associate Professor of Communication, Manhattan College

Robert MacDougall is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Curry College. He is an active member of the Media Ecology Association, the National Communication Association, and the Institute of General semantics. His research centers around the social, political and cognitive roles communication media have played throughout history.

Prologue: Defining Our Terms; Introduction: Media Ecology, Systems Theory and the Noosphere; Part 1: Psychopharmacological approaches to Understanding Communication Technology; Perceptual Amplifiers and Inhibitors: some parallels between modern media and drug use -Robert MacDougall; Media Ecological Psychopharmacosophy -Ronan Hallowell Psychoactive Media -John P. Skinnon; Part 2: Consciousness Technologies: the Environmental properties of Drugs and Media; Drugs: The Intensions of Humanity - Lance Strate; Intervention! Videowest on Television Addiction, 1975-1985 - Meredith Eliassen; Drugs as Environments: Being Inside What is Inside Us - Corey Anton; Part 3: Local and Systemic Effects of Drugs and Media; ED Drugs and the re-Making of the Real Man - Robert MacDougall; Sex, Drugs, and Media Ecology -Valerie V. Peterson; The Extended Pharmacist: Entering the Era of Remote Drug Dispensation and Pharmaceutical Counseling -Phil Rose and Ainsley Moore; Part 4: Selling Drugs, Pushing Media: Advertising, Consumption, Diagnostics and Dissemination; Pediatric Bipolar and the Media of Madness- Jonah Bossewitch; Treat her with Prozac: Four Decades of Direct-to-Physician Psychotropic Advertising - Cristina Hanganu-Bresch; Recreational Dubs: Advertising Apple's iPod Cult - Brett Robinson; Media Pharmacists, Peddlers and Pushers: A Consumption-Orientation Model of Mass Communication -Brecken Chinn Swartz Conclusion: Engineering our environments to build a better beast - Robert MacDougall; Epilogue: Epigenetics, Mirror Neurons, and a few new prescriptions on the horizon - Robert MacDougall.