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'On Drugs explores philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of drug addiction, which begins while he is a student and then becomes a life-threatening obsession.
'Fleming describes the intricate mechanics of drug acquisition and use, their impact on the intellect and the emotions, and the chaos that emerges as his tightly controlled life spins out of control. His account is informed by searching reflections on his childhood, with its acute obsessive compulsive disorder and auditory hallucinations, through to his teenage fixations on karate, music and bodybuilding magazines. Combining a meticulous, almost ethnographic observation of his own life with a keen sense of the absurd, On Drugs opens out into philosophical meditations on time, religion, popular culture and the body.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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The Last Bulwark
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 416 2019; (p. 20)
— Review of On Drugs 2019 single work autobiography'Literature inspired by drugs tends to swing between extremes. On the one hand, drugs are the very doors of perception, gateways to Xanadu; on the other they are a source of grim addictions, lotus plants that tempt one into indefinite living sleep. In recent decades there have been the highs of William S. Burroughs, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Irvine Welsh, but rarer are those memoirists with experiences of addiction and philosophy who can reflect on the subject in the tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Well, cue Chris Fleming’s On Drugs.'(Introduction)
-
The Last Bulwark
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 416 2019; (p. 20)
— Review of On Drugs 2019 single work autobiography'Literature inspired by drugs tends to swing between extremes. On the one hand, drugs are the very doors of perception, gateways to Xanadu; on the other they are a source of grim addictions, lotus plants that tempt one into indefinite living sleep. In recent decades there have been the highs of William S. Burroughs, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Irvine Welsh, but rarer are those memoirists with experiences of addiction and philosophy who can reflect on the subject in the tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Well, cue Chris Fleming’s On Drugs.'(Introduction)
