High Culture is a collection of essays containing reflections on addiction. Some of the essays are original and some are reprints. The volume is divided into two sections: the first dealing with literature, philosophy, and the arts and the second with sociology, psychology, and the media. The editors promise something different from the usual “insistent drive to medicalize, discipline, rehabilitate, and contain the subject of drugs within frameworks that disguise deeply rooted moral and religious fears, values and beliefs or prejudices” and that addiction will emerge as something “not reducible to substance abuse or compulsiveness per se” (p 15).

The editors also lay claim to demonstrating the “complexity, creative value and diversity” of addiction in place of what they describe as the limited …