Chris Fleming

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.