Book excerpt: “Erudite and wide-ranging, perceptive and provocative, lively and up-to-date – Shane Blackman has produced a book with something to offer to just about anyone interested in drugs in contemporary society. Blackman uncovers hidden histories, points out the contradictions running through media, popular culture and official policy and highlights the challenges facing us. Chilling Out is a book that will be a boon to students and a valuable resource for both teachers and researchers.”Nigel South, Professor, Department of Sociology and Research Professor, Department of Health and Human Sciences, University of Essex. How are drug war politics, drug prevention, popular culture and drug consumption interconnected? What are the major contradictions, assumptions and silences within the moral arguments of drug policy makers? What are the implications for the viability of drugs policy? This book critically examines the assumptions underlying drug prohibition and explores the contradictions of drug prevention policies. For the first time in this field, it combines a wide-ranging exploration of the global political and historical context with a detailed focus on youth culture, on the basis that young people are the primary target of drug prevention policies. Chilling Out provides a critical map of drugs, bringing together work on drugs as a source of political state repression and regulation of morality through medical discourse, work on drugs as cultural commodities in film, popular music, advertising and tourism, work on ‘drug normalisation’, subcultural deviance and the politics of drug education. This clear and enlightening text for sociology, health and media and cultural studies courses argues for an holistic and a critical understanding of drugs in society, which can be the basis for a more coherent approach to drug control. Practitioners and policy makers will find it a thought-provoking and informative source.