How to Break an Addiction

“Annie Spencer's wonderful book explores capitalism’s devastating relentlessness through a brilliant analysis of how big pharma exploits organized abandonment and organized violence. Spoiler alert: it’s not a metaphor.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore

What the opioid epidemic teaches us about the addiction at the root of our social life—and how we free ourselves from it. How To Break An Addiction paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction.

In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth.