This book explores pain in a number of ways. At the heart of the book is an extension Melzack’s neuromatrix theory of pain into the social, cultural, and economic fields, where specific constellations involving disparate institutions, flows of capital, encounters, and social and economic structures provide a framework for the formation of pain, its perception, experience, meaning, and cultural production. Complementing the extended neuromatrix is a second theory, which focuses on the propensity of western market capitalism to seek out new areas of life to subsume to capital. Pain is one such life area that is now ripe for exploitation. Although the book has theory at its heart, it extensively draws on case studies, which are used to explicate theory, and to identify the contradictions and complexities. The case studies are drawn from accounts of drug use in varied contexts such as global methamphetamine use, oxycodone use in the southern states of America, and the global rise of the medicinal cannabis marketplace. weiterlesen