How to Break an Addiction

“Annie Spencer’s bravery to speak the truth offers us a model and path forward, away from both the ‘suffering addict’ and victim-blaming discourses that surround the opioid crisis, and reminds us that there is so much more behind the death and destruction of illicit opioid use and accidental overdose in the United States. Weaving together personal experiences, socioeconomic analysis, and historical insight, How to Break an Addiction invites us to look at this whole mess differently and reframes addiction and chaotic substance use as a consequence of systemic, calculated, and intentional choices. I hope every classroom across the country reads this book and I hope every harm reductionist embraces it. With its publication, we finally have a book that represents us degenerates, drug users, sex workers, queer people in a way that honors our experiences and celebrates our wisdom.” —Zoe Odlin-Platz, Director of Operations, Church of Safe Injection

“How to Break an Addiction is brilliant, gutting, miraculous, uncategorizable. It will crowbar-open neglected parts of your brain and set your heart on fire. It is not so much a book about addiction or the opioid crisis, as a book about our pain under capitalism and what it means to be an Earthling. Annie Spencer guides us gently through the centuries, the science, the Marxist theory, the contours of the precipice otherwise known as our times in poetic prose that is easy to understand, that sings, that transports, that reminds us about the best aspects of ourselves, that we have purpose and we have possibility.” —Owen Toews, author of Island Falls and Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg

“An essential corrective to overdetermined narratives of addiction that locate the opioid crisis in either the damaged brains of users or in the unscrupulous hands of doctors, dealers, and pharma reps, Annie Spencer centers a capitalist logic that alienates us from forms of solidarity and violently clears ground for extractive profit. Clear-eyed in their outrage and grief, Spencer promiscuously moves between form, discipline and context in this essential indictment of a global system that keeps us in pain in order to sell us the fix.”—Benjamin Haber, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Wesleyan University

“As a mutual aid and harm reduction project committed to sharing resources and redistributing wealth throughout the Kensington community, we think How to Break An Addiction is essential reading for anyone involved in similar work. This book humanizes our community members through its analysis, compellingly arguing that addiction is not a moral failing but a failure of a society reliant on capitalism. Dr. Spencer expertly identifies the pernicious ways the capitalist mode of production accumulates wealth through dispossession, especially for those that capital must fail in order to grow.” —Community Action Relief Project, a mutual aid organization in Philadelphia, PA

“Annie Xibos Spencer, whose prose indicates that she could have just as likely been a rapper than a geographer, gives us a scholarly and accessible map of the people, policies, and corporations behind the opioid epidemic as well as our collective social pain. Our space-age materialist tour guide reveals the economic causes of chronic pain and morbidity and reveals that our recovery is predicated on a revolution that is more powerful than the chemicals. Substance users of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chronic existential and physical pain!”—Cassie Thornton, author of The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future

“This beautiful, forcefully argued book wrestles our understanding of addiction away from pathology and punishment, placing it exactly where it must be: in a history of capital, an extractive economic system which is fundamentally against life. Across these pages, Spencer argues that if our social movements strive, on the other hand, to be for life, then we must without question be on the side of those who have been treated as disposable and discarded as ‘addicts.’ Far from a call to rescue people from drug use, How To Break an Addiction reveals that understanding the political economy of the opioid epidemic’s devastation is a necessary step to saving ourselves from the death-making and deadening forces of capitalism today.” —Craig Willse, author of The Value of Homelessness

“How to Break an Addiction is a stellar analysis on the unavoidable poisons in the framework of survival. The wiring of our consciousness, our access to wellness, and our cognitive ability to separate truth from trauma, deteriorates under capitalism, destroying our voice and our purpose. In How to Break an Addiction, studying the opioid epidemic becomes the axis between surviving systemic abuse and accessing self-care.”—Cristy Road Carrera, author, artist; Next World Tarot, Spit & Passion

“We know that capitalism is about the reign of abstractions, of surplus value over life, of abstract labor over the laboring body. These abstractions are codified and reified in the discipline of economics, which abstract itself from the lives that are wrecked in the wake of the pursuit of profit. What would it mean to think concretely? How can we locate thought in our bodies, in our struggle, and this moment? Annie Xibos Spencer’s How to Break an Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism is not just a book on the opioid epidemic and its situation with late-capitalist strategies of exploitation and extraction, but a demonstration of how one can think in-and-through the specificity of one’s situation, one’s struggles, and even one’s pain to produce a common strategy for struggle and liberation.” —Jason Read, author of The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work

“This book isn’t just a story about the so-called ‘addict,’ the demon drug of OxyContin, or, even, the most evil people in the pharmaceutical industry (meet the Sacklers!). It is, at its core, a crime story about capitalism: how capitalism makes addicts of all of us but how the true addict is capital itself; how this dead but dominant paradigm destroys personal lives, but also planetary life. Damning as it is, How to Break an Addiction is also deeply funny, generous, personal, moving—and, dare I say, healing! In short: this is the book about the opioid epidemic you want to hold in your hand to make sense of the world and the book you want holding your hand too as you break free.”—Mikkel Frantzen, author of Going Nowhere, Slow: The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression

“Spencer’s work is a tour de force that effortlessly moves between the personal and the structural and thereby evokes the best of critical theory while at the same time producing an altogether novel approach to the most pressing societal issues of our time.” —Björn Karlsson, organizer and scholar activist, IT University of Copenhagen

“The ongoing opioid ‘epidemic’ is a racialized class war. It is capitalism feeding on the misery it has created, presenting a gory scene full of murderous contradictions. What would an epic detective story read like if the victim were a whole society, if the killer were a system, and if the sleuth was not a cop but a comrade? This remarkable book offers us a model. It moves with precision, grace, and compassion between theory, testimony, political economy, history, biography, science, and vision. File it under a radical forensics, but rippling with a quiet, queer hope. It not only shows us the bodies, the motive, and the method of this monumental crime. Like the best of such stories, this one invites us to see the glint of solidarity in the grit and darkness, and by that light to find our way through the long night back to day.” —Max Haiven, author of Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts