Media addiction is quietly acknowledged but never discussed, for obvious reasons. It is a "dirty little secret" which could revolutionize every aspect of innovation and marketing if it were known. Such a revolution would have the most beneficial effects on preservation of culture and the easing of social and individual unrest...It gives the reader, for the first time, some means of ascertaining how media do and will affect his life and society and culture. --Eric Mcluhan, Independent Scholar and co-author of The Laws of Media

We all of course know the cliché 'don't judge a book by its cover.' But to anyone who is perusing this cover and reading this note, you would be well advised to heed the following extension of that cliché: 'Do not be too quick to judge this book by its title.' This is by no means a book about media like Cheech and Chong's movie Up in Smoke or Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled journalistic endeavors, or what happens when music fans fuel up on Ecstasy and rave all night at a club. It is a book that takes on, in a deeply serious and scholarly way, the serious matters that: (a) drugs are media in that they come between us and our ways of being in and experiencing our world; (b) our uses of and gratifications from media in certain ways smack of and parallel the use of and addiction to drugs; and (c) both drugs and media operate on our consciousness at the same time our consciousness operates on them - in significant ways, for significant reasons, and with significant effects. --Thom Gencarelli, Associate Professor of Communication, Manhattan College