Winner, Independent Publishers Award 2000, in the Pop Culture category.

Pills-A-Go-Go savors the American love affair with little gems—from Quaaludes and Prozac and Desoxyn to Viagra. Inspired by Jim Hogshire’s zine of the same name, the book version goes much further, filled to the brim with weird pharmaceutical ads and history, exposes of FDA lies, pill reviews, contents of celebrity medicine chests, acquisitional tips, and hundreds of remarkable photos and illustrations guaranteed to stop the breath of the unrepentant pill fiend.

Here it is: A cultural study of pills. Not medicine per se nor health nor pharmacology—just pills, all pills, any pills—pills that get you stopped at the border, pills that associate you with the rich and famous, and pills that link you to skid row.

Jim Hogshire wrote the Feral House title Grossed Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient: An Insider’s Look at Supermarket Tabloids. He is also the author of the following titles: Sell Your Body To Science, You Are Going To Prison, and Opium For The Masses.

Opium for the Masses was such a national phenomenon when first released in the early ‘90s that Michael Pollan wrote a cover story for Harper’s magazine about the book, in which he he expressed his amazement that a common plant, P. somniferum, or the opium poppy, grows wild in most states, and could be made into a drinkable tea that acts in ways similar to codeine or Vicodin.

With Opium for the Masses as the guide, Americans can learn how to supplement their own medicine chest with natural pain medicine without costly and difficult trips to doctors hamstrung by pernicious laws to prescribe proper pain relief.

This new edition features material on legal issues andfurther recipes, including how to make Laudanum and how heroin is created in the depths of of the Afghani poppy fields.

Jim Hogshire is also the author of the award-winning book Pills-A-Go-Go.

“Regarded as God’s own medicine,’ preparations of opium were as common in the Victorian medicine cabinet as aspirin is in ours. What Hogshire has done is to excavate this vernacular knowledge and then publish it to the world in how-to form, with recipes.”
-Michael Pollan, Harper’s

“It’s all in here, in masterful detail…”
-Dean Latimer, High Times