The drug you thought was gone never left. And its story has never been told like this.

From the outlaw biker clubhouses of Toronto and Baltimore to the streets of Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, Angel Dust Memories uncovers the hidden, hallucinogenic underworld of PCP—also known as “angel dust”—through a blend of immersive journalism, true crime grit, and gonzo psychonaut anthropology.

Freelance journalist Sam Iravani (VICE, Filter, TalkingDrugs) follows the trail of PCP from its psychedelic roots in Haight-Ashbury to its adoption by criminal motorcycle gangs, street-level chemists, and the “dust bunnies” and “wetheads” who use it today. While other books skim over this taboo substance or reduce it to medical caricature, Angel Dust Memories plunges readers deep into the volatile heart of one of America’s most misunderstood drugs—and the subcultures it shaped.

Inside you’ll find:
• First-person accounts from former PCP kingpins, users, and law enforcement insiders
• Shocking tales from the heyday of biker-run PCP empires
• Urban legends dissected—and sometimes proven true
• The racial, social, and economic realities of a drug that lives off the radar

Whether you’re a true crime obsessive, a counterculture historian, or just someone who’s heard the stories and wondered, “Is any of that real?” — this book has your answer.

Fans of Lords of Chaos, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, or Say Why to Drugs will find Angel Dust Memories a mind-bending addition to their shelf.

While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality.

DOPE MENACE collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything.

Author Stephen J. Gertz is a well-regarded authority on antiquarian books and contributor to Feral House’s Sin-A-Rama, an award-winning visual history of sleaze
paperbacks from the sixties.

*** Available for preorder! Buy now and your book will ship as soon as it’s available. ***

The War on Drugs is now a century old. The question isn’t why aren’t we winning, it’s why are we fighting? Dr. Henry Smith Williams asked that question in his 1938 cult-classic book, Drug Addicts Are Human Beings.

In 1938, Dr. Henry Smith Williams saw the effects of decades of drug laws enacted between 1909 and 1924 that banned the importation and use of opium, cocaine, and marijuana and criminalized drug users to find out who benefited. No surprise, it wasn’t the American public who were convinced by complicit newspapers that removing drugs and immigrants would eradicate crime but the pharmaceutical industry and law enforcement.

Dr. Williams’ research and observations have proven true to a scale he could never have imagined.

Conservative cultural warriors in the early 1900s found a singular cause of every societal wrong: DRUGS. Especially when black, brown, and poor people use drugs. Harry Anslinger, who led the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930-1962, escalated the War in the wake of alcohol prohibition. Anslinger focused on marijuana, ignored the science of the day, and proclaimed it a scourge upon America. Drug laws enforced by newly empowered police at the height of Jim Crow legislation, eugenic ‘science,’ and rampant xenophobia created governmental policies that remain in place to this day.

Dr. Williams shows that the solution is treatment, not criminalization. But more importantly, he demonstrates the War on Drugs’ sinister origins that are hauntingly familiar to anyone who’s experienced friends and family dealing with the aftermath of the Purdue Pharma Oxycontin tragedy.

Feral House editor Christina Ward provides a brief updated history of the War on Drugs since 1938 and a biographical sketch of author Dr. Henry Williams, a flawed yet vigorous patient advocate. Contains reproductions of original illustrations by the author’s brother and fellow physician, Dr. Walter Huntington Williams.

Here is a lost illustrated masterpiece, a book so rare and sought-after that only two copies can be found in world libraries. For the first time this classic work on a forgotten Arabian legend has been translated into English. This illustrated novel is presented as a “pictorial opera” of love, hashish, and tragedy in the time of Victorian erotica, and it contains the first known illustrations and descriptions of true hashish hallucinations. This high quality case-bound and slipcased limited edition reproduces all fifty original erotic illustrations and colorful extras by illustrator Gottfried Sieben, and it is limited to only 418 copies, all signed by Ronald K. Siegel. This book will appeal to readers of Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater, Charles Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise, High Times magazine, and marijuana users everywhere.

Fritz Lemmermayer was born in Vienna in 1857, became a writer, poet, and journalist, and maintained close relationships with Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner.

Ronald K. Siegel is a recognized world authority on drugs and drug literature. A former research professor at UCLA, he is the author of numerous books including the critically acclaimed Intoxication. Siegel was featured in several Time magazine cover stories, and has been a consultant to presidential commissions and the World Health Organization. He is currently curator of the RKS Library of Drug Literature, one of the largest such libraries in the world.

“Some novels die and justifiably remain dead. A few are resurrected by bookish saviors and, re-examined, rise to deserved new life. Haschisch by Fritz Lemmermayer is one such literary Lazarus.” — Stephen J. Gertz

“Everything one does in life occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke [Cannabis, marijuana, opium] is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.” -Jean Cocteau

Among the native tribesmen in the Rif region of Morocco who have been smoking a cannabis preparation known as kif for over 800 years, it is accepted as part of the magic and sorcery in everyday life. This seemingly supernatural effect is neither physical nor psychological. Rather, it is an unconscious cognitive process involving perception, thinking and learning. The cognitive process was given the name “Kif Wisdom.”

In Timothy Wilfred Coakley’s novel Keef: A Story of Intoxication, Love & Death, written in the witchy style of an Edgar Allan Poe horror story, the narrator, a kif smoker, takes us through his supernatural search for love powered by his “Kif Wisdom” growing from his chronic smoking. At maturity, the wisdom allows him to see that the path to love goes beyond death.

Coakley’s novel, in the form of an illustrated memoir, was heralded as one of the most important publishing events of 1897. It made the list with H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and Rudyard Kipling’s Captain Courageous. Since average marijuana potency is now approaching kif levels, this book about toxic kif experiences may more applicable to today’s audience than those of 1897.

Dr. Ronald K. Siegel is a psychopharmacologist and former research professor at UCLA School of Medicine, author of several books including the acclaimed Intoxication, numerous journal articles based on translations of lost and forgotten works in drug literature, and currently curator of the RKS Library of Drug Literature.

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

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.

Elvis Presley, the Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, the Beatles, Judy Garland, Hank Williams, Jack Kerouac, Johnny Cash, JFK, the Manson Family and Adolf Hitler. All of the above were, at one time or another, to put it bluntly, speedfreaks.

Speed-Speed-Speedfreak traces the criminal and cultural use of amphetamine and its growing use through each new and destructive cycle. Speed is both one of the biggest social problems facing the country today, an indispensible component of the doctor’s medicine bag, and a huge and abiding influence on artists, musicians and writers.

Formatted in the shape of an amphetamine capsule, this book presents award-winning author Mick Farren’s examination of the curious history of America’s secret addiction to speed, both in its political and cultural manifestations.

• Ingenious, one-of-a-kind book that looks just like the subject it covers!

• Two-color photos, illustrations throughout.

Mick Farren was the former lead singer of The Deviants and the author of more than forty books.

“[Speed-Speed-Speedfreak] is cleverly formatted in the shape of an amphetamine capsule and is full of Mick Farrenisms: with reference to Hitler at his most tweaked, he’s described as “high as a swastika-decorated kite.” Farren and his publisher Feral House (legendary for their controversial tomes) have provided a sometimes fun, sometimes scary, always fascinating look at one of the most popular items in the recreational pharmacopoeia. Speed may kill, but its history teaches us a lot about human nature.” — Michael Simmons, High Times