From Fire to Fentanyl: The Hidden Story of Human Addiction and Survival (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798244955736)

The Hidden Story of Human Addiction and Survival

Addiction did not begin in a laboratory, a pharmacy, or a courtroom.
It began with the human body.

From Fire to Fentanyl is a sweeping, deeply human history of intoxication-one that traces humanity's long relationship with mind-altering substances from ancient ritual and medicine to modern pharmaceutical systems, prohibition, and the synthetic drug crisis. Rather than framing addiction as moral failure or individual weakness, this book reveals it as a recurring survival response shaped by biology, trauma, culture, power, and policy.

Moving across civilizations and centuries, Cindy Swartz-Garcia shows how early societies once integrated intoxicants through ritual, care, and communal responsibility-and how those systems gradually hardened into moral judgment, criminalization, and control. The book follows this transformation through religion, empire, industrialization, war, medicine, and neuroscience, revealing how addiction became misunderstood, stigmatized, and ultimately engineered at scale.

Blending history, public health, neuroscience, policy analysis, and lived human experience, From Fire to Fentanyl explains why prohibition repeatedly fails, why treatment alone cannot repair systemic harm, and why modern responses to addiction so often deepen the very suffering they aim to solve.

This is not a book that excuses harm-or one that reduces addiction to a single cause. It is a book that restores context, dignity, and clarity to one of the most misunderstood human conditions.

Inside, readers will explore:

• How early rituals and medicines governed intoxication long before law and punishment

• The role of faith, empire, and moral authority in reshaping substance use

• How industrialization and global trade engineered mass addiction

• The invention of the "addict" as a social identity

• Why war, trauma, and inequality accelerate substance dependence

• What neuroscience reveals about the body's memory of intoxication

• How policy choices-not just substances-drive addiction crises

• What a compassionate, evidence-based future could look like

Written for readers who want understanding rather than blame, From Fire to Fentanyl offers a powerful reframing of addiction as a shared human story-one that demands not fear or punishment, but responsibility, care, and informed action.

This book is the first volume in the Fire to Fentanyl series, which also includes a companion scholarly volume and a policy-focused edition for educators, clinicians, and decision-makers.