Forces of Habit - Drugs and the Making of the Modern World

He also shows how Europeans used alcohol as an inducement for native peoples to trade their furs, sell captives into slavery, and negotiate away their lands, and how monarchs taxed drugs to finance their wars and expanding empires. This text explains why such profitable exploitation has increasingly given way, over the last hundred years, to policies of restriction and prohibition - and how economic and cultural considerations have shaped those policies to determine which drugs are readily accessible, which strictly medicinal, and which forbidden altogether.

About the author

David T. Courtwright is Presidential Professor Emeritus at the University of North Florida and the author of Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America and Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (both from Harvard). He was an inaugural recipient of a grant from the highly competitive NEH Public Scholar Program and is a regular media commentator on the history of addiction.

Summary

A global history of the acquisition of progressively more potent means of altering ordinary waking consciousness, this book is the first to provide the big picture of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources, from tea and kola to opiates and amphetamines.

Product details

• Authors: David T. Courtwright
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.10.2002
• EAN: 9780674010031
• ISBN: 978-0-674-01003-1
• Dimensions: 156 mm x 235 mm x 19 mm
• Weight: 318 g
• Illustrations: 25 halftones, 1 table
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; History, HISTORY / World, History: specific events and topics, Health, illness and addiction: social aspects, Drugs and alcohol: social aspects, drug