Drogernas Historia

Why are coffee, tobacco & marijuana available the world over, but not peyote or qat? Why are alcohol & tobacco legal, but not heroin or cocaine? What drives the drug trade & how has it come to be what it is today--a vast, checkered pattern of use & abuse, medicine & recreation, commerce & interdiction? 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 & exploitation of the planet's psychoactive resources, from tea & kola to opiates & amphetamines. Offering a social & biological account of why psychoactive goods proved so seductive, Courtwright tracks the intersecting paths by which popular drugs entered the stream of global commerce. He shows how the efforts of merchants & colonial planters expanded world supply, drove down prices & drew millions of less affluent purchasers into the market, effectively democratizing drug consumption. He also shows how Europeans used alcohol as an inducement for native peoples to trade their furs, sell captives into slavery & negotiate away their lands, & how monarchs taxed drugs to finance their wars & expanding empires. Forces of Habit explains why such profitable exploitation has increasingly given way, over the years, to policies of restriction & prohibition--& how economic & cultural considerations have shaped those policies to determine which drugs are readily accessible, which strictly medicinal & which forbidden altogether.--Book Jacket (edited)