A History of Drugs

Why are some psychoactive substances regarded as ‘dangerous drugs’, to be controlled by the criminal law within a global prohibition regime, whilst others – from alcohol and tobacco, through to those we call ‘medicines’ – are seen and regulated very differently? A History of Drugs traces a genealogy of the construction and governance of the ‘drug problem’ over the past 200 years, calling into question some of the most fundamental ideas in this field: from ‘addiction’ to the very concept of ‘drug