David Herzberg. White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America.

Abstract

David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America is an important book for casting a well-studied slice of history in a new light. The 1914 Harrison Act and the establishment of the narcotics enforcement regime it spawned have generated a large and impressive historiography. Thanks to scholars such as David Musto, David Courtwright, Caroline Acker, and Rufus King, we know how a confluence of racist xenophobia, progressive reformism, and moralism led to the criminalization of “narcotic” drugs like opium, morphine, and heroin, and how the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ Harry Anslinger harnessed these forces to make himself drug czar of the United States for the middle third of the twentieth century. This classic era of narcotic control from the 1920s to the 1960s created a criminalized, racialized black market in dangerous drugs responsible for great social and health harm to African Americans and other disadvantaged groups, and after a brief hiatus in the 1970s these harms have been redoubled. There is also a strong and growing literature on the pharmaceutical industry as a player in American social history, particularly in its role in shaping perceptions of health, disease, and proper medical care. Herzberg introduces the concept of a “white market” in drugs—the flip side of the black market cocreated by the narcotics control regime—to bridge this divide and draw the two literatures together into a unified and coherent view of US drug politics over the past century.