David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business

Abstract

This is a remarkable book that will be the standard history of addictions for the foreseeable future—or until enough currently unforeseen addictions emerge to demand a broadening of its already expansive scope. David Courtwright’s books and articles have guided us through this often-grim branch of history for a number of years, and here he brings many of the strands together in a work that is a real tour de force, one where his impressive breadth of perspective meshes seamlessly with close analysis. Courtwright’s terrain in this work is behaviors associated across the broad spectrum of commodities and activities that can be called addictions—which he defines in several ways, including “a pattern of compulsive, conditioned, relapse-prone, and harmful behavior” (p. 3). Clearly, no single definition will do when we consider such varied objects of potential addiction—and their equally varied consequences—as pornography, gambling, cocaine, social media, and tobacco. The focus of this book is the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although there is a brief introduction to the distant attraction of humans to commodities and activities that gave them pleasure and might well have, and probably did, lead to addictive behavior. The discovery of honey (the sweetest commodity known to humans until sugar came on the scene) in beehives and the mastery of the process of fermentation to produce beer, wine, cider, and mead exposed humans to potentially addictive habits of consumption. These commodities entered the diets of some humans early on and undoubtedly led some individuals to crave them and consume them compulsively, very likely with harmful results to themselves and their communities.