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

Abstract

In Forces of Habit, David T. Courtwright harvests the multidisciplinary literature of the drug field and distills it with wit and historical acumen to produce the best single book we have on the history of psychoactive substances, their use and regulation. It is not the only book to read on the subject, but Forces of Habit provides the neophyte with a sophisticated place to begin and the teacher with a coherent overview from which to digress. Few books in any crowded and controversial field provide such sure-handed and wide-ranging synthesis. The book's uccess derives from its neatly crafted integration of neurobiological realities and political-economic matters. Courtwright takes his biology straight but avoids pharmacological determinism. Forces of Habit owes a great deal to Andrew Weil's insistence that we have an innate curiosity about altered states of consciousness. (In his 1972 book, The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness, Weil elevates it to the status of a “drive.”) He draws as well on the late Norman Zinberg's elaboration of the interaction of “drug, set, and setting” as a framework for understanding drug effects in view of pharmacology, the expectations of the user, and the social context of use (see Drug, Set, and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use, 1984) and on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's consideration of Genussmittel (“articles of pleasure”) in the development of international commerce (see his 1980 volume, Tastes of Par -adise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, translated by David Jacobson in 1992). On this foundation, Courtwright builds an international story of consumption, the commodification cycle (including its environmental impacts), and fitful and flawed regulation. He begins with alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, then takes up opium, cannabis, and coca. In the process, he attends to provincially popular drugs that have not achieved worldwide appeal: qat, for example, and many New World hallucinogens.