On the Vanguard of the First Drug Scare

Abstract

This article examines how newspapers portrayed cheap distilled spirits, known as gin, and the people who drank it in eighteenth-century London. It shows that coverage did not coincide with movements in consumption; rather, coverage peaked with the passage of the Gin Act of 1736 and then declined and disappeared altogether just as consumption reached new heights in the early 1740s. Coverage then resumed in January 1751, by which time consumption was already in decline. Despite the fact that coverage and consumption did not move in tandem, there is little evidence to suggest that newspapers contributed to the making of a moral panic over gin and its supposed effects on the health, morals, and productivity of the working poor. In the 1730s, at least, newspapers were divided on the subject of gin; in the early 1750s, by contrast, the press was unanimous in its condemnation of gin, but, as in the 1730s, it generally avoided running sensational stories.