Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine
- 2 Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
- 3 Pharmacological experimentation with opium in the eighteenth century
- 4 The regulation of the supply of drugs in Britain before 1868
- 5 Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
- 6 From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
- 7 Changes in alcohol use among Navajos and other Indians of the American Southwest
- 8 The drug habit: the association of the word ‘drug’ with abuse in American history
- 9 Research and development in the UK pharmaceutical industry from the nineteenth century to the 1960s
- 10 AIDS, drugs, and history
- 11 Anomalies and mysteries in the ‘War on Drugs’
- Glossary
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine
- 2 Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
- 3 Pharmacological experimentation with opium in the eighteenth century
- 4 The regulation of the supply of drugs in Britain before 1868
- 5 Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
- 6 From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
- 7 Changes in alcohol use among Navajos and other Indians of the American Southwest
- 8 The drug habit: the association of the word ‘drug’ with abuse in American history
- 9 Research and development in the UK pharmaceutical industry from the nineteenth century to the 1960s
- 10 AIDS, drugs, and history
- 11 Anomalies and mysteries in the ‘War on Drugs’
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
are drugs a spectre that is haunting the world at the present time? This is a question which arises of necessity on reading headlines in newspapers such as these:
Drugs case shocks community. Sensational details of how a top scientist used his Cambridge laboratory to produce mind-bending illegal drugs instead of life-saving medicines have shocked the pharmaceutical industry.
Cambridge Evening News, 27 November 1993It's the ‘wonder drug’ of the nineties, Prozac is an anti-depressant with a cultural identity of its own … Every successful drug generates controversy and none more than Prozac. Critics fear that it could herald a disturbing era of pharmacologically-induced social control of the kind visualized by Anthony Burgess in his novel Clockwork Orange. This may seem extreme, but Prozac is now being proclaimed not only as an anti-depressant but as a means of treating personality disorder of all kinds. At the same time it has inspired a spate of lawsuits from people alleged to have had bad experiences with it.
Guardian, 4 February 1994We spend £1 billion on over-the-counter medicines for minor ailments each year. But are they actually doing us any good?
Guardian, 8 February 1994Top-selling drug may have killed hundreds in Britain.
Sunday Times, 27 February 1994- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Drugs and Narcotics in History , pp. 1 - 3Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995