Chapter 2 lays the foundations for the study and further clarifies its scope. Unhealthy lifestyles are defined here as collective patterns of unhealthy behaviour, based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances. This definition highlights four key dimensions central to the book: the health risks associated with those behaviours, their consumable nature, their voluntary character and, finally, the relevance of social norms and structural factors. The chapter explores the health dimension in greater detail for each of the three categories of products studied here, tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy foods, clarifying the health risks to which consumers are exposed and introducing the central regulatory questions raised by each category.

Chapter 4 provides an historical overview of the content and objectives of the EU’s policy on unhealthy lifestyles. It distinguishes two periods. The first spans from the early days of European integration until the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht, in 1993. It is a period of negative integration: unhealthy products are regulated mostly through the prism of the TFEU internal market freedoms. One cannot yet speak of an EU ‘policy’ on the matter, in the sense of a deliberate and coordinated action made in response to the health burden associated with unhealthy lifestyles. This changes post-Maastricht, the second period, with the recognition of a formal competence for the EU in health matters. Unhealthy lifestyles are singled out as one of the key priorities of EU health action and a greater role is given to positive integration, with the adoption of various horizontal legislative instruments. Different approaches emerged for the three categories of products: while the declared goal is to bring tobacco consumption to a near end, alcohol consumption is considered to be a natural part of human life, not to be overly discouraged, with food and nutrition positioned somewhere in between.

Chapter 5 continues the overview through a different analytical lens. It investigates the EU’s toolbox, describing and classifying the regulatory tools used by the EU legislature across the different lifestyles. It identifies four main types of interventions: ban and composition requirements, tax and price measures, rules on advertising and promotion and rules on mandatory and voluntary information. Beyond this systematic description and classification, the chapter serves three aims. First, it confronts the regulatory tools used with the stated objectives of EU lifestyle policy, assessing their adequacy and suggesting possible reforms. Second, it highlights the significant regulatory disparities existing between lifestyle risk factors, critically evaluating the justifications for such differential treatment. Third, it shows how health and internal market objectives are intertwined in EU lifestyle policy, generating legal frictions.

Chapter 2 explores how networks of power both reinforced and blurred social and occupational boundaries for non-Muslims. It examines which professions they were barred from, which they were pushed into, and which they came to dominate. In some instances, demand for goods and services such as music, dance, and alcohol created negotiated spaces where Muslims relied on non-Muslims, illustrating how exclusion and dependence coexisted in ways that unsettled rigid divisions – a dynamic analyzed through the concept of heterotopia. At the same time, although formally restricted from certain trades, non-Muslims were entrusted with sensitive occupations such as banking and currency exchange that required significant trust. Many also became leading merchants or specialized craftsmen, using transnational networks of co-religionists to expand their influence, advocate for greater rights, and secure a stronger position in regional commerce. The chapter introduces some well-established non-Muslim trading firms.

Alcohol and other drug use (AOD) use tends to hold a privileged position within legal decision-making (Seear, 2020; Flacks, 2023), and the criminal case of R v Taj (2018) was no exception. The defendant, who was – it was agreed by all parties – experiencing paranoia and psychosis, launched a violent attack on a man he suspected of being a terrorist. Mr Taj had been drinking on eve of the incident, and the night before that, but tests on the day found no trace of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was nevertheless unable to plead self-defence on the basis that he honestly believed there was a risk to life and limb because, successive courts argued, he was already at fault for drinking alcohol, which led to the psychotic thoughts. There were some significant and potentially far-reaching claims in the case, including that intoxication-related behaviour does not require the presence of alcohol in the body, and that psychosis can be caused by alcohol alone. This allowed the court to conclude that Mr Taj was wholly responsible for his actions and so could not claim excuse or mitigation.

This chapter provides multiple-choice questions designed to reinforce and expand your knowledge of substance use disorders and impulsive-compulsive disorders, including neurobiology of impulsivity and compulsivity, neurobiology of reward, mechanisms of drugs of abuse, treatments for substance use disorders, and treatments for impulsive-compulsive disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

What is a contraindication for naltrexone?

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

The chapter creates the context for the rest of the study by outlining the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts’ operations in Europe from August 1944 to May 1945. It also discusses the troops’ undisciplined and criminal conduct, including acts of robberies, assaults, murders, excessive alcohol consumption, and desertion and straggling. It pays particular attention to the issue of rape. The Red Army personnel committed hundreds of thousands of rapes in Romania during the exploitation phase of the Iassi–Kishinev Offensive. The same soldiers behaved with more restraint in “neutral” Bulgaria and “allied” Yugoslavia. In Hungary, the extremely brutal and protracted combat led to an escalation in violence against civilians, which reached its zenith in Austria. The chapter estimates that there were around 150,000 deserters and stragglers, who greatly contributed to the violence against civilians.

Chapter 1 focuses on the career of Harlem writer Aubrey Bowser, who began his career editing the uplift literary journal The Rainbow, the official organ of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and who then re-edited some of that material, which, in turn, appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Baltimore Afro-American. The printscape of Bowser’s work reveals the pressures that Jazz Age Black journalism placed on writers committed to racial uplift, as well as how Black newspapers bridged tensions between religious, dry, daytime tenets and wet, nighttime indulgence. As the Black press advertised, reported on, and editorialized “uplift” events concurrently with Harlem nightlife, it encouraged readers to mitigate at least some of the ideological divisions by offering a cosmopolitan vision of the New Negro. Within this context, the cultural work of Bowser’s fiction, especially after 1925 when most Black newspapers shifted their stance and saw Prohibition as a failure, assuaged readers that “knowing” wet Harlem did not mean abandoning the church and that attending church did not mean condemning the cabaret.