ADDICTION AND ITS SCIENCES

doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03723.x

Addiction and the science of history

add_3723

486..492

David T. Courtwright
Department of History, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA

ABSTRACT
Aims To discuss the contributions historians have made to the addiction field, broadly construed to include licit and
illicit drug use, drug policy, drug treatment and epidemiological and neuroscientific research. Methods Review of
literature, highlighting specific contributions and controversies from recent research on the United States, the United
Kingdom, China and world history. Findings and conclusions At the bar of addiction knowledge, historians make for
excellent companionsuntil they turn quarrelsome. Historians companionability arises from their ability to tell a
particularly rich kind of story, one that blends structure, agency and contingency in a contextualizing narrative.
Historians occasional quarrelsomeness arises from their skepticism about the ascendant brain-disease paradigm, the
medical and pharmaceutical establishments and the drug war, especially in its US incarnation. These enterprises have
put some historians in a polemical frame of mind, raising doubts about the objectivity of their work and questions
about the political orientation of historical scholarship (and, more generally, of social science research) in the field.
Keywords

Addiction, drug policy, drug treatment, epidemiology, history, neuroscience.

Correspondence to: David T. Courtwright, Department of History, University of North Florida, 3 UNF Drive, Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645, USA.
E-mail: dcourtwr@unf.edu
Submitted 23 August 2011; initial review completed 17 October 2011; final version accepted 10 November 2011

INTRODUCTION
Historians do not usually think of themselves as scientists, let alone scientists allied to addiction researchers.
Even so, history provides data, contextual knowledge
and narrative syntheses for those who study addiction
in more conventionally scientific disciplines. In some
research areas, such as retrospective epidemiology or
policy analysis, history is indispensible. Things are the
way they are because they got that way, as any evolutionary biologist will attest. Understanding the present state
of things requires understanding past events.

WHAT HISTORIANS DO
Although historians gain knowledge about the past in
many ways, their signature method is the location, close
reading and interpretation of primary sources. Why, for
example, did the US Supreme Court uphold the federal
governments position that the ambiguously worded
1914 Harrison Narcotic Act forbade maintenance, the
long-term supply of addicts with prescribed narcotics?
Part of the answer can be found by unearthing the briefs
government attorneys prepared for two crucial 1919
2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

cases. Both briefs exaggerated the prevalence of addiction

and the threat it posed to the nation. Given that the Harrison Acts extension of federal police power was controversial and constitutionally convoluted; that the Court
had previously ruled against government attempts to
block maintenance; and that the vote was five-to-four,
it seems likely that the misinformation contributed to the
outcome [1].
It seems likely and contributed to are modest and
tentative formulations. This is necessarily so, because
historians deal in retrodiction rather than prediction.
They cannot test their findings experimentally. No time
machine permits us to dial up 1919, substitute amended
briefs, and then observe whether the justices votes
change. No statistical program can run a regression
equation through their minds, calculating causal weights
for the many variables in their decision processes.
What historians can do, however, is amass enough
information to give themselves and their readers an
understanding of how historical actors saw evolving situations, with all their peculiarities and ambiguities, and
why they acted as they did. The evidence behind such
empathic explanations is cumulative and, in an important sense, verifiable. How do we know that the justices
Addiction, 107, 486492

Addiction and history

confronted exaggerated claims? What evidence justifies

that adjective? The answer is that several contemporaneous reports, as well as correspondence between chagrined researchers, showed the government estimates
of 750 0001 500 000 addicts to be impossibly high.
Prevalence had been declining, rather than increasing,
and had been doing so for years [1]. Historical claims may
not be experimentally verifiable, but they are objective in
the sense that they emerge from corroborative evidence
that can be confirmed by others. Historians look for
patterns.
They also look for litigation. Intellectual property
lawsuits over amphetamine gave Nicolas Rasmussen
the opportunity to show, in rare detail, how medical
researchers and pharmaceutical companies developed
and marketed the drug, turning quotidian problems
into amphetamine-treatable medical conditions [2].
The tobacco litigation discovery process, and convenient
internet access, gave Alan Brandt much of the material
for The Cigarette Century (2007) [3], his monumental
study of how tobacco companies addicted tens of millions
of people world-wideand went on doing so after the
emergence of damning health evidence. Rather than
staring up at the Camel Man, Brandt wrote, I can
examine his personal papersthe very contracts, plans,
and letters that made him a reality.
The Cigarette Century exemplifies three of narrative
historys cardinal virtues: efficiency, readability and
range. Efficiency seems an odd compliment to bestow
on a 600-page book, but Brandt distills thousands of
scattered sources, from laboratory reports to marketing
studies, into a single, gracefully written narrative that
combines technology, culture, science and law with the
decisions of key corporate, medical and political actors.
His book serves double duty as the chronicle of a conflicted, modernizing society and a history of drug usea
feat duplicated in Alan Baumlers study of opium in the
Chinese Republic and Robert Stephenss account of the
Hamburg counterculture, Germans on Drugs [4,5]. In
good history, everything is connected to everything else.
What makes interwoven accounts possible is hindsight, the one advantage that historians enjoy over
deadline-pressed journalists and prediction-oriented
scientists. From Thucydides onwards, historians have
grasped that the accumulation of evidence from different
sources after the fact will reveal processes beyond the
control, or even the knowledge, of the historical actors.
To those who say that hindsight is always 20/20, the
historian responds that there is nothing wrong with
excellent vision.
Consider again the question of maintenance. In 1880
most US addicts were middle-class women whose
narcotic use was medical in origin. By 1920 most were
lower- or working-class men whose use was non-medical
2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

487

in origin. Because the change occurred gradually and

arose from multiple independent causes, contemporaries
were not always aware of it; yet it affected policy, in so far
as legislators and judges had previously shown no interest in criminalizing drug use by elderly morphine addicts.
Junkies were another matter. We can now see that the
demographic transformation of the addict population
was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the
anti-maintenance policy, which also arose from decisions, ill-informed or otherwise, of elite historical actors
such as the Supreme Court justices [1].

PROGRESS AND RECOGNITION

Historical knowledge is thus cumulative. The perspective
that comes with time, the opening of new archives and
the growth of secondary literature adds continuously to
the store of insight, making possible ambitious books
such as Brandts or the international drug history and
policy studies by Rudi Matthee, Kathryn Meyer and Terry
Parssinen, William McAllister, Richard Davenport-Hines
and Griffith Edwards [610]. The emergence of English
as a common academic language has facilitated access
to the secondary literature, as has the translation of
such important works as Wolfgang Schivelbuschs Das
Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft [Tastes of Paradise:
A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants]
and Pierre-Arnaud Chouvys Les Territoires de lOpium
[Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy] [11,12]. It
is now possible for an English-fluent graduate student
in any discipline, anywhere in the world, to gain, in a
semesters reading, knowledge of the history of addictive
substances beyond all but the most sophisticated scholars
of a generation ago.
The same graduate student would also learn something about addiction science. Although historians do
not usually test theories in a formal way, their research
often applies, and sometimes corroborates, findings of
social and natural scientists. Why, for example, did addiction become much more widespread during the 19th
century, to the point that political elites began imposing
market restrictions? The answer is complex, but would
minimally include the expanded production and export
of cheap spirits; the isolation and non-medical use of
psychoactive alkaloids (morphine, cocaine); new means
of consuming drugs (injecting narcotics, smoking cigarettes); and global migrations, such as those of indentured Indian and Chinese laborers, who introduced
cannabis and smoking opium to new lands. What is
striking about this list is how well it corresponds to the
findings of epidemiologists, economists and clinicians,
namely, that exposure, price and mode of administration
are crucial variables in the addiction process [13].
Addiction, 107, 486492

488

David T. Courtwright

HistoriansI include all serious researchers who

apply the methods and insights of the discipline, not only
history PhDshave also turned their attention to addiction research and treatment. They have given us classic
accounts of the origins of the concept of alcoholism
[14,15]. They have described the development of alcohol
and drug treatment [16,17]. They have profiled such
seminal figures as Marie Nyswander and Jerry Jaffe
[18,19]. They have described the rise of addiction as a
medical and scientific field [20,21]. They have recorded,
transcribed and provided internet access to interviews
with many of the fields leading figures [22]. Attention
from historians is, like imitation, a sincere form of flattery.
The College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) has
returned the flattery in the form of media awards for
Nancy Campbell, Brandt and other academic historians.
CPDD has also honored journalist Michael Massing and
economist Peter Reuter, both of whose works are deeply
informed by history.
All this prize-giving is of little moment to bench scientists working in wet laboratories and imaging centers.
Like research into consciousness, pain or mental illness
(broadly considered), the great intellectual divide in the
addiction field is between the reductivists and the nonreductivists. Those who are concerned only with nomothetic brain research, such as receptor pharmacology in
experimental animals, will have little or no immediate use
for the idiographic history that sociologists, ethnographers, economists and other social scientists find valuable; yet the trend towards preserving and articulating
the history of addiction science and treatment shows that
there are at least some areas of common interest and
potential collaboration between those in white coats and
those in tweed.

TENSIONS
Whatever common ground historians and addiction
scientists have found, there are still some significant tensions. One involves an unspoken double standard, which
historian Joseph Gabriel described with unusual candor:
Scientists often feel free to make historical
claimsand in fact they often feel somewhat
compelled tobut, at least in my experience, they
really dont like it when historians try to make
scientific ones. Historians, for our part, generally
dont feel comfortable making scientific claims at all,
and when we do we generally do so with a lot of
apologiesdisqualifiers of the now, Im not a
neuroscientist . . . type. But when was the last
time you heard a scientist apologize for not being
a historian? When was the last time you saw a
2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

scientist exhibit any awareness at all that the

historical claims they were making were, at best,
simplistic? [23]
Or, at worst, erroneous. At some point the number and
casualness of historical misstatements in a purportedly
scientific book, such as Solomon Snyders Brainstorming,
crosses the line from irritation to unconscious disciplinary insult [24].
The problem has a time-honored solution: hard work
and accuracy. To avoid appearing foolish, scientists need
to understand that history is the fruit of disciplined
research, not something cobbled together from memory,
oral tradition and prefaces from old journal articles. Historians, for their part, will gain credibility and insight by
adding the new language of addiction neuroscience to
the familiar languages of paradigms past. Historians,
who are interested in the diachronic development of
multiple scientific approaches, are multi-lingual in the
classical languages of addiction; laboratory researchers,
who are interested mainly in the synchronic elaboration
of the current paradigm, are monolingual in their
modern languageand blissfully unaware that it, too,
will pass into the classics under the pressure of revision.
Even so, historians should do their best to understand the
latest dispensation. Veteran researchers such as Michael
Kuhar have simplified the task by providing, in interdisciplinary conferences and journals, lucid surveys of basic
science in the field [25]. Such surveys are especially
useful in addiction, where developments are occurring
rapidly and issues of etiology and treatment remain
tangled and complex.
The words etiology and treatment connote disease,
which raises another fundamental difference between
historians and scientists: addiction as a pathological
frame. Like most social scientists, historians study alcohol
and other drugs in contexts other than those of addiction
or disease. Tellingly, the name of their international association makes no mention of addiction. Founded in 1979
as the Alcohol and Temperance History Group (ATHG),
the organization grew from a renaissance of historical
studies of alcohol, which was itself part of a larger wave
of new social history in the late 1960s and 1970s. There
was a smaller but near-simultaneous revival of the historical study of narcotics and street drugs such as cannabis and cocaine. The informal alliance between the two
groups of researchers became formal in 2004, when the
ATHG renamed itself the Alcohol and Drugs History
Society (ADHS). Specialists in licit psychoactive drugs,
such as historian David Herzberg [26], have since become
active in ADHS, whose 2011 conference was expansively
entitled The Pub, the Street, and the Medicine Cabinet.
ADHS members are concerned with addiction, in that
addicts have long accounted for a disproportionate share
Addiction, 107, 486492

Addiction and history

of alcohol and drug consumption, profits, taxes and

social costs. Without addictions pathos and urgency,
alcohol and drug history probably would not have coalesced into a specialty with its own organization and
journal. However, in absolute terms, compulsive users
never made up more than a minority of all users. Alcohol
and other drugs played multiple, often positive social
rolesas markers of identity, occasions of conviviality,
talismans of faiththat had little to do with addiction.
ADHS members, whose meetings are conspicuously
catholic affairs, assume neither a common interest in
addiction nor, for that matter, common training. They
lack the equivalent of a fellowship in addiction medicine.
They also lack allegiance to the NIDA paradigm,
shorthand for the scientific model of addiction as a
chronic, relapsing brain disease with a social and genetic
component, significant comorbidity with other mental
and physical disorders, long-term changes in brain structure and function visible in imaging studies, and a defining loss of control over drug craving, seeking and use
despite adverse consequences. Emanating from researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), this
paradigm currently dominates, and may one day unify,
scientific work in the addiction field. Researchers, and
journalists who popularize their findings, now routinely
describe compulsive behaviors involving gambling, sex,
shopping and eating as addictions. These claims are
more than metaphorical. Imaging studies have shown
that drug and behavioral addictions activate the same
neural pathways. Epidemiological and genetic studies
have found that compulsive gamblers are more prone to
alcohol and drug abuse. Clinical studies have revealed
that narcotic antagonists can reduce compulsive gambling and viewing of pornography, evidently by limiting
these activities capacity to augment dopamine release.
In the NIDA paradigm all addiction is, in the words of
psychiatrists Michael Bostwick and Jeffrey Bucci, an
acquired malfunctioning of the brains reward center
[27,28].
Historians have found much evidence that vices, as
they were once called, were linked spatially and conceptually. Gamblers flocked to bars. Prostitutes and their
customers drank liquor and snorted cocaine. Chinatown
revelers found opium dens, brothels and gambling parlors
in the same teeming quarter, a stones throw from the
pawnbrokers. Victorian reformers regarded vices as a
constellation of ruinous behaviors, all of which they
sought to discourage or suppress [29].
However, historians are loath to concede the neural
and genetic commonalities of these same behaviors.
The brain-disease paradigm appears to be an oldfashioned monistic pathology wearing the fashionable
garb of neuroscience [30]. It strikes them (and many
other social scientists) as crudely reductive because it
2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

489

ignores that which cannot be illumined with positrons

or studied in neurons. It seems irrelevant because it
sheds no light on culturally specific phenomena. It seems
threatening because it gains all the funding and media
attention. It seems intellectually reactionary because it
evokes biological essentialism and naive positivism. It
may even be politically reactionary because it lends, inadvertently and despite the medicalizing intentions of its
proponents, the prestige of science to supply-side drug
warriors bent on keeping everyones fragile brains out
of the sizzling drug grease [27].
In The Cult of Pharmacology, Richard DeGrandpre
marshals these grievances and more in his retelling of the
story of how America became the worlds most troubled
drug culture. Drawing selectively on history, as well
as on such critics as psychologist Bruce Alexander
and physician-ethnobotanist Andrew Weil, DeGrandpre
indicts the brain-disease model as a prop of pharmacologicalism. This is his term for the largely arbitrary,
socially clueless and highly profitable division of the
pharmacopeia into angel drugs on which we spend billions for prescriptions and devil drugs on which we
spend billions for futile suppression. Among former NIDA
directors, DeGrandpre has some angels and devils of his
own. The late Bob Schuster has wings. Alan Leschner has
horns [31].

OPPOSITIONAL SCHOLARSHIP
The Cult of Pharmacology exemplifies what historiographers call oppositional histories, works that are highly
critical of the status quo and that favor radical change.
They occupy the left end of an ideological spectrum that
runs from oppositional to accommodationist (i.e. mildly
reformist) to dominant (i.e. conservative) views [32]. In
a discipline in which left-liberal views are commonplace,
virtually any political or social subject can prompt an
oppositional response; but they arise most often when
the subject involves morally charged policy questions or
claims about the biological determinants of behavior.
Americas punitive drug policy and high-profile addiction research programs have made for especially tempting targets. For much of the mid-20th century, authors
such as Alfred Lindesmith, Rufus King and Edward
Brecher treated history as a sort of munitions dump
where they might find the means of exploding prejudicial
ideas and unjust policies [3335]. Then, beginning in the
1970s, historians such as David Musto, Wayne Morgan,
Jill Jonnes, Joseph Spillane, Timothy Hickman and Eric
Schneider published new, conspicuously professional
histories [3641]. Although these works were accommodationist to a lesser or greater degree, they provided
empathic narratives based on primary sources. Their
authors, all of whom had graduate training in history,
Addiction, 107, 486492

490

David T. Courtwright

ground no axes, or none so conspicuous that readers

might doubt their selection and handling of evidence.
(Social psychologist Robert MacCoun and economist
Peter Reuter displayed similar circumspection in Drug
War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places,
a widely read hybrid of comparative policy analysis and
history that used past experience of vice regulation to
guardedly support such heresies as cannabis depenalization [42].) The new accommodationist scholarship
merely counterbalanced the older polemical tradition. It
did not replace it, as books such as those of DeGrandpre
[31] or Arthur Benavie [43] continued to roll off the
presses.
Recent drug-history literature in the United Kingdom
follows a similar pattern. Virginia Berridges Opium and
the People [44] and Alex Molds Heroin [45] are straightforward narratives, measured in tone. Griffith Edwardss
Matters of Substance [10], a medical and historical tour
dhorizon with a coda of policy suggestions, is more explicitly accommodationist. Davenport-Hiness The Pursuit
of Oblivion [9], Gargi Bhattacharyyas Traffick [46] and
Toby Seddons Foucauldian A History of Drugs [47] are all
frankly oppositional works.
The same spectrum runs throughout Chinese drug
history. Here the stakes are particularly high, as all historians agree that the Chinese opium situation motivated
international efforts to curtail the drug traffic in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Historians do not,
however, agree on how serious the Chinese problem was
or whether it warranted strong prohibitory medicine.
Carl Trocki [48], who uses words such as plague or
bane to describe the drugs impact in China and other
Asian lands, argues that opium enabled Europeans to
create a vast empire and to exploit Asian consumers and
laborers. Although he concedes that Qing China had
many underlying problems, his damage narrative is
consistent with that of the nationalists, missionaries,
physicians and diplomats who sought to suppress the
traffic. The same could not be said of Frank Diktter,
Lars Laamann and Zhou Xun, who deny that China
was Patient Zero in a global drug plague [49,50]. They
condemn as counterproductive (and sometimes murderous) the 20th-century drug wars inflicted within and
without China. Opium was, if not quite harmless, then a
popular, multi-purpose drug used in social contexts other
than compulsion and degradationan interpretation
consistent with work by Richard Newman [51] and
Zheng Yangwen [52]. Broadly speaking, the more a historian doubts or qualifies the extent of past addiction and
other drug-related harms, the more likely he or she is to
criticize prohibitionist regimes.
The same is true of social scientists, save that oppositional scholars in disciplines such as sociology or criminology argue typically that current drug problems are
2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

exaggerated and/or by-products of suppression. Thus

Tom Decorte writes that captive samples in prisons and
treatment programs blind authorities to the extent of
controlled drug use, which is made more difficult by their
imposition of prohibition regimes [53]. Anthropologist
Phillipe Bourgois describes vividly the self-destructive
behavior of homeless street addicts, but presents them as
victims of social neglect and structural change whose
lives are worsened, not improved, by law enforcement
[54]. Unsurprisingly, when oppositional social scientists
evoke history, they most often cite the works of oppositional historians with whom they are simpatico. As in
Middle Eastern politics, the enemy of my enemy is my
friend.
If it is natural for controversial subjects such as drug
policy to produce oppositional scholarship, it is also
natural for such scholarship to breed a measure of distrust and confusion. While a single polemic can be
bracing, a dozen can color the perception of an entire
field: guilt by association. The value of history to policy
analysts and addiction scientistsor even the likelihood
that they will bother to read itdiminishes in proportion
to their perception that it is politicized or dismissive
of cutting-edge research. The danger is that the addiction field will become a grotesque caricature of C. P.
Snows two cultures [55]. Neuroscientists will
dismiss historiansin fact, all non-quantitative social
scientistsas naive leftists and neurochemical Luddites.
The compliment will be returned in renewed charges of
scientific arrogance and indifference to the addictions
real-world contexts.
While we have not yet reached such an impasse, I
worry that mutual distrust and incomprehension will
end the tenuous cross-fertilization between scientists and
historians concerned with addiction. That would be an
irony as well as a shame, forthis is the nub of my
essayboth of their enterprises have flourished in the
last four decades. We know more than ever about addictive processes that occur inside the brain. We know more
than ever about addictive processes, past and present,
that occur outside the brain. The chance to put that
knowledge together represents, perhaps more for historians and social scientists than for bench-bound
researchers, an ungrasped intellectual opportunity.
Declaration of interests
None.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Nancy Campbell, Claire Clark,
Andrew Courtwright, Shelby Miller, Joseph Spillane and
Nicolas Rasmussen for commenting on a preliminary
draft.
Addiction, 107, 486492

Addiction and history

References
1. Courtwright D. T. Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction
in America, revised edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press; 2001, p. 301.
2. Rasmussen N. On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine.
New York: New York University Press; 2008, p. 262.
3. Brandt A. M. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly
Persistence of the Product That Defined America. New York:
Perseus; 2007, p. 112.
4. Baumler A. The Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse
Than Floods and Wild Beasts. Albany: State University of New
York Press; 2007.
5. Stephens R. P. Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press; 2007.
6. Matthee R. Exotic substances: The introduction and global
spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor,
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In: Porter R., Teich M.,
editors. Drugs and Narcotics in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1995, p. 2451.
7. Meyer K., Parssinen T. Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords,
Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield; 1998.
8. McAllister W. B. Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An
International History. London: Routledge; 2000.
9. Davenport-Hines R. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History
of Narcotics. New York: Norton; 2002.
10. Edwards G. Matters of Substance: Drugsand Why Everyones a User. New York: St Martins Press; 2004.
11. Schivelbusch W. Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft
[Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and
Intoxicants]. New York: Parthenon; translation published
1992.
12. Chouvy P.-A. Les Territoires de lOpium [Opium: Uncovering
the Politics of the Poppy]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; translation published 2010.
13. Courtwright D. T. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the
Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press;
2001.
14. Levine H. G. The discovery of addiction: changing conceptions of habitual drunkenness in America. J Stud Alcohol
1978; 15: 493506.
15. Valverde M. Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas
of Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1998.
16. Tracy S. W. Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to
Prohibition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press;
2005.
17. White W. L. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. Bloomington, IL: Chestnut
Health Systems; 1998.
18. Courtwright D. T. The prepared mind: Marie Nyswander,
methadone maintenance, and the metabolic theory of
addiction. Addiction 1997; 92: 25765.
19. Massing M. The Fix. New York: Simon and Schuster; 1998.
20. Acker C. J. Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in
the Classic Era of Narcotic Control. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press; 2002.
21. Campbell N. D. Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics
of Substance Abuse Research. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press; 2007.
22. Campbell N. D., Spillane J. History of a Public Science:
Substance Abuse Research. Available at: http://sitemaker.
umich.edu/substance.abuse.history/home (accessed 19
2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

23.

24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.

30.
31.

32.

33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.

39.

40.

41.
42.

43.
44.

45.

46.

491

August 2011); archived by Webcite at http://www.

webcitation.org/60wCz01MQ.
Gabriel G. Historical scholarship as a subordinate enterprise.
Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society,
April 4, 2011. Available at: http://pointsadhsblog.
wordpress.com/2011/04/04/historical-scholarship-as-asubordinate-enterprise/ (accessed 19 August 2011);
archived by Webcite at http://www.webcitation.org/
613wxzvw1.
Snyder S. H. Brainstorming: The Science and Politics of Opiate
Research. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1989.
Kuhar M. J. Contributions of basic science to understanding
addiction. BioSocieties 2010; 5: 2535.
Herzberg D. Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 2009.
Courtwright D. T. The NIDA brain disease paradigm: history,
resistance, and spinoffs. BioSocieties 2010; 5: 13747.
Bostwick J. M., Bucci J. A. Internet sex addiction treated with
naltrexone. Mayo Clin Proc 2008; 83: 22630.
Burnham J. C. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs,
Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American
History. New York: New York University Press; 1993, p. 5.
Kushner H. Toward a cultural biology of addiction. BioSocieties 2010; 5: 824.
DeGrandpre R. The Cult of Pharmacology: How America
Became the Worlds Most Troubled Drug Culture. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press; 2006.
Novick P. That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and
the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; 1988, p. 623.
Lindesmith A. R. The Addict and the Law. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press; 1965.
King R. The Drug Hang-Up: Americas Fifty-Year Folly. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas; 1972.
Brecher E. M. et al. Licit and Illicit Drugs. Boston: Little,
Brown; 1972.
Musto D. F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control,
3rd edn. New York: Oxford University Press; 1999.
Morgan H. W. Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800
1980. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press; 1981.
Jonnes J. Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of
Americas Romance with Illegal Drugs. New York: Scribner;
1996.
Spillane J. F. Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace
in the United States, 18841920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press; 2000.
Hickman T. A. The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic
Addiction and the Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870
1920. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; 2007.
Schneider E. C. Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 2008.
MacCoun R. J., Reuter P. Drug War Heresies: Learning from
Other Vices, Times, and Places. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2001.
Benavie A. Drugs: Americas Holy War. New York: Routledge;
2009.
Berridge V. Opium and the People: Opiate Use and Drug Control
Policy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England, rev.
ed. London: Free Association Books; 1999.
Mold A. Heroin: The Treatment of Addiction in TwentiethCentury Britain. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press;
2008.
Bhattacharyya G. Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and
Things. London: Pluto Press; 2005.
Addiction, 107, 486492

492

David T. Courtwright

47. Seddon T. A History of Drugs: Drugs and Freedom in the Liberal

Age. Abingdon: Routledge; 2010.
48. Trocki C. A. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy:
A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 17501950. London:
Routledge; 1999.
49. Diktter F., Laamann L., Zhou X. China, British imperialism
and the myth of the opium plague. In: Mills J., Barton P.,
editors. Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and
Intoxication, c. 1500c. 1930. Houndmills, Hants: Palgrave
Macmillan; 2007, p. 1938.
50. Diktter F., Laamann L., Zhou X. Narcotic Culture: A History
of Drugs in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
2004.
51. Newman R. K. Opium smoking in late imperial China: a
reconsideration. Mod Asian Stud 1995; 29: 76594.

2012 The Author, Addiction 2012 Society for the Study of Addiction

52. Zheng Y. The Social Life of Opium in China. New York:

Cambridge University Press; 2005.
53. Decorte T. Blinding ourselves with science: the chronic
infections of our thinking on psychoactive substances.
In: Hunt G., Milhet M., Bergeron H., editors. Drugs and
Culture: Knowledge, Consumption and Policy. Farnham,
Surrey: Ashgate; 2011, p. 3351.
54. Bourgois P. Homelessness, addiction, and politically structured suffering in the US war on drugs. In: Hunt G., Milhet
M., Bergeron H., editors. Drugs and Culture: Knowledge,
Consumption and Policy. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate; 2011,
p. 24159.
55. Snow C. P. The Two Cultures of the Scientific Revolution. New
York: Cambridge University Press; 1961.

Addiction, 107, 486492