Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. (Books).

David T. Courtwright. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Why are coffee, tobacco, and marijuana available throughout the world, but not peyote or qat? Why are alcohol and tobacco legal, but not heroin or cocaine? What drives the drug trade, and how has it come about to what it is today -- a vast, checkered pattern of use and abuse, commerce and interdiction?

David T. Courtwright, a history professor at the University of North Florida, answers these questions in this comprehensive and well-written book. Courtwright shows how the actions of merchants and colonial planters expanded world drug supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less affluent consumers into the market -- effectively democratizing drug consumption. He also shows how Europeans used alcohol as an inducement for native peoples to trade their furs, sell captives into slavery, and deal away their lands; and how monarchs taxed drugs to pay for their wars and expanding empires. And he explains why such practices, over the last centry, have increasingly given way to policies of restriction and prohibition -- and how economic and cultural factors have informed these policies to determine which drugs are easy to obtain, which are restricted to medical use, and which are totally banned.

Courtwright brings extensive research, reasoned judgment, and a sense of humor to his subject. For example, after tracing caffeine plants from their origin in three continents -- tea at the crossroads of India and China, coffee in Ethiopia, cacao in South America, and cola in West Africa -- Courtwright describes American cowboy preferences for hot, strong brews, "Coffee and America grew up together. Frontiersmen of a different sort, the Apollo 11 astronauts, were drinking coffee three hours after landing on the moon. Theirs was history's first extraplanetary drug use."

Besides a compelling narrative, Forces of Habit contains many interesting illustrations, a Bibliographic Note, and copious footnotes. As someone who has more than a passing interest in Courtwright's topic (my own book on the drug problem in America will be published in 2002), I highly recommend Forces of Habit to scholarly and lay readers alike.