Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. Pleasure and Panic reveals how attitudes toward drug and alcohol consumption have always been deeply embedded in cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities. Contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business. Pleasure and Panic brings a dispassionate voice to current debates about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws and challenges existing ideas about how to deal with the so-called problems of drug and alcohol use.

Cultural pastime, profitable industry, or harmful influence on the nation? Liquor was a tricky issue for municipal, provincial, and federal governments after Confederation. Liquor and the Liberal State traces the Ontario provincial government's takeover of liquor regulation by in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how notions of individual freedom, equality, and property rights were debated, challenged, and modified in response to an active prohibitionist movement and equally active liquor industry. The drink question became as political as it was moral - a key issue in the establishment of judicial definitions of provincial and federal rights and, ultimately, in the crafting of the modern state.

In the 1800s, opium and cocaine could be easily obtained to treat a range of ailments. Drug dependency, when it occurred, was considered a matter of personal vice. Near the end of the century, attitudes shifted and access to drugs became more restricted. Dan Malleck reveals how different forces converged in the early 1900s to influence lawmakers and set the course for the drug laws that exist today. As this book shows, social concerns about drug addiction had less to do with the long pipe and shadowy den than with lobbying by medical professionals, concern about the morality and future of the nation, and a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry.

Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. Pleasure and Panic reveals how attitudes toward drug and alcohol consumption have always been deeply embedded in cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities. Contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business. Pleasure and Panic brings a dispassionate voice to current debates about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws and challenges existing ideas about how to deal with the so-called problems of drug and alcohol use.

In the 1800s, opium and cocaine could be easily obtained to treat a range of ailments. Drug dependency, when it occurred, was considered a matter of personal vice. Near the end of the century, attitudes shifted and access to drugs became more restricted. Dan Malleck reveals how different forces converged in the early 1900s to influence lawmakers and set the course for the drug laws that exist today. As this book shows, social concerns about drug addiction had less to do with the long pipe and shadowy den than with lobbying by medical professionals, concern about the morality and future of the nation, and a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry.

Cultural pastime, profitable industry, or harmful influence on the nation? Liquor was a tricky issue for municipal, provincial, and federal governments after Confederation. Liquor and the Liberal State traces the Ontario provincial government's takeover of liquor regulation by in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how notions of individual freedom, equality, and property rights were debated, challenged, and modified in response to an active prohibitionist movement and equally active liquor industry. The drink question became as political as it was moral - a key issue in the establishment of judicial definitions of provincial and federal rights and, ultimately, in the crafting of the modern state.