Bringing together scholars from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this multidisciplinary Handbook offers a comprehensive critical overview of intoxicants and intoxication. The Handbook is divided into 34 chapters across eight thematic sections covering a wide range of issues, including the meanings of intoxicants; the social life of intoxicants; intoxication settings; intoxication practices; alternative approaches to the study of intoxication; scapegoated intoxicants; discourses shaping intoxication; and changing notions of excess. It explores a range of different intoxicants, including alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and legal and illicit drugs, including amphetamine, cannabis, ecstasy, khat, methadone, and opiates. Chapter length case studies explore these intoxicants in a variety of countries, including the USA, the UK, Australia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Singapore, and Sweden, across a broad timespan covering the nineteenth century to the present day. This wide-ranging Handbook will be of great interest to researchers, students, and instructors within the humanities and social sciences with an interest in a wide range of different intoxicants and different intoxication practices.

In this book, anthropologists, criminologists and sociologists analyse different aspects of drug policy. The articles approach drug policy from new angles, focusing in particular on the history and consequences of drug policy in practice. How can we understand and explain the increasingly complex puzzle that we call drug policy? The authors explore in different ways how drug policy has spread into new areas of society, how new players are engaged in drug policy, and what consequences this has for drug users, citizens, or society in general. Taking a point of departure in drug policy as a way of regulating drugs - including control, treatment, prevention and harm reduction - the book shows how drug policy has become increasingly diverse and evident at many levels of society. A very wide range of drug policies are implemented in contemporary societies - not only by governments, but also by local communities, organisations, public institutions, private enterprises, sports clubs etc. Using examples from both Denmark and the USA, drug policy is analysed on an international, national and local level. This book will be of great value to advanced undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in drug policy, as well as to academics, practitioners and policy makers in the drug policy field.