von Hans-Christian Dany
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From Publishers Weekly
Davenport-Hines offers a sharply opinionated history of drugs structured around three major premises: Human beings use drugs; for many that choice will be debilitating, sometimes fatal; and government prohibition of drugs, as opposed to regulation, is counterproductive and doomed to vainglorious failure. Davenport-Hines, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and author of a well-received work on W.H. Auden, builds his case with a body of evidence encyclopedic in scope and varied in perspective. He explores the effects of drugs on families and private lives, for example, by sampling diaries of ordinary citizens, the writings of literary figures as diverse as Balzac and Ken Kesey, the theories of notorious cult-leader Timothy Leary, and the reports of a host of journalists. He is equally focused on exposing the high public costs that, he argues, have resulted from governments' treatment of drugs (both in American and elsewhere) as a criminal rather than medical problem a choice that, the author says, is a product of political demagoguery rather than honest conviction. To give credence to his charges, he quotes the inflammatory words of presidents, drug czars, and moralist such as William Bennett. U.S. policymakers exported this punitive approach to Europe and Latin America, which he deems a form of cultural imperialism. Davenport-Hines also finds hypocrisy in government support for pharmaceutical companies, whose advertising and marketing contribute to the cultural acceptance of drugs. He takes care to provide readers with useful information about the effects of both legal and illegal drugs, and to carefully discriminate among the relative dangers of different classes of drugs. The effort adds credibility to his strong writing, and his well-documented positions will be difficult to dismiss.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The need for altered states, the release from the tyranny of the quotidian and one's self, is, as British historian Davenport-Hines so cogently observes, intrinsic to human nature. Drugs have always played a role in spiritual and healing practices, art, and human interactions both personal and social. As he did in Gothic (1999), Davenport-Hines draws from a great sea of materials, deftly connecting intriguing insights into the drug use of artists, doctors, world leaders, criminals, and common folk with concise summations of related aesthetic and political shifts, scientific discoveries, and the change in attitudes toward certain drugs that led to their criminalization and the rise of an illegal international drug trade that generates $400 billion a year. Davenport-Hines documents the complex cultures of opium, coca, hemp drugs, and beyond, and explains why prohibition has, paradoxically, increased drug use and made it more dangerous. Empathic in his portrayal of individuals and perceptions into the connection between narcotics and sensuality, societal anxiety, war, and issues related to gender, race, and class, he is ruthless in his rigorous critique of the covert participation of governments in the lucrative trade they've so vehemently outlawed. The war on drugs, he concludes, is a war on ourselves. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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IN THE 1670s an English merchant seaman called Thomas Bowrey (1649?-1713) was plying his trade along the coast of Bengal together with other English sailors. Lesen Sie die erste Seite
Buchdeckel | Copyright | Inhaltsverzeichnis | Auszug | Stichwortverzeichnis | Rückseite
IN THE 1670s an English merchant seaman called Thomas Bowrey (1649?-1713) was plying his trade along the coast of Bengal together with other English sailors. Lesen Sie die erste Seite
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