Forbidden Drugs
Philip Robson
Oxford University press 1999
ISBN: 0 19 2629557

Heroin: The failure of prohibition and what to do now
Francis Wilkinson
Centre for Reform 2001
ISBN: 1 902622 28 6

Detailed look at the public health and crime reduction benefits of effective regulation of the heroin market, by former Chief Constable Francis Wilkinson (also wrote the leaf and the law – see below).

Drugs: Dilemmas and choices
Royal College of Psychiatrists
Gaskell 2000
ISBN: 1901242447

Written by a multi-disciplinary group of experts, this book aims to stimulate informed debate about the possible alternatives to current failings.

High Time for Reform: Drug Policy for the 21 st Centuary
Edited by Selina Chen and Edward Skidelsky.
Social Market Foundation 2001
ISBN: 1874097895

A collection of ten critical essays on UK and international drug policy by a range of experts from the fields of history, psychiatry, social policy, philosophy and economics. It brings to bear a range of innovative ideas and perspectives on the problems facing Britain’s policy on drugs.

Drugs: Cultures, Controls & Everyday life
Nigel South
Sage 1998
ISBN: 0761952357

An overview of drugs and society. Topics addressed include: the debate over prohibition versus legalisation; drug and dance cultures; drug use amongst young women; images of "race" and drugs; the strategy of policing drugs and controlling drug users; and drug control and sport.

From War to Work: Drug treatment, social inclusion and enterprise
Rowena Young
The Foreign Policy Centre 2002
ISBN: 1903558077

A detailed examination of the drugs issue presenting a vision of how drug use can be safely managed, based on lessons from around the world.

Illicit Drugs: use and control
Adrian Barton
Routledge 2003
ISBN: 0415281725

This book moves beyond this single issue approach and locates illicit drug use in its wider context, with chapters on: the history of illicit drug use measuring the 'problem' legal and medical responses to illicit drug use the illicit drugs market drugs, crime and trends in drug policy. Drawing information from wide-ranging sources, Adrian Barton illuminates the complex nature and broad impact illicit drug use carries in its wake and provides an overview of the contemporary state of the drug 'scene'. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers working in the area of drugs and society.

Winning the war on drugs: to legalise or not?
Richard Stevenson
Institute of Economic Affairs 1994
ISBN: 0 255 36330 3

Drugs, Trafficking and Criminal Policy: The scapegoat strategy
Penny Green
Waterside press 1998
ISBN 1 872 870 33 3

Academic examination of international drug trafficking, and the failure of enforcement. focuses on scapegoating low level players.

Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out
Mike Gray
Random House 1998
ISBN 0 679 43533 6

A well told account of the drug war.

Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure
Dan Baum
Little Brown 1996
ISBN 0-316-08446-8

Another well researched and argued critique of the US war on drugs.

White-out: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St.Clair
Verso 1999
ISBN 1-85984-258-5

This is a fine piece of scholarship with no easy answers for anyone. Focussing on what policies ought to be implemented in the USA, the authors pay little attention to the morality or otherwise of prohibition or legalization; instead, they present a well-researched review of the likely consequences of different legal regimes with regard to different drugs (focussing on cannabis, cocaine and heroin as the most 'important' illegal substances). They draw analogies with the USA during alcohol prohibition, during the period when cocaine and heroin were legally available, and the experiences of those states that have to some extent decriminalized possession of cannabis. They also examine the consequences of the USA's legal approach to gambling (once illegal, now largely legalized) and prostitution (still illegal but with very different enforcement approaches compared with drug use). Various European regimes are considered, particularly the Dutch decriminalization of first use and then sales of cannabis. From all these they make the prediction that removal of criminal penalties for drug use is unlikely to result in an upsurge in users, but legalization of sales probably will (because it will be difficult to restrain the forces of commercialization, and because some people are deterred by the 'symbolic threshold' of a drug being de jure prohibited, even if the state has decided to stop enforcing that prohibition). They look at various harm reduction measures that have been tried, such as heroin maintenance, needle exchanges and treatment as an alternative to prison, consider why the US is so politically hostile to even allowing experimental harm reduction programmes, and try to evaluate whether under decriminalization or full legalization the aggregate harms to society or the average harms to users may decrease even if the total number of users rises. As they make clear at the very start, their conclusions are essentially that we don't know; to attempt a calculation would be to multiply uncertainties with uncertainties, therefore anyone who makes a strong prediction should be treated with skepticism. However, given the manifest existing harms created by prohibition, they come down tentatively in favour of some measure of reform.

Lies, Damned Lies and Drug War Statistics
Mattew Robinson & Renee Scherlen
Published 2007
ISBN: 079146976X

'Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics is surprisingly easy to read, and Robinson and Scherlen have done a huge favor not only to critics of current drug policy by compiling this damning critique of ONDCP claims, but also to anyone interested in how data is compiled, presented, and misused by bureaucrats attempting to guard their domains. It should be required reading for members of Congress, though, sadly, that is unlikely to happen.'

After Prohibition: An adult approach to Drug Policies in the 21 st Century
Editor: Timothy Lynch with foreword by Milton Friedman
Published: 2001
ISBN: 1-882577-94-9

This is not, as the title would suggest, a book proposing how a newly legalized drugs industry should be run, rather it is an interesting collection of essays from a wide variety of authors, mostly criticising the consequences of the war on drugs in the USA. There are chapters detailing how prohibition is itself (in a technical, legalistic way) illegitimate according to the US Constitution, and how in the course of recent decades it had been used as the justification for removing pretty much all of the rights that the Constitution used to guarantee, from protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, to the separation of the military from the police, even up to the right to a fair trial. There is a chapter by Gary Johnson who, as Governor of New Mexico, has been one of the highest level US politicians to call for legalization (and has an entertainingly gung-ho writing style), and several by former or current police officers, including one by Michael Levine which is worth mentioning in detail. He is dead set against legalization, but after years of fruitlessly trying to stop the flow of drugs by focussing on arresting dealers, he started to formulate a demand-side approach that aimed to organise local police and citizens' groups into scaring/shaming drug buyers, making it clear that they, not the dealers, were being targeted. Whether or not this approach would have worked long term, or across a whole country, his initial experiments with his 'Fight Back' programme seem to have been very successful in putting local drug dealers out of business. The point is that Levine soon found his apparently effective demand-reduction approach being opposed by precisely those bureaucracies whose continued existance depends on inefficient supply-reduction policies, with police officers telling him that pressure was being put upon them not to cooperate with 'Fight Back' - a telling revelation of who benefits from the war on drugs. The final two chapters are a 'debate' about legalization, but they seem rather out of place in the book since neither writer has space to argue their side in the depth it deserves, and since most of the rest of the book is already about the evils of prohibition.

Drugs and Security in the Caribbean
Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith
Published 1997
ISBN: 0-271-01719-8

'A comprehensive study of the drug dilemma in the Caribbean that reveals the severity of the threat illegal drug trafficking poses to the small countries of that region'. Drugs and Security in the Caribbean

The Political Economy of Narcotics
Julia Buxton
Published 2006
ISBN: 1842774468

The Political Economy of Narcotics "aims to break new ground in integrating the study of history, ideology, institutions and policy", and by its own criteria does rather well. The book begins with a brief historical overview of drug use and an account of the main events leading from the unregulated free market of the 19th century to the global prohibition regime that holds sway today under the auspices of the United Nations, with the USA at the forefront of the push for ever more repressive legislation. Then, while acknowledging the difficulty of gathering accurate information about an illegal activity, the next section gathers the available statistics on the prevalence of use and cultivation of the major illicit drugs, divided by continent, over recent years. Here Buxton is able to let the numbers do the talking, since, despite all the efforts of the international drug control system, both use and production, when considered globally, show an upward trend. The following two chapters analyse the reasons for the failure of prohibition, in terms of its inherent utopianism and in terms of the failure of the control system to learn from experience. The remainder of the book focuses on particular areas in which the war on drugs has harmful effects, namely, on the political systems of producer countries, on efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and on the environment, including a critique of the proposed biological warfare tactic of using a fungus to attack drug crops. The meticulous laying out of statistics makes for somewhat dry reading at times, and the sheer volume of history and analysis presented lead to some topics feeling a bit rushed. Also, there are a few pervasive linguistic infelicities, such as using the words 'narcotics' and 'stimulants' as if they meant all illicit drugs, and comparing alcohol and tobacco with 'drugs' as if they were not included in the meaning of that term. Overall, though, the book does a good job of exposing the failure of prohibition and explaining how it has managed to persist for so long.

Legalize This! The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs
Douglas Husak
Published 2002
ISBN: 1859843204

As in his earlier Drugs and Rights Husak is concerned above all else to show that punishing people for using drugs is unjust, whether or not their drug use (or the laws prohibiting it) leads to negative consequences. Indeed, in one of the later sections he explicitly argues that a cost/benefit analysis is an inappropriate way of deciding whether current prohibition laws should be repealed. He starts from the reasonable assertion that if punishment is to be inflicted, it ought to have a personal justification - that is to say, that it's not sufficient to show that it will be better for society if an individual is punished, but that individual must deserve it for some evil he has done. He identifies the most plausible reasons for prohibiting drug use and shows how in each case the evils that prohibition seeks to prevent do not constitute a sufficiently dire emergency to allow us to override justice in pursuit of our aims. It is noted that when all their other arguments have been dealt with, prohibitionists tend to fall back on legal moralism - that the law is justified in enforcing private morality and that drug use is inherently immoral - a position which usually turns out to rest on religious conviction, which in a secular society ought to be insufficient reason to imprison people. Finally he shows how despite much talk from both sides, we cannot with very much confidence predict what society would look like if we legalized the use of drugs. He does not try to offer a model system for legalization, but he makes a strong case that whatever the consequences (and whether or not we should legalize the sale of drugs), criminalizing non-violent drug users is morally wrong. This is a much shorter and more accessible read than his previous book on the topic; an essential introduction to the rights-based case for decriminalization.

Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics
Curtis Marez
Published 2004
ISBN: 0816640602

'Inaugurated in 1984, America's "War on Drugs" is just the most recent skirmish in a standoff between global drug trafficking and state power. From Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars in China to the activities of Colombia's drug cartels and their suppression by U.S.-backed military forces today, conflicts over narcotics have justified imperial expansion, global capitalism, and state violence, even as they have also fueled the movement of goods and labor around the world'.

The Globalisation of Addiction
Bruce Alexander
Published 2008
ISBN: 0199230129

'This book explores the problem of addiction using a nontraditional approach...a refreshing look at an age-old problem.'

McMafia: Crime without Frontiers
Misha Glenny
Published 2008
ISBN: 0224075039

I'd heartily reccommend this even to anyone with no interest in drug policy, such is its fascinating scope. Misha Glenny has travelled the world in search of Montengran cigarette smugglers, Russian oligarchs, Nigerian email scammers, Canadian cannabis farmers, Japanese Yakuza, Transnistrian trafficked women (how many people have even heard of that shadowy breakaway Moldovan border province?), Brazilian cyber-criminals, Chinese illegal migrants and more. Just about every chapter feels like it could be expanded into a whole book, which I suppose is testament to the vast network of organised crime that seemingly pervades every corner of the globe. Readers of this website will be particularly interested in what he has to say about the illicit drugs trade: here he focusses on the curious set of economic and geographical circumstances that have transformed the Canadian province of British Columbia into a huge cannabis farm: the decline of traditional logging and mining industries, coupled with vast space and plentiful hydroelectric power, means that cannabis, mostly cultivated in underground aeroponic factories, now accounts for a substantial portion of the province's GDP. We meet David Soares, the District Attorney for Albany County, New York, who is working to reform NY's draconian mandatory minimum sentence laws, and who has praised Canada's relative tolerance of cannabis use. We also encounter some of the victims of the ongoing chaos in Colombia, fuelled by cocaine prohibition. Glenny dissects some UK government statistics to show how ineffective the War on Drugs is, and comes to the inevitable conclusion that prohibition, far from making the world safer, is an extravagant gift to gangsters and terrorists. I won't go into detail on the many other topics covered in this book; I'll just say it deserves to be widely read by anyone with an interest in the world we live in.

Drug Control in a Free Society
James Bakalar & Lester Grispoon
Published 1988
ISBN: 0521357721

‘This is a landmark book, destined to be regaled and harangued by many : should be read by a wide group of individuals, including members of the legal, political, medical, and drug abuse fields. Its views will irritate some and please others but, like the question of mind-altering drugs themselves, should give us all much to reflect on.’ Journal of the American Medical Association

Modernising Australia's Drug Policy
Alex Modak & Tim Moore
Published 2002
ISBN: 0868404829

'Written by two experts in the field, this book is about the options for Australia when the law enforcement approach is finally exhausted. - It includes a ten-point plan to reduce the death, disease, crime and corruption that has become an entrenched part of the drug economy, and concludes with a call for a new realism in Australian drug policy.'

Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century
William McAllister
Published 1999
ISBN: 0415179904

'An excellent history of how and why international institutions controlled drugs...historians of both the drug trade and international institutions will rely on his work for years to come.' The International History Review, December 2002

Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations
Peter Andreas & Ethan Nadelmann
Published 2008
ISBN: 0195341953

'Every serious student of international organized crime in particular and international crime control in general should make the reading of Policing the Globe by Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann a priority.' Michael Woodiwiss, International Criminal Justice Review

Between Politics and Reason: The Drug Legalization Debate
Eric Goode
Published 1997
ISBN: 0312163835

In this book Erich Goode gives an overview of drug use and abuse in America to give students a solid understanding of the issues and problems. Key arguments in the drug legalization debate are placed in a social and political perspective, with implications for current debates beyond the US.

The Legalization of Drugs: For and Against
Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe
Published 2005
ISBN:0521546869

As the general preface states, the 'For and Against' series is intended to form a library of applied ethics, with each book containing an argument from both sides of a debate, put as forcefully and coherently as possible. Unfortunately, the two authors here are rather talking at cross-purposes. Husak is concerned mainly to argue from principles of justice that punishment should not be inflicted on people for recreational drug use, whereas de Marneffe is mostly concerned with explaining why prohibition of manufacture and sale of some drugs is ethically justified. Indeed, Husak's section is largely an abridged and updated version of his earlier Legalize This!, reviewed elsewhere on this site, which argues that imposing criminal sanctions on someone is only justified if they can be shown to have violated someone else's right (or unacceptably raised the risk of this happening), and that drug use does not fit this category. It features just a short extra chapter explaining why he believes that the laws surrounding production and sale of drugs should be set up so as to minimise harm. De Marneffe's argument is based on different axioms; that as long as someone's reasons for wanting (say) heroin to be prohibited are stronger than anyone else's reasons for wanting it to be legalized, then prohibition is justified. He does indeed make a strong case if we accept this idea, and his other assertion, namely that prohibition has a significant deterrent effect (which he believes, but concedes he cannot prove). However, what is telling about this book is that, given that the series editors presumably chose de Marneffe as the best writer to make the ethical case for prohibition, the scenario he supports is so very different from that which currently prevails. In particular, he is prepared to support prohibition of heroin, alcohol, cocaine and the amphetamines, but not cannabis, MDMA or the psychedelics. He also holds that penalties should be 'proportional and gradual' - i.e. nothing like as severe as is often the case today. Another refreshing observation is that he does not base his support for heroin prohibition on its supposed addictiveness (which he breaks down into seven different elements in a neat analysis of a term that's often used too vaguely), but solely on its likelihood to present adolescents with a loss of opportunity to make something of their lives, or to prevent parents from taking the best care of their children. He also admits that in order to outweigh the harms caused by prohibition on opium-producing regions Western governments would have to invest heavily in providing alternative economic opportunities, as well as increasing aid for eradication programmes (if such programmes can indeed be effective in the long term). Both writers have a good deal of sense to say in this book, and neither has much to say in favour of the status quo. It would have been nice if it were a bit longer, because some of Husak's arguments were better fleshed out in his earlier work, but as a convenient-sized introduction to the moral dimensions of the debate it achieves its purpose.

Drug War Crimes
Jeffery A Miron
Published 2004
ISBN: 0945999909

This short book is written from a libertarian perspective; as such, one of the most salient disadvantages of prohibition is the infringement of people's liberty to choose to use drugs; not something that a supporter of the status quo would put much weight on. The book examines the amount of money is currently spent enforcing prohibition, then looks at alcohol consumption in 1920s and 30s America as an illustration of how effective prohibition is at reducing the number of people who use a drug - in this case concluding that it does have some effect but that it is far more modest than modern drug prohibitionists tend to claim. Next comes an analysis of violent crime statistics throughout the 20th century, illustrating a positive correlation between the homicide rate and the amount of resources devoted to enforcement of prohibition (of either alcohol or other drugs). Having argued that prohibition is too costly in money and lives to justify the modest amount of reduction in drug use it achieves, the author then considers whether reducing drug use is a sensible policy goal for a government to seek to achieve in the first place. This is where Miron's libertarian credentials become clear. Under the assumption that most people are rational agents seeking to maximise their own welfare, people who choose to use a drug do so because they want to, and therefore any policy that seeks to prevent them goes against their interests, and the extent to which people are irrational in their choice of drugs is no greater than that associated with other goods which are not illegal. The conclusion is that preventing drug use is not generally a worthwhile policy goal, and even where it is, prohibition is a bad choice of way to achieve it. He reaches the same conclusion with several other possible policies under a legal regime - ie 'sin taxes', provision of treatment, bans on advertising, advocating a legal market no different from that involved in the sale of any other goods. This is bound to be too extreme a position for many who come to the legalization debate from a harm-reduction perspective to swallow, but the book is certainly a succinct statement of the logical libertarian position. That said, it's rather a breathless white-knuckle ride through a series of statistics and observations; the reader is whisked from starting point to conclusion with barely a moment devoted to any rhetoric to help the book's message sink in, which is probably something of an oversight when wring from such a controversial standpoint. Unlikely to win many converts, but the prohibition/violence ratio is well illustrated.

Drug War Facts
Douglas MVay
Published 2006
ASIN: B0011355C8

'Drug War Facts provides reliable information with applicable citations on important public health and criminal justice issues. Most charts, facts, and figures are from government sources, government sponsored sources, peer review journals, and occasionally newspapers.'<br> <em>Drug War Facts </em>

The Irish War on Drugs
Paul Mahony
Published 2008
ISBN: 0719079026

'This book provides the first comprehensive, critical analysis of the drugs problem in Ireland over the last thirty years with a particular focus on the role of drugs in crime and the role of prohibition in generating drug-related harms.' The Irish War on Drugs.

Drugs and Justice
M Battin, E Luna, A Lipman, P Gahlinger, D Rollins, J Roberts, T Booher
Published 2008
ISBN: 0195321014

'Drugs and Justice attacks a central problem in theory, policy and practice concerning drugs: the tendancy of health professionals, government, academics, medical scientists, social scientists, clinicians, and the public to compartmentalize thinking about "drugs".'

Mama Coca
Antonil
Published 1978
ISBN: 0861660005

'With all the notoriety currently associated with cocaine, it is prehaps surprising to note how little attention has been directed at the coca leaf itself - source of the illicit white powder - and particularly at the real, as opposed merely sensational, dimensions of the cocaine industry and the so-called 'war on drugs' in South America.'

Forces of Habit
David T Courtwright
Published 2002
ISBN:0674010035

This book is a history of what its author terms ‘the psychoactive revolution’, the set of circumstances by which the variety and availability of mind-altering chemicals increased vastly over the last several centuries, driven by profit, dependant on but also helping to fuel the expansion of ocean trading routes. The globalisation of distilled alcohol, tobacco and caffeine-bearing plants, the ‘big three’ as Courtwright puts it, as well as the ‘little three’ of opium, cannabis and coca, are considered in the early part of the book, along with the reasons for other drugs, such as kava, peyote and qat failing to become major global commodities. Sugar is also included as a sort of pseudo-drug, crucial in making spirits and in sweetening caffeine products. The book explores how all the major plant drugs have gone from limited medical use to popular consumption, how they have in many cases become a means of coping with the daily grind, and how technological progress in refinement and delivery systems (e.g. from beer to spirits, opium to heroin, chewing tobacco to cigarettes) raises the stakes in terms of potential for abuse. It also enumerates several different social forces that combined to push for prohibition of some drugs in the late nineteenth century, and the problems they faced in implementing it. There are a few interesting case studies, such as India’s and the Soviet Union’s attempts at alcohol prohibition, and James Buchanan Duke’s rise to the top of a vast cigarette-producing empire. Finally, Courtwright attempts to analyse the current global drug policy and its likely future direction. He rather unfairly characterises the legalization movement as a ‘form of reactionary libertarianism… [which] would reset the policy clock by more than a hundred years’, and contrasts it with the harm reduction movement which faces formidable opposition but has the powerful weapon of AIDS on its side. Nevertheless he concedes that humanity’s prospects of becoming drug free are slim.<br> This book provides a good overview of how we arrived at a global free market in drugs, but less detailed on how we went from there to worldwide prohibition - the latter being better dealt with by Julia Buxton's The Political Economy of Narcotics

The Khat Controversy: v.4: Stimulating the Debate on Drugs
David Anderson, Susan Beckerleg, Degol Hailu, Axel Klein
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1845202511

'The Khat contoversy presents the first broad, international study of khat - from its value as a crop to local farmers and national economies, to its pharmacology and effects, to its use in a wide range of social rituals - and outlines how an international policy on khat might be best constructed.' The Khat Controversy

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Always Almost do Better
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 2009
ISBN: 1846140390

'The remarkable data this book lays out and the measure it uses are like a spirit levelwhich we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies.' The Spirit Level

Innocent Bystanders: Developping Countries and the War on Drugs
Edited by Philip Keefer and Norman Loayza
Published 2010
ISBN: 0821380346

This volume systematically assesses the costs of drugs for developing countries. It brings together evidence on the efficacy and consequences of all aspects of current drug policies, including criminalization, eradication and interdiction.

Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die
Chip and Dan Heath
Published 2007
ISBN: 1400064287

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the Heath brothers reveal the anatomy of ideas that "stick" and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating "curiosity gaps."

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Daniel Okrent
Published 2010
ISBN: 0743277023

A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages.

Drugs in Afghanistan: Opium, Outlaws and Scorpion Tales
David McDonald
Published 2007
ISBN: 074532617X

Everyone knows that Afghanistan is the centre of the world's heroin trade. Afghanistan's poppy fields produce more heroin than all other countries combined. Most accounts of the drugs trade concentrate on the impact of trafficking on the West. Yet the truth is that drug addiction is also a problem within Afghanistan. This book explores the devastating impact that the drugs trade has had on the Afghan people.

The Emperor wears no clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana conspiracy
Jack Herer
Green Planet Company
ISBN: 1878125028

The classic history of cannabis prohibition.

The Leaf and the Law: The case for the legalisation
Francis Wilkinson
Centre for reform 2001 ( www.cfr.org.uk tel: 0207 222 5121)
ISBN 1 902622 20 0

Detailed analysis of current cannabis policy, how we got here and the options for reform, from the former Chief Constable of Gwent. Includes analysis of international conventions.

Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century
Mike Jay
Dedalus Press 2000
ISBN 1-873982-48-8

A brilliant history of the origins of modern prohibitionist drug policy. A fascinating account of drug culture before prohibition.

The Atmosphere of Heaven
Mike Jay
Published 2009
ISBN: 0300124392

"At the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, England, founded in the closing years of the eighteenth century, dramatic experiments with gases precipiated a revolution not only in scientific medicine but also in the modern mind. Propelled by the energy of maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, the Institution was both laboratory and hospital - the first example of a medical research institution. But when its researchers discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, their experiments devolved into a pioneering exploration of consciousness, with far-reaching and unforeseen effects. In this fast-paced and dramatic narrative, Mike Jay tells the story of Dr. Beddoes and the brilliant circle who surrounded him: Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar Society, who supported his experiments; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who were inspired by his ideas; James Watt, who designed and built his laboratory; Thomas Wedgwood, the visionary heir to the pottery dynasty, who funded it; and Beddoes' dazzling young chemistry assistant, Humphry Davy, who tested nitrous oxide to its limits with legendary results. The Atmosphere of Heaven is a riveting account of the chaotic rise and fall of the Instituion, and reveals for the first time its crucial influence - on modern drug culture, attitudes toward objective and subjective knowledge, the development of anaesthetic surgery, and the birth of the Romantic movement."

The Pursuit of Oblivion
Richard Davenport-Hines
Published 2001
ISBN: 0753813718

"Intoxication is neither unnatural nor deviant,"quotes Hines, prizewinning writer and regular TLS contributor, at the start of his compendious chronicle, The Pursuit of Oblivion . This pretty much sums up his objective take on drug consumption although he is far less impartial on the policies surrounding the trade and legislation of the drugs industry. This fascinating book examines the history of changing Western social attitudes to drugs, their place in our culture and what they reflect of it.

Drug Use and Social change
A distortion of history
Michael Shiner
Published by Palgrave 2009
ISBN: 0230222722

Despite the psychedelic exploding rainbows on the cover, this is piece of serious academic statistics-crunching. The main thrust of the book is that sociologists have of late come to the conclusion that over the course of the 1990s and early 21st century illicit drug use has become 'normalised' throughout the youthful population of the UK, in the sense that, while it may not be a majority activity, it is no longer confined to the fringes of society as it allegedly was during the 1960s and 70s. Shiner maintains that this is a false conclusion - that although there have been increases in the rates of drug use and social perception of drugs since the 60s, we are far from a situation where illicit drug use has become mainstream. After a brief run-through of the main sociology publications that have dealt with drug use, and the various 'deviancy theories' about what influences people to break the law, we are introduced to the scheme of drug classifications which the book uses. Rather than listing illicit drugs by legal classification or pharmacology, they are divided into three categories by patterns of use: a category containing only cannabis, as the most widely used illicit drug, and that which is most likely to be the only one someone has used; a category containing amphetamine, MDMA and various psychedelics (under the oddly misleading heading of 'hallucinants'), and a category containing cocaine, crack and heroin, though in fact the statistics relating to this category deal only with cocaine as the number of heroin or crack users who respond to surveys is so small. The majority of the book deals with statistics from the British Crime Survey and the Youth Lifestyles Survey, both of which (amongst other things) track their respondents' use of legal and illegal drugs over time against other indicators such as age, education, income, marriage etc. These survey responses are used to illustrate such points as the tendency for people to use a drug to be in proportion to its actual harmfulness, as opposed to its legal classification, and that, although many young people have used illicit drugs, for most it is a brief, tentative dabbling; regular, long term users are still very much a minority. A major factor in the rise of illicit drug use in post-industrial countries is identified as the 'night time economy' - the pubs and clubs that serve as a major source of entertainment and socialisation for young people who are now likely to enjoy an extended adolescence (the peak time for both licit and illicit drug use) before starting work and having children than previous generations. The surveys suggest that the same people who are likeliest to drink and smoke are also likeliest to use illicit drugs, as all of these tend to scale with one's levels of sensation-seeking. Drug use is also correlated with ethnicity and religious identification, with the most actively religious people being least likely to use drugs, and with members of ethnic minorities usually being under-represented in drug use statistics, contrary to what we are sometimes enouraged to believe. There is little in the way of policy recommendations, on the grounds that the case for more effective, harm-reducing regulation has already been made by many other writers; it is simply noted that the pursuit of punitive policies has failed to prevent the escalation of drug use, established criminological theories still have a useful role to play, and it is only by learning the lessons of the past that we can hope to avoid history repeating itself. This book is likely to appeal largely to an academic audience; that said, it's surprisingly readable for such a statistics-heavy work, and contains much that would surprise the wider public.

High Society
Ben Elton
Published 2002
ISBN: 0552150533

'Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) quite as awful as it's rendered in this terrifying kaleidoscope. We're taken into a world in which drug use holds total sway, and the whole world essentially functions as a single criminal network. From royalty and the upper crust to drug abusers and prostitutes--right across the social spectrum--we are (in Elton's unsparing universe) plunging into a criminal world.' Amazon

Diary of a drug fiend
Alister Crowley
Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN-10: 0877281467

It is a story of love and the couples reliance on drugs to survive, nothing else matters to them. It is not the subject matter that is important, it is Crowleys ability to explain and enlighten the reader to the glory of drugs and their hellish undertow. Crowley was a lifelong heroin addict and is more than qualified to explain. He tells us that when on a drug like heroin, one is perfectly capable of thought and able to aknowledge the world around them, however, the impression left is like flashes of lightning which illuminate the area, giving you a glimpse of what is around for the briefest of moments. The novel is very psychological with insight to the thoughts, and therefore the actions, of a drug addict. Not since Dostoyevsky have i read a more intiriguing set of emotions.