Word: courtwright
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...happy and partake, except of the forbidden fruit, has always been a hard message to swallow," writes David Courtwright in Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World, in an attempt to summarize a potentially fatal flaw of human nature. Courtwright examines every historical detail of the development of drugs: their discovery, whether accidental or man-made, and their evolution and use in society. He cleverly toys with our present-day notion of the term "drug," examining a range of products that includes the illegal substances such as cocaine, marijuana, opium, as well as certain legalized substances...
...standard classification of the main drugs under discussion soon emerges in the book, and Courtwright focuses his first chapters on what he calls the "Big Three" and the "Little Three." Contrary to intuition, the "Big Three" includes the legal and mass-produced and consumed alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. The "Little Three" conforms to the typical notion of drugs as illegal substances, produced on a much smaller scale. These include opium, cannabis and coca. Courtwright's market-centered classification of these drugs foreshadows the economic emphasis in his historical accounts of each drug. But what about the drugs that didn...
...Courtwright's writings even draw the Harvard social scene into the drug chronology. In tracking the evolution and boom of LSD, he cites Timothy Leary, a former professor of psychology at Harvard, as a prime example of the huge effect that drugs can have on an individual's life. Leary's statement, "LSD is more important than Harvard," accurately sums up his decision to drop out of academia and spend his life as a LSD groupie. And while Courtwright provides glimpses throughout Forces of Habit of the varying degrees of addictions that ultimately drove the drug trade and globalization...
Because the beginning of the book is very historically centered in the economics and politics of the drug trade itself, Courtwright's accounts don't generally pull on one's heartstrings. Avoiding a simplistic negative focus on the reality of drug use, Courtwright counterbalances these facts with an examination of why it all happened the way it did: the desire and demand for the drugs on one side and the economics and large profits on the other. However, Courtwright sneaks in some amazing insights between his pages of history, namely a direct comparison between the drug trade and the atomic...
Forces of Habit affords the reader an in-depth understanding of the history of drugs in society, not tailored to a specific platform or program of reform. In fact, Courtwright mentions little about the future of drugs and the drug trade in his accounts, and when he does veer towards moral judgments, he states them simply and concisely. But if you're looking for a serious emotional scrutiny of present day drug issues, you'll have to go see the movie Traffic. Courtwright sticks to his historical format until the very end, taking only the final few paragraphs...