Full Description
A global history of intoxication, exploring the international spectrum of drug use in cultures across the world, from prehistory to the present day.
Every society is a high society. Every day, people drink coffee on European terraces, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets, take coca leaf on Andean mountainsides and smoke tobacco in every nation on earth. Mike Jay's global history of intoxication looks at the earliest archaeological evidence of drug use, the botanicals of the classical world, the mind-bending self-experiments of early scientists and today's 'war on drugs'.
In High Society Jay paints vivid portraits of the roles that drugs play as medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols and trade goods. He traces the understanding of intoxicants from prehistory to the present, and reveals how the international trade in substances such as tobacco, tea and opium shaped the modern world. First published to accompany the highly successful exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, and now featuring a new preface, this striking and lyrical book remains one of the most complete explorations of drug use in cultures across the world.
Contents
A Universal Impulse High Societies • The Evolution of Drugs • Animal Intoxication • Drugs and Shamanism • Drugs and Culture • The Culture of Kava • The Culture of Betel • Drug Prohibitions • Drug Subcultures • The Cultures of Ecstasy From Apothecary to Laboratory What Is a Drug? • Drugs in Antiquity • Renaissance Herbals • Witches and Flying Ointments • The Invention of Laudanum • Linnaeus and the Enlightenment • The First Synthetic Drugs • Opium and the Romantics • The Club des Haschischins • Freud and Cocaine • Addiction and Drug Control • Mescaline{,} LSD and Beyond • Drugs of the Future The Drugs Trade Drugs of the New World • The Psychoactive Revolution • Tobacco in China{,} Tea in Europe • The Opium Wars • The Anti-Opium campaign • Temperance and Prohibition • The 'War on Drugs' • Epilogue: The Decline of Tobacco
