The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics - Hardcover

Richard Davenport-Hines

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9780393051896: The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393051897 ISBN 13: 9780393051896

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2002

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A chronicle of drug abuse throughout the last 500 years traces how drugs transformed from untested medicines to illegal pleasure sources, describing people and events that shaped its history, famous users, the industry today, and related issues. 13,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Richard Davenport-Hines is the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He writes for The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, and The Independent. He lives in London.

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.

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