While drugs and alcohol have been used across millennia for a host of purposes, it remains that, in the scholarly literature at least, they are most often conceived of as a problem. In recent academic debate and media coverage, substances that alter an individual's physical or mental state have tended to be linked to particular, high profile social issues, such as sexual and other forms of violence, homelessness, unemployment, and mental health concerns. Intoxication and Society provides a broader account. Through a series of fourteen essays by well-known scholars in their respective fields, this edition seeks to provide a re-reading of the current problematization of psychoactive substance, presenting a multiplicity of views on intoxication to open up a space for alternative conceptions and responses.
This volume brings together the essays as a brief but rich multidisciplinary account of intoxicants since the 1600s. Each essay assumes its own particular approach, with some contributions drawing from historical and regulatory sources, while others engage in and with psychological and sociological studies. Each essay, though, explores the meaning of drugs and alcohol for individuals, cultures, and societies. Organised into five sections of two to three essays, the result is a structured account that traverses disciplinary boundaries, drawing from law, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, neuroscience, and social psychology. The sections serve as a framework; they highlight the progression of the text in critically analysing how intoxicants are understood and reshaped by society. The sections make the diverse set of offerings appear focused and clear, overcoming a common deficit of many multidisciplinary edited collections.
Centrally, the text seeks to provide an account of why some mind-altering substances are unregulated or freely available, while others are consumed despite of extensive legal regulation or prohibition. It provides evidence for the rise of the so-called ‘pharmaceutical society’, in which some drugs are not just available but their use is promoted. The book, therefore, adopts a broad and inclusive approach, detailing the intoxicated self and connecting this through to confounding disparities in legal responsibility. It seeks in many ways, then, to challenge the rhetoric that assumes personal responsibility both for licit and illicit consumption.
In the Introduction, the editors present the concept of expertise as shaping understandings of, and responses to, intoxicants. They argue that, as social conditions shape expertise itself, both the past and present must be accounted for in studying psychoactive substances in society. The purpose of the text is spelled out as initiating a multi-disciplinary conversation, as opposed to offering a definitive account, to challenge previously dominant discourses, in order to allow a more complex and full understanding of substance use and abuse within society.
The essays begin in the first section, entitled the “Formation of expertise”, to establish, descriptively, how intoxicants have been conceived of as the subject of expertise both now and in the past. This section sets the socio-historical context to modern discourses. The first three chapters cite examples of how medicine and law came to drive particular conceptions of psychoactive substances. Clemis, for example, in the first essay details the development of medical expertise surrounding intoxicants between 1660 and 1830. His historical account draws from works from Brooke to Trotter, along with remarks from doctors and clergymen during the period. In the second core contribution, Loughnan details the historical development of criminal law on intoxication over the nineteenth century focusing on how law has come to adopt lay knowledge in its formation of mental state requirements. The chapter explores how legal expertise around intoxication presents particular difficulties, exploring legal conceptions of responsibility and capacity drawn on the “expertise of non-experts”. Finally, in the third essay in this section, Berridge explores twentieth Century formation of health expertise around illicit drugs, alcohol and tobacco. He details how there has been a move from intoxicants being conceived of as a medical, mental health, and then public health problem. In exploring these transitions, Berridge explores the contributions of general medicine until the 1920s, psychiatry across the 1960s, and public health from the 1970s, to deriving the meaning of intoxicants and appropriate responses. The chapter concludes the section with the idea that since the 1990s new disciplines that “cross boundaries” have emerged that blend public health and psychiatry models, alongside the development of psycho-pharmacology and its new brain theories.
The collection then moves in the next section to explore “Spatial politics”. In this collection, a historical account of lay experiences of intoxicants is the focus. It begins with a contribution from Kneale and French who explore the interjections of the life insurance industry into the issue of intoxicants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter explores particularly how alcohol has long been connected to economic decisions, drawing together both medical and insurance knowledges, leading to an understanding of alcohol as a “risk”. In the next chapter, Brown explores the Licensing Act of 1552, using Southampton as an example to explore the relationship between local and national legislation for licensed premises. It uses this historic example to place regulation within a wider context of state formation and practice.
Intoxication and Society transitions in the third section to consider “Culture and practice”. It begins with an essay by Withington on Renaissance drinking in both general culture and print. He convincingly evidences a misdirected research focus and wrongful conclusions about poverty and excessive alcohol consumption. He draws on literary evidence to establish that during the Renaissance, excessive alcohol consumption was a feature also for the elite, beginning in the universities and the Inns of Court. The following chapter by Reinarman moves to establish that intoxicants can be culturally domesticated. Using comparative case studies, the chapter explores how various intoxicants are responded to differently in different cultures. The wide-ranging approach provides an interesting challenge to conventional problematization, however the limits of cultural and substance comparison are not detailed with significant, even sufficient, nuance. Finally, Bancroft explores the ‘public’ element of intoxication, exploring the interaction between policy and embodiment. The chapter again raises the core issues of responsibility and autonomy, considering how they are embodied in light of external influences and public interest.
The fourth section, “Intoxication and self”, attends to the concepts of human and non-human agency in the context of intoxication and addiction. Shrank begins the section with a literary analysis of sources from the Bible to Shakespeare, which construct intoxication as connected to bestial urges and metamorphoses. Next, Ersche's contributions served to explore neuroscience's contribution to understanding intoxicants. The chapter focuses in on the relationship between intoxicating substances and compulsive behaviour. The section rounded out by Weinberg, who explores addiction in terms of both scientific and sociological explanations. He unpacks how neither explanation fully helps us to understand the irresistible urge to use intoxicants, but contributes a view on the need for sociologists to account for science in their understandings of addiction.
The concept of responsibility is again contemplated in the final section on “Law, morality and science”. Bogg and Herring begin the section with an explicit and directed survey of the current law's focus on personal responsibility, and provides an overview of why the law has been hesitant to recognise addiction in the context of criminal conduct. The chapter focuses on alcohol, and uses both the conception of the disease and moral frameworks from Alcoholics Anonymous, to argue for a modification to our approach to afford greater respect to addicts, rather than the current focus on medicalization. Further, the chapter argues for a defence of diminished responsibility/capacity in those who are intoxicated when they commit a crime. The general agreement with the current framework spelled out by Bogg and Herring stands in stark contrast to the following chapter by Williams, who is unforgiving in her critique of the current criminal law on intoxication. Her observations will not be new to any student of criminal law. Her clear and directed unpacking of the failings of the current approach to intent and issues around voluntariness and consumption is a convincing and precise overview of the many issues we criminal law scholars face. Her evaluation of proposed reforms and the potential for a more coherent and consistent approach is persuasive. In the final chapter, Regan comes back to neuroscience and genetics, reminding the reader of the connections between the brain itself and addiction. While overlapping with Ersche's chapter in the previous part, the chapter finishes the volume on a heavily scientific note, which serves to emphasize the diversity on contributions. Certainly, the chapter does not provide a sense of resolution but raises many more questions for the reader about conventional understandings of intoxicants within society.
This is perhaps the core contribution of Intoxication and Society; the collection raises many more questions than it answers. The edition certainly encourages further exploration in its challenging of many conventional assumptions. Covering an immense number of subjects, the structure of the book makes such expansiveness still feel coherent and focused. Ambitious in its aim to provoke debate and interdisciplinary exchange, the book remains accessible by even the non-expert, but challenging even when one encounters his or her area of expertise. In sum, Intoxication and Society persuasively brings together a lively and stimulating set of essays by leading figures in the field, demonstrating the confused, irregular, confounding response of the law and modern society to intoxication. It provides a useful tool for those seeking to critically analyse the historical, social and regulatory contestations that surround substance use and abuse.
