David Courtwright is recognized for his scholarly explorations into the history of drug use and drug policy, examining these phenomena across American and world contexts. His research also delves into the distinct challenges and historical narratives of frontier environments. In his latest work, he chronicles the turbulent politics and unexpected resolutions of the culture wars that shaped America in the decades following a pivotal election. Courtwright's writing offers a compelling blend of historical analysis and social commentary, illuminating complex societal shifts.
We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and opioid abuse. What can we do to resist temptations that insidiously and deliberately rewire our brains? Nothing, David Courtwright says, unless we understand the global enterprises whose limbic capitalism creates and caters to our bad habits.
Focusing on the transformation of aviation, the narrative explores how the initial excitement of flight gave way to a more structured and routine experience due to commercial and military pressures. It examines the rapid changes that occurred over a brief thirty-year period, highlighting the loss of the pioneering spirit as aviation became a normalized part of life. The book delves into the implications of this shift, providing insight into the evolution of air travel and its impact on society.
A global history of the acquisition of progressively more potent means of altering ordinary waking consciousness, this book is the first to provide the big picture of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet's psychoactive resources, from tea and kola to opiates and amphetamines.
Offering a social and biological account of why psychoactive goods proved so seductive, David Courtwright tracks the intersecting paths by which popular drugs entered the stream of global commerce. He shows how the efforts of merchants and colonial planters expanded world supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less affluent purchasers into the market, effectively democratizing drug consumption. He also shows how Europeans used alcohol as an inducement for native peoples to trade their furs, sell captives into slavery, and negotiate away their lands, and how monarchs taxed drugs to finance their wars and expanding empires. Forces of habit explains why such profitable exploitation has increasingly given way, over the last hundred years, to policies of restriction and prohibition--and how economic and cultural considerations have shaped those policies to determine which drugs are readily accessible, which strictly medicinal, and which forbidden altogether.