Explores how the concepts 'risk' and 'benefit' can operate as analytic tools across the medicine/drug divide, allowing new narratives, clearer understanding, and bridging the gap between licit and illicit.
Scholars, like most people, tend to assume that 'pharmaceuticals' and 'illicit drugs' operate as distinct categories that should be analyzed separately from one another, as if drugs such as penicillin and cocaine are different types of objects that entail different scholarly questions, literatures, and communities of inquiry. Numerous experts have challenged this assumption by demonstrating that some 'medicines' have moved across categories as a result of criminalization; yet after decades of work, simply deconstructing the boundary is no longer fresh and compelling. It also risks continuing to center the licit/illicit divide instead of offering categories that could replace or supplement it.
Dealing with Drugs: New Histories of Risk and Benefit, takes the next step: by foregrounding the rich analytic concepts 'risk' and 'benefit', chapters in this volume tell new stories about a broad group of substances that we regularly put in our bodies. Taken together, these deeply researched and innovative essays cut across inherited categories and offer a new approach to the past. In doing so, they reshape our understanding of these powerful and often dangerous chemicals. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe and North America, this volume explores the utility of risk and benefit as concepts that can bridge the worlds of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs.
Introduction
Nils Kessel, Joseph Gabriel, David Herzberg
Part One: Systematizing Risk and Benefit
1. Such Immoral Pharmacy: Pharmacists, Physicians, and Addressing the
Harms and Benefits of Secret Remedies in Canada
Dan Malleck
2. Ehrlich's Dangerous Magic: Salvarsan and the Fantasy of
Pharmaceutical Innovation
Joseph Gabriel
3. A Non-Linear History of Side Effects: Risk Management,
Pharmaceutical Innovation, and WHO's Adverse Drug Reaction Monitoring,
1945-1980
Nils Kessel
Part Two: Narrating Risk and Benefit
4. What's in a Substance? LSD and the Impending Decline of the West
Beat Bächi
5. Hallucinations: 1960s Filmic Narratives of Subjective Lived
Psychedelic Experiences and their Legal/Illegal Status
Christian Bonah
6. Proscribing and Prescribing: Drug Education in 1980s Britain
Alex Mold
Part Three: Crises of Risk and Benefit
7. Depo-Provera and Medical Controversies in Britain 1970s-1980s
Caroline Rusterholz
8. Trivializing an Extra-ordinary Analgesic: The Example of Tramadol
in General Practice
Josephine Eberhart
9. Change for Continuity: Temporalities of Risk and Benefit in the
French Appetite Suppressant Scandal of Mediator® (1976-2009)
Solène Lellinger
Part Four: Resisting Systems of Risk and Benefit
10. Lying about Opioids? Rescuing Risk and Benefit from the Addiction
Paradigm
David Herzberg
11. "Why Must We Again Be the Guinea Pigs in this Genocidal
Mentality?": Toward a Historical Understanding of Black Popular Resistance to
Harm Reduction
Samuel Kelton Roberts
12. When Abstinence is Risk: Naloxone's Path to Over-the-Counter Status
Nancy D. Campbell
Part Five: Consumer Paradigms of Risk and Benefit
13. "A Healthy Reactive Tendency": Risks and Benefits of Cannabis and
User Agency in the 1930s
Bob Beach
14. When is an Opioid Not an Opioid? Loperamide, the Use of
Pharmacology and the Pharmacology of Use
Jeremy Greene and Avery Gulino
15. Containing a Gray Market Drug: The Rise and Regulation of the U.S.
Poppers Industry, 1969-1991
Joseph Jay Sosa
List of Contributors
Index
DAVID HERZBERG is Professor of History and Director of the interdisciplinary Drugs, Health, and Society MA Program at the University at Buffalo-SUNY. JOSEPH M. GABRIEL is Associate Professor of medical history at Florida State University. NILS KESSEL is Maître de conférences (Assoc. Prof.) of history of medicine, science and technology at Université de Strasbourg. JOSEPH M. GABRIEL is Associate Professor of medical history at Florida State University. DAVID HERZBERG is Professor of History and Director of the interdisciplinary Drugs, Health, and Society MA Program at the University at Buffalo-SUNY. NILS KESSEL is Maître de conférences (Assoc. Prof.) of history of medicine, science and technology at Université de Strasbourg.
