The Age of Intoxication

The Age of Intoxication
Author: Benjamin Breen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812296621

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Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist. Focusing on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen examines the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. He then turns his attention to the British Empire, arguing that it owed much of its success in this period to its usurpation of the Portuguese drug networks. From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the cannabis that an East Indies merchant sold to the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in one of the earliest European coffeehouses, Breen shows how drugs have been entangled with science and empire from the very beginning. Featuring numerous illuminating anecdotes and a cast of characters that includes merchants, slaves, shamans, prophets, inquisitors, and alchemists, The Age of Intoxication rethinks a history of drugs and the early drug trade that has too often been framed as opposites—between medicinal and recreational, legal and illegal, good and evil. Breen argues that, in order to guide drug policy toward a fairer and more informed course, we first need to understand who and what set the global drug trade in motion.


The Age of Intoxication
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: Benjamin Breen
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-11-22 - Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

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Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures
The Age of Intoxication
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: Benjamin Breen
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-12-20 - Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

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Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures
Intoxication
Language: en
Pages: 390
Authors: Ronald K. Siegel
Categories: Nature
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-03-29 - Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

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Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel draws on 20 years of groundbreaking research to provide countless examples of the intoxication urge in humans and animals.
Reducing Underage Drinking
Language: en
Pages: 761
Authors: Institute of Medicine
Categories: Medical
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004-03-26 - Publisher: National Academies Press

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Alcohol use by young people is extremely dangerous - both to themselves and society at large. Underage alcohol use is associated with traffic fatalities, violen
Intoxication
Language: en
Pages: 398
Authors: Ronald K. Siegel
Categories: Health & Fitness
Type: BOOK - Published: 1990-08 - Publisher:

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