Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs; The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade

In Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), David Courtwright argued that a number of highly popular intoxicants (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, opium, coca/cocaine, and cannabis) in combination with an emerging and gradually accelerating global trade triggered a “psychoactive revolution” in the early modern era. “Psychoactive revolution” may well be the most influential single phrase ever put to paper in the historiography of drugs, elegantly summing up how six intoxicants had become so important to the modern world, and why states eventually declared “war” on half of them. Forces of Habit was also unusual for being a creditable drug history, footnotes and all, written for a popular audience by a historian who already had a pedigree for serious, fine-grained research on drugs. Although Courtwright was not the first drug scholar to recognize the significance of the early modern era (Schivelbusch preceded him), he certainly...