Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800-2000 (review)

Everyday consumers of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs routinely mix them, using one drug to enhance or counteract the effects of another. Yet historians have only recently begun to combine their analyses of drugs and alcohol. Acknowledging the arbitrary and contingent nature of the division between licit and illicit substances, historians nevertheless tend to specialize in one or the other. This delightful volume represents a careful admixture of skillfully edited, high-quality, and richly documented contributions to the analytic history of American experiences with alcohol and drugs. The scope of the collection is expansive. Unlike many conference-based volumes, this one succeeds in getting the authors to engage with each other in ways that build coherence and resonance. Despite the diversity of primary sources and a breathtaking variety of conceptual frameworks, the interlocking social, linguistic, and cultural logics at work here enable the whole to become something more than the sum of its parts. The introductory essay on the historiography of the field is invaluable for understanding the "important commonalities" shared among psychoactive substances (p. 22). The volume as a whole fights against our collective amnesia about the variety of institutions involved in the treatment of alcoholism and addiction prior to the mid-twentieth century, which ranged from mutual aid societies to clinics to congregate care facilities, such as the state "boozatorium" in Knoxville, Iowa, which is the subject of Sarah Tracy's essay. Jim Baumohl recounts California's little-known experiment with morphine maintenance clinics, a politically charged subject that has been understudied.

Historians of drug policy have tended to concentrate on federal policy, but this volume documents considerable variation among states in shaping the experiences of drug users and those who responded to them. Caroline Acker's contribution captures the recurrent relapses of an opiate-addicted family from central Pennsylvania, demonstrating how the changing demographics of addiction in the early twentieth century were embodied and lived out. Then, as now, the cultural geography of alcohol and illicit drug use varied. Many of the contributing authors foreshadow current debates in the field. Katherine Chavigny analyzes the social networks through which nineteenth-century evangelical temperance societies worked to reform drunkards, marking interesting continuities with the spiritual recovery movement and faith-based treatment today.

Unusual for an edited volume, the book can also be read as a coherent account of how various framings or "contending rhetorics" offered by interest groups supplant one another over time. Although the authors differ in what they take to be the locus of change and the social and economic forces that propel it, they contribute to a nascent comparative narrative. Listening attentively for rhetorical constructions and linguistic logics, Susan Speaker and William White discuss different modes by which rational or scientific discourse was suppressed, both in professional and reformist circles. The identity of the groups that imbue drugs with their meaning often determines the response to particular substances and populations.

Treating drugs sociologically—in essence listening to drugs for what they say about social order and cultural history—has been in the air since Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac hit the bestseller charts. Nicholas Weiss provides a witty rejoinder in "No One Listened to Imipramine," examining the pharmacological optimism of the 1950s and showing that the earliest antidepressants were associated with serious disease rather than with relief from the minor rigors of everyday life. The radical expansion of the boundaries of depression as a diagnostic category—and the exponential growth in prescriptions for antidepressant medications—could not have occurred without new kinds of credibility and cultural authority. Sociological concepts and explanatory frameworks are usefully put to historical work throughout the collection, but particularly in the chapters by Sarah Tracy and Ron Roizen on the changing definitions of the alcohol problem in the United States. The social and cultural logics by which gendered...