When Good Drugs Go Bad ─ Opium, Medicine, and the Origins of Canada's Drug Laws

"Throughout the 1800s, opium and cocaine could be easily obtained to treat a range of ailments in Canada. Dependency, when it occurred, was considered a matter of personal vice. Near the end of the century, attitudes shifted and access to drugs became more restricted. How did this happen? In this intoxicating history, Dan Malleck examines the conditions that lead to Canada's current drug laws. Drawing on newspaper accounts, medical and pharmacy journals, professional association records, asylum records, physician case books, and pharmacy records, Malleck demonstrates how a number of social, economic, and cultural forces converged in the early 1900s to influence lawmakers and criminalize addiction. His research exposes how social concerns about drug addiction had less to do with the long pipe and shadowy den than with lobbying by medical professionals, concern about the morality and future of the nation, and a growing pharmaceutical industry."--

Dan Malleck is associate professor in the department of Health Sciences at Brock University. He is the author of Try To Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario and coeditor of Consuming Modernity: Gendered Behaviour and Consumerism Before the Baby Boom.