Forces of habit. Drugs and the making of the modern world

The book's first section describes the confluence of the world's principal psychoactive resources, concentrating on alcoholic and caffeinated beverages, tobacco, opiates, cannabis, coca, cocaine, and sugar - the last a key ingredient in many drug products. [...]
A number of regionally popular plant drugs - kava, betel, qat, peyote - failed to become commodities in both hemispheres in the way that wine or opium did. Global drug commerce, propelled by European overseas expansion, was highly selective. For reasons that ranged from limited shelf life to cultural biases against their effects, Europeans chose to ignore or suppress many novel psychoactive plants. The ones they found useful and acceptable they traded and cultivated throughout the world, with social and environmental consequences that are still very much in evidence.
The second section, on drugs and commerce, deals with psychoactive substances as medical and recreational products. Drugs typically began their careers as expensive and rarefied medicines, touted for a variety of human and animal ailments. Once their pleasurable and consciousness-altering properties became known, they escaped the therapeutic realm and entered that of popular consumption. As they did so, their political status changed. Wide-spread nonmedical use of spirits, tobacco, amphetamines, and other psychoactive substances occasioned controversy, alarm, and official intervention. All large-scale societies differentiated in some way between the medical use and the nonmedical abuse of drugs, and eventually they made this distinction the moral and legal foundation for the international drug control system. [...]
The third section, which concerns drugs and power, shows how psychoactive trade benefited mercantile and imperial elites in ways that went beyond ordinary commercial profits. These elites quickly discovered that they could use drugs to control manual laborers and exploit indigenes. [...] Early modern political elites found drugs to be dependable sources of revenue. [...] Drug taxation was the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial empires. Political elites do not ordinarily kill the geese that lay their golden eggs. Yet, during the last hundred years, they have selectively abandoned a policy of taxed, legal commerce for one of greater restriction and prohibition, achieved by domestic legislation and international treaties.
The final chapters explore the modernizing pressures, medical developments, and political maneuvers that prompted so many governments to reverse course, and why they did so for some drugs rather than others. The psychoactive counterrevolution was strikingly erratic. Its legacy is a world in which (for now) tobacco and liquor are easily and legally available, while drugs like cannabis or heroin are generally not. (Extracts of the publication)