Forces of Habit by David Courtwright, Harvard University Press,
$24.95/£16.95, ISBN 0674004582
STANDING in an airport duty-free shop, David Courtwright realised he was surrounded by attractively packed psychoactive drugs. It was this revelation that drove him to write his remarkable Forces of Habit. Considering skirmishes in the perennial warfare over cannabis, it could hardly be better timed.
Courtwright tackles every one of the so-called psychoactive drugs. Some might find his scope surprising. Drugs are divided roughly into two kinds, “hard” and “soft”. Heroin and cocaine are hard, cannabis and ecstasy soft. Most people recognise that alcohol and tobacco are…
