Rendez-vous 99
Monday, May 14 , 2001
David is the author of Forces of Habit : Drugs and the Making of the Modern World.
He is Professor of History at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, USA
Thank you David for accepting our rendez-vous. May I ask you to introduce yourself?
Tenure has its uses. About ten years ago I decided that I might as well stick my neck out and write big, controversial, theme-driven books. This one, Forces of Habit, is a world history of psychoactive commerce over the past five centuries. It tells the story of the global psychoactive revolution-how people everywhere acquired progressively more potent means of altering their ordinary waking consciousness-and who profited from it.