When Good Drugs Go Bad: Opium, Medicine, and the Origins of Canada’s Drug Laws - Hardcover

Malleck, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774829192 ISBN 13: 9780774829199

Publisher: UBC Press, 2015

Synopsis

In the 1800s, opium and cocaine could be easily obtained to treat a range of ailments. Drug 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. Dan Malleck reveals how different forces converged in the early 1900s to influence lawmakers and set the course for the drug laws that exist today. As this book shows, 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 burgeoning pharmaceutical industry.

About this title

Review:

In Malleck’s brilliant account we can see how commercial interests both combined and competed with professionals and sellers to influence Canada’s drug laws ... As Canadians debate how marijuana should be designated―legal or illegal, medicine or recreational drug or both―Malleck provides a fascinating description of a similar journey taken by pain medications such as opium and cocaine at the beginning of the last century. His book provides a useful history to help us navigate today’s discussions about who should grow and sell safe and affordable marijuana.

Author: Colleen Fuller, a researcher and writer focused on health and pharmaceutical policy Source: Alberta Views

Malleck vividly depicts how sensationalism, misunderstanding, and the threat to the practise of medicine fuelled the new concept of addiction distinct from insanity and moral depravity. Malleck’s scouring of all available records provides a rich understanding of how the social and cultural factors surrounding opium in Canada set the stage for the moral debate over drug use ... His thorough analysis and ability to draw on a mountain of records to seamlessly tell the story provides the reader with a new found appreciation of the complex development of drug legislation in the modern era. Author: Joel Rudewicz Source: Active History

[A] close study of how doctors, pharmacists, bureaucrats, and policy-makers wrestled over the control of opiates in the decades leading to the first Opium Act of 1908 ... When Good Drugs Go Bad will be of interest to scholars exploring the history of drugs and their regulation while also adding to our understanding of state formation and professionalization during the nineteenth century. Its multi-regional focus on Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia serves to nationalize these issues. Malleck also addresses and critically challenges the association in British Columbia between anti-Chinese sentiments and opium that, he argues, has distorted events by insisting that the Opium Act was a reaction to racial tensions. Instead, by broadening the regional lens, Malleck shifts the story to a contest over professional authority.

Author: Erika Dyck Source: BC Studies

Malleck’s extensive use of primary sources convincingly establishes this context and describes the dominant origin story of Canada’s drug laws that has not frequently been told. Author: Noah Wernikowski Source: Saskatchewan Law Review

When Good Drugs Go Bad deepens our understanding of the connections that could be so easily drawn between the body, race, medicine and the nation in early twentieth century Canada. Author: Yvan Prkachin, Harvard University Source: Left History, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring-Summer 2016

Review:

When Good Drugs Go Bad will stand for a long time as an essential volume in every drug scholar’s library, not only for its encyclopedic detail and insightful analysis but for the sheer pleasure of reading Dan Malleck as he recounts the history of drug regulation in Canada. Author: Joseph Spillane, co-author of Federal Drug Control: The Evolution of Policy and Practice

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0774829192
• ISBN 13: 9780774829199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320