Seiler, Lars Winfried (Author)
University of South Carolina
Clements, Kendrick
Edition Details: Advisor: Clements, Kendrick
Physical Details: 296 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation traces the evolution of the ways in which Americans see drug use and addiction during the late nineteenth century, and establishes that American anti-drug reform ideas had parallels in China and Great Britain. In all three countries people began to perceive that there were specific material practices, namely the non-medical use of drugs, that could not be tolerated within their respective social worlds. In all three countries, reform minded citizens began to view recreational drug users as unproductive members of their society. Furthermore, reformers also began to define recreational drug use as a sign of disease which necessitated medical intervention. Finally, reformers began to view drug users as a group as enemies of national progress. This representation of recreational drug use as unproductive occurred within a rapidly industrializing economy where time-management skills were prized, where the gap between the rich and poor was growing, and where new class-identities and boundaries needed to be carefully defined. The perception of drug users as ``idle'' allowed members of the middle-class, for example, to talk about poverty as a matter of personal choice, rather than the by-product of capitalism, and it provided one way in which members of this middle-class could define the cultural boundaries of their own class identity. The parallel representation of drug use as a disease, and the establishment of links between drug use and other diseases or public health concerns, occurred within the context of a professionalizing medical community which no longer had place for quacks and peddlers. Finally, reformers linked drug use either directly or indirectly to ethnic and national outsiders, thus providing linkages between ideologies---nationalism, anti-drug, progress---that continue to exist today.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/04 (2004): 1511. UMI pub. no. 3130492.
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