Taylor applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Ambivalent Conquests does a good job of portraying how this book tries to uncover the deep patterns in the past that set the stage for drug use today. In particular, it shows early modern Europeans wrestling with the soft drugs that were either new to them at the time or newly available in mass quantities – sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, distilled spirits like rum and gin, opium, and on this page, tobacco. Here readers will find Europeans trying to figure out why tobacco, like all the other new drugs, were so hard to quit using once started. Early modern Europeans thought they understood the medicinal properties of all these substances quite well – and all these drugs were used initially as medicines – through the old concepts of Galenic humoral medicine that dated back to ancient Greece. But nothing in their medical heritage helped them understand what we today would call “addiction” or “substance use disorder.” On this page, we find observers from England, France, and Spain wondering if something in the drugs themselves gave them power over their users, and they employed the language of sorcery and slavery to articulate this idea. Other attempts to understand addiction drew on their understanding of gluttony, an individual vice, or on problems that inhered in society as a whole, like luxury and debauchery. Probing the ways that Europeans first tried to grapple with the compulsive use of psychotropic drugs might help us see a way forward when the “brain disease” model of substance abuse is beginning to crumble today.Learn more about Ambivalent Pleasures at the Cornell University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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