Reviews in American History

If we ever needed more proof of the market power of potentially addictive substances and electronic diversions, the COVID-19 pandemic has surely provided it. Even as the pandemic pushed many economic sectors to Great Depression levels of contraction and unemployment, psychoactive commerce—the trade in products that boost moods and alter consciousness—saw substantial, and sometimes dramatic, upticks. Cannabis retail sales hit an all-time high in the U.S. and Canada (fueled in part, some speculated, by consumer stockpiling prior to the lockdowns in spring 2020). Retail and online sales of alcohol also skyrocketed—bested only by purchases of frozen food—though not quite enough to compensate for the lost revenue from bar and restaurant closures. Even the traditional cigarette made something of a comeback, prompting one tobacco executive to observe that the pandemic's limits on social gatherings provided smokers more opportunities to indulge their habit without fear of social disapproval.¹ That consumers can purchase such products from grocery stores and other retail outlets deemed too essential to shutter during a lockdown underscores the relatively privileged position of psychoactive commodities in the U.S. political economy. Let us not forget, too, the many mood-boosting, binge-enticing foods and pastimes that fall outside the regulatory purview of the Food and Drug Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Was it merely happenstance that manufacturers struggled to keep serotonin-enhancing carbs like flour [End Page 560] and pasta on grocery store shelves during the first months of the pandemic? Or that new subscriptions to Netflix soared by the millions?

These bright spots in the economy hint at the ways people have coped with the stresses of mass unemployment, social isolation, and the deep racial and class divides that the pandemic has laid bare. But they also remind us that psychoactive commerce does not always follow the same logics as other types of commerce. They invite us to think more deeply about the ways that the state, business, and consumers have collaborated to legitimize the place of psychoactive commodities in our daily lives and to spread their pleasures and perils around the globe. They provoke questions about the costs of psychoactive substances to public health and the body politic. Three groundbreaking new works—Nan Enstad's Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism, Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History, and David Courtwright's The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business—shed light on such questions and much, much more. Though each places psychoactive commodities at the center of their narrative—Enstad and Milov tackle smoking tobacco, while Courtwright addresses the full panoply of potentially addicting substances and entertainments—each engages with distinctive secondary literatures and deploys innovative methods to re-narrate the histories of capitalism (all three), the corporation (Enstad), and the associational state (Milov). Despite areas of topical overlap, these books privilege such different sets of voices and players that they carry the reader down strikingly different narrative paths.

Courtwright's The Age of Addiction begins with a deceptively simple question: why have addictive behaviors "become more conspicuous and varied over time" (p. 3)? To solve this intellectual puzzle, Courtwright examines regulated substances (drugs and alcohol) that have long commanded historians' attention as well as a host of unregulated (or lightly regulated) pleasures that manufacturers have engineered to be "addicti[ve] by design" (p. 10). Courtwright thus uses the same analytical frame to evaluate markets for alcohol and cigarettes alongside markets for store-bought foods that entice consumers with their seductive blend of fat, sugar, and salt; video games and electronic slot machines that continually beckon users to play just one...