alcohol was a normal part of social life

obacco, introduced in the 16th century, became a mass consumption c

US, where addiction was often linked to medical prescription, in Britain, opium use was more widespread and not necessarily connected to medical practice.

focus was on the quality of the drug and the lack of standardization, which led to accidental overdoses.

infant deaths were due to opium poisoning.

opium use was a normal part of everyday life in 19th-century England.

hypodermic syringe

often blamed the individual for their condition rather than acknowledging the role of external factors.

"addiction" eventually became widely accepted as the medical diagnosis of habitual narcotic use as a threatening and modern disease.

he Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade was founded in 1874, focusing on the economic and moral aspects of the trade.

spread of opium smoking in England, particularly among the working class.

dens were seen as a threat to the English

opium use also reinforced the debt-labor system that bound them to exploitative merchants and criminal societies.

The anti-alcohol temperance movement,

medical concern about its consequences began to rise.

transatlantic adoption of the addiction concept by the First World War signaled the emergence of an Anglo-American conception of dangerous drugs

illicit consumption characterized by decadence and excess.

"anti-narcotic nationalism" in France.

n the late 1870s, attitudes towards psychotropic experimentation began to change with the introduction of new medical research on the dangers of addiction.

new drug legislation in 1916, criminalizing the consumption of drugs in public

deviant behaviors that would weaken and corrupt the French population and empire.

degeneration of France's population led to new medical research on the dangers of morphine addiction, alarming doctors and social reformers.

The use of use mythos to critique logos “became one of the central traditions of German philosophy since the nineteenth century.”

As Martha Stoddard Holmes suggests, nineteenth-century thinkers were among the first to see disability as a cause of individual suffering, which has the problematic consequence of minimizing “the importance of the material circumstances that surround all disabilities” while maximizing “the importance of personal agency while minimizing the need for social change” (Fictions of Affliction 28-9).