Dealing with Drugs New Histories of Risk and Benefit

Explores how the concepts 'risk' and 'benefit' can operate as analytic tools across the medicine/drug divide, allowing new narratives, clearer understanding, and bridging the gap between licit and illicit.

Scholars, like most people, tend to assume that 'pharmaceuticals' and 'illicit drugs' operate as distinct categories that should be analyzed separately from one another, as if drugs such as penicillin and cocaine are different types of objects that entail different scholarly questions, literatures, and communities of inquiry. Numerous experts have challenged this assumption by demonstrating that some 'medicines' have moved across categories as a result of criminalization; yet after decades of work, simply deconstructing the boundary is no longer fresh and compelling. It also risks continuing to center the licit/illicit divide instead of offering categories that could replace or supplement it.


Dealing with Drugs: New Histories of Risk and Benefit, takes the next step: by foregrounding the rich analytic concepts 'risk' and 'benefit', chapters in this volume tell new stories about a broad group of substances that we regularly put in our bodies. Taken together, these deeply researched and innovative essays cut across inherited categories and offer a new approach to the past. In doing so, they reshape our understanding of these powerful and often dangerous chemicals. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe and North America, this volume explores the utility of risk and benefit as concepts that can bridge the worlds of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs.

DAVID HERZBERG is Professor of History and Director of the interdisciplinary Drugs, Health, and Society MA Program at the University at Buffalo-SUNY.

JOSEPH M. GABRIEL is Associate Professor of medical history at Florida State University.

NILS KESSEL is Maître de conférences (Assoc. Prof.) of history of medicine, science and technology at Université de Strasbourg.