Risk and Substance Use (Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness)

This interdisciplinary collection examines the role that alcohol, tobacco and other drugs have played in framing certain groups and spaces as ‘dangerous’ and in influencing the nature of formal responses to the perceived threat.

Taking a historical and cross-national perspective, it explores how such groups and spaces are defined and bounded as well as the processes by which they come to be seen as ‘risky’. It discusses how issues of perceived danger highlight questions of control and the management of behaviours, people and environments, and it pays attention to the way in which sanctions and regulations have been implemented in a variety of often inconsistent ways that frequently impact differently on different sections of the population.

Bringing together a range of case studies drawn from different countries and across different periods of time, the chapters collected here illustrate issues of marginalisation, stigmatisation, human rights and social expectations. It is of interest to a diverse audience of historians, philosophers, human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and criminologists interested in substance use and misuse, deviance, risk and power among other topics.

Susanne MacGregor is Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University London and Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.

Betsy Thom is Professor of Health Policy and Co-Director of the Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at Middlesex University, UK.