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Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920. By Joseph E Spillane. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii, 214 pp. $39.95, IsBN 0-8018-6230-2.) Cocaine: Global Histories. Ed. by Paul Gootenberg. (New York: Routledge, 1999. xvi, 213 pp. Cloth, $90.00, ISBN 0-415-19247-1. Paper, $25.99, ISBN 0-415-22001-7.)
American attitudes toward illicit drugs seem to run through three phases: full panic model recovering from the last panic, and waiting for the next one to strike. Drug scares are multiply interesting, not just for what they reveal about the changing nature of American concerns (customarily about race, gender, and age) but for the complex impacts on the nations social policies. To take a recent example, although some fine work has been written on the crack cocaine scare of the early 1990s (notably by Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine in their 1997 edited collection, Crack in America), it might still be too early to assess the full significance of that shameful incident on matters as diverse as welfare law and medical practice, to say nothing of the immense expansion of police powers and penal systems. Regardless of whether a given substance poses an objective threat, understanding drug scares is vitally necessary for comprehending social policy.
Writing a history of cocaine use is by no means a new endeavor: from as far back as 1972, Edward Brecher's Licit and Illicit Drugs stands as a magnificent scholarly contribution to the study of that and other substances. In light of this, it is no mean feat to have made a substantial new contribution to the literature, which is what Joseph F. Spillane achieves in his innovative history of...