When Good Drugs Go Bad

We humans tend to like binaries. War and peace, good and evil, Leafs and Habs: they’re simple ways of seeing the world.

The problem of course is that life is rarely that simple. Wars are fought for peace; good people can do bad things; and other teams keep winning The Cup.

Nowhere is this quest for binaries and their fundamental inadequacy more obvious than when we talk about drugs. Heroin is bad; codeine is good. Cocaine is bad; Ritalin is good. Tobacco is bad; coffee is good. None of these binaries really works. Each substance has its place, depending on the social and political context, and can be simultaneously bad and good. Schroedinger’s cat had it easy.

Historians of drugs contemplate this binary problem often, while policy makers often stick with the “good or bad” dialectic. The two books under review here join a growing number of studies that explore the research and development of psychoactive pharmaceuticals and their relationship with...