Drugs and Our World PDF Download

Author: Gretchen Super
Publisher: Children's Press(CT)
ISBN: 9780516073712
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Author: Axel Klein
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861896239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Drug trafficking and consumption are among the most pressing global issues of our time and the approaches to alleviating them are myriad and complex. With Drugs and the World,Axel Klein takes a remarkably broad approach to the issue, exploring the importance of psychoactive substances to our health and culture. To be properly understood, drugs should not be simply examined from a negative point of view, Klein argues. From their centrality in religious rituals to their part in the growth of trade among nation-states, Klein reveals the pivotal role that drugs have played in the advancement of human society. Klein then investigates the modern policies that define certain substances as drugs; the link between drugs, addiction, and crime; and the legal strategies and policies around the world that have largely failed to control global drug trafficking. The book also draws upon studies from the Caribbean, West Africa and Eastern Europe to propose solutions that could reinforce the eroded power of state institutions, law enforcement, and the democratic process in addressing drug trafficking. A timely and in-depth analysis, Drugs and the World offers an expertly written examination that will be essential for all those concerned with the role of drugs in the modern world.

Author: David T. Courtwright
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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What drives the drug trade, and how has it come to be what it is today? A global history of the acquisition of progressively more potent means of altering ordinary waking consciousness, this book is the first to provide the big picture of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet’s psychoactive resources, from tea and kola to opiates and amphetamines.

Author: Mark A.R. Kleiman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
While there have always been norms and customs around the use of drugs, explicit public policies--regulations, taxes, and prohibitions--designed to control drug abuse are a more recent phenomenon. Those policies sometimes have terrible side-effects: most prominently the development of criminal enterprises dealing in forbidden (or untaxed) drugs and the use of the profits of drug-dealing to finance insurgency and terrorism. Neither a drug-free world nor a world of free drugs seems to be on offer, leaving citizens and officials to face the age-old problem: What are we going to do about drugs? In Drugs and Drug Policy, three noted authorities survey the subject with exceptional clarity, in this addition to the acclaimed series, What Everyone Needs to Know®. They begin, by defining "drugs," examining how they work in the brain, discussing the nature of addiction, and exploring the damage they do to users. The book moves on to policy, answering questions about legalization, the role of criminal prohibitions, and the relative legal tolerance for alcohol and tobacco. The authors then dissect the illicit trade, from street dealers to the flow of money to the effect of catching kingpins, and show the precise nature of the relationship between drugs and crime. They examine treatment, both its effectiveness and the role of public policy, and discuss the beneficial effects of some abusable substances. Finally they move outward to look at the role of drugs in our foreign policy, their relationship to terrorism, and the ugly politics that surround the issue. Crisp, clear, and comprehensive, this is a handy and up-to-date overview of one of the most pressing topics in today's world. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

Author: Donald Light
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231146922
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Few people realize that prescription drugs have become a leading cause of death, disease, and disability. Adverse reactions to widely used drugs, such as psychotropics and birth control pills, as well as biologicals, result in FDA warnings against adverse reactions. The Risks of Prescription Drugs describes how most drugs approved by the FDA are under-tested for adverse drug reactions, yet offer few new benefits. Drugs cause more than 2.2 million hospitalizations and 110,000 hospital-based deaths a year. Serious drug reactions at home or in nursing homes would significantly raise the total. Women, older people, and people with disabilities are least used in clinical trials and most affected. Health policy experts Donald Light, Howard Brody, Peter Conrad, Allan Horwitz, and Cheryl Stults describe how current regulations reward drug companies to expand clinical risks and create new diseases so millions of patients are exposed to unnecessary risks, especially women and the elderly. They reward developing marginally better drugs rather than discovering breakthrough, life-saving drugs. The Risks of Prescription Drugs tackles critical questions about the pharmaceutical industry and the privatization of risk. To what extent does the FDA protect the public from serious side effects and disasters? What is the effect of giving the private sector and markets a greater role and reducing public oversight? This volume considers whether current rules and incentives put patients' health at greater risk, the effect of the expansion of disease categories, the industry's justification of high U.S. prices, and the underlying shifts in the burden of risk borne by individuals in the world of pharmaceuticals. Chapters cover risks of statins for high cholesterol, SSRI drugs for depression and anxiety, and hormone replacement therapy for menopause. A final chapter outlines six changes to make drugs safer and more effective. Suitable for courses on health and aging, gender, disability, and minority studies, this book identifies the Risk Proliferation Syndrome that maximizes the number of people exposed to these risks. Additional Columbia / SSRC books on the privatization of risk and its implications for Americans: Bailouts: Public Money, Private ProfitEdited by Robert E. Wright Disaster and the Politics of InterventionEdited by Andrew Lakoff Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System-and How to Heal ItEdited by Jacob S. Hacker Laid Off, Laid Low: Political and Economic Consequences of Employment InsecurityEdited by Katherine S. Newman Pensions, Social Security, and the Privatization of RiskEdited by Mitchell A. Orenstein

Author: Niko Vorobyov
Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
ISBN: 9781529378030
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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'The police had already taken away the body, but the blood was still fresh on the sidewalk.' Look below the surface of every society, and you'll find somebody selling, buying, and taking drugs. It happens all around us. Even if we don't realise it. In this ground-breaking book, former drug-dealer Niko Vorobyov travels the world attempting to shine a light on the global drug trade. From cocaine farms in South America to the forests of Russia, he speaks to people making the machine work. He meets drug lords, cartel leaders, street dealers and government officials exposing the true scope of the drug industry. Dopeworld is an addictive and intoxicating trip deep into the world of drugs, tracing their emergence and our relationship with them. This is the story of the drug trade as you've never seen before.

Author: Matthew James Crawford
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986833
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe. Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.

Author: Edward Murguía
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739114551
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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The editors of this pivotal text, Edward Murguia, Melissa Tackett-Gibson, and Ann Lessem, elevate the debate about drug use and the Internet from a polemic discourse to a social scientific investigation. The essays confront issues related to the study of drug communication online, including the causal factors of abuse as discussed in online forums, the relationship between music and drug use in virtual communities, and the ways in which individuals assess the accuracy of online drug information. This book highlights the variety of ways to examine drug use as a social problem and presents several theoretical perspectives valuable to online research. Real Drugs in a Virtual World is an enlightening and thought-provoking read that will appeal to sociology students and those interested in virtual communities. Book jacket.

Author: Thomas Hager
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683355318
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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“The stories are skillfully told and entirely entertaining . . . An expert, mostly feel-good book about modern medicine” from the award-winning author (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be an oddball researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. Piece together these stories, as Thomas Hager does in this remarkable, century-spanning history, and you can trace the evolution of our culture and the practice of medicine. Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book. “[An] absorbing new book.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A] well-written and engaging chronicle.” —The Wall Street Journal “Lucidly informative and compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly “Entertaining [and] insightful.” —Booklist “Well-written, well-researched and fascinating to read Ten Drugs provides an insightful look at how drugs have shaped modern medical practices. Towards the end of the book Hager writes that he ‘came away surprised by some of the things he had learned.’ I had the very same reaction.” —Penny Le Couteur, coauthor of Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

Author: Dominic Milton Trott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780995593619
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This is the full colour coffee table edition of The Honest Drug Book, with dimensions of 8.5" x 11" (21.59 x 27.94 cm). Produced to do justice to the hundreds of photographs, it also allows a more leisurely perusal of the contents. The Honest Drug Book presents the hidden truth about a topic which touches the lives of almost everyone. It cuts through the blustering rhetoric of the war on drugs, and documents the facts about the subject in general, and about the individual drugs specifically. This is a journey through 140 psychoactives, both chemical and botanical, each of which was personally tested and used by the author. For every drug, it lists the fundamental and sometimes life-critical information, including the anticipated onset, the common threshold doses, and the expected period of efficacy. It also describes the subjective experience: what the drug was actually like at each stage of the duration. These 'trip reports' are vital, as they help to identify pitfalls and specific risks for each substance. Often, this is achieved in a humorous and anecdotal manner, which is occasionally accentuated by the fact that the author had to travel the world to undertake the experiments lawfully. In addition to these often rich and lengthy reports, the book is crammed with data and general information, inclusive of legal briefings, relative harm tables, addiction and overdose advice, detailed reference material, and even a drug dictionary. Of critical importance is the first section, as it introduces the basics of harm reduction, in the form of a 10 step procedure to help mitigate risk. The same section explains core safety issues, such as how to test and identify a drug, and how to properly establish a dose. The book itself is lavishly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, including of the drugs themselves. The images in the botanical section also encompass some of the indigenous settings encountered on the journey. The full gamut of psychoactive chemicals and botanicals is covered. The well known include: LSD, heroin, cannabis, mephedrone, kratom, cocaine, 2C-B, DMT, yopo, methamphetamine, salvia divinorum, ketamine, ayahuasca and MDMA. The lesser known include: betel nut, 4-ho-met, changa, TPA, 4F-MPH, ephenidine, ololiuqui, cebil seeds, mapacho, MNA, celastrus paniculatus, yohimbe, and MEAI. The scope also extends beyond the most common categories of hallucinogens, stimulants, depressants, cannabinoids and opioids. Included, for example, are nootropics (smart drugs) and oneirogenics (lucid and vivid dream herbs). Another dimension, which is covered largely in the final section, is that of politics and the war on drugs. This is confronted head-on, with a statement of intent which is crystal clear: "People are dying because of ignorance. They are dying because unremitting propaganda is denying them essential safety information. They are dying because legislators and the media are censoring the science, and are ruthlessly pushing an ideological agenda instead. They are dying because the first casualty of war is truth, and the war on drugs is no different. This book is a step to counter this harrowing and destructive situation." Emphasised and underpinned throughout is personal safety and risk mitigation. This is the first and last message, and guides the entire narrative. This is a book that won't only fascinate and inform: it will save lives.