Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
The non-medical market in South Asia endured for almost a half century before finally disappearing during the Second World War. This paper explains this phenomenon through a comparison between India’s markets for intoxicants and those elsewhere in Asia in this period. The question at the heart of this paper is why did South Asians take to this most modern of pharmaceuticals at the time when those elsewhere on the continent did not? It was certainly available in places as diverse as China, the Philippines, Japan and Myanmar, but while consumers there did dabble with cocaine over the decades, a market of the size and longevity of that in India never developed anywhere else. The answer to that question seems to lie in the encounter between traditions of consuming intoxicants in South Asia and the modern psychoactive medicines arriving there in the first half of the twentieth-century.
Period
28 Jun 2024
Event title
Psychoactive Paradigm Shift? Historicizing Drug/Alcohol Policies and Practices: Alcohol and Drugs in History Society (ADHS) Bi-annual conference