Abstract Scientific and technological revolutions, including the isolation of alkaloids and the invention of machines, allowed the mass production and long-distance distribution of drugs from the early nineteenth century onwards. At the same time, drugs were found to keep industrial work processes going, by cutting hunger and fatigue and other conditions associated with the industrial lifestyle, including chronic pains, coughs, asthma, and depression. The seven chapters of the issue show the neglected relationship between drugs and the industrial situation, by combining different spatial scales: by zooming in on factories and other enclosed spaces, such as slave ships, colonial hospitals, laboratories, as well as the suburbs and garden plots that made up the everyday lives of drug-using working classes; and by zooming out to transnational business connections, resource-providing agricultural areas, and licit and illicit trade routes across national borders and continents.
Vitale et al. (Thu,) studied this question.