Table Of ContentIntoxication and Society
Intoxication and Society
Problematic Pleasures of Drugs and Alcohol
Edited by
Jonathan Herring
Professor of Law, University of Oxford
Ciaran Regan
Professor of Neuropharmacology, University College Dublin
Darin Weinberg
Reader in Sociology, University of Cambridge
Phil Withington
Professor of Early Modern History, University of Sheffield
Editorial selection and matter © Jonathan Herring, Ciaran Regan, Darin Weinberg
and Phil Withington 2013
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Contents
Notes on Contributors ix
1 Starting the Conversation 1
Jonathan Herring, Ciaran Regan, Darin Weinberg
and Phil Withington
Introduction 1
Some key themes 3
Intoxication and history 5
Section 1 The Formation of ‘Expertise’
2 Medical Expertise and the Understandings of Intoxication
in Britain, 1660 to 1830 33
David Clemis
3 The Expertise of Non-Experts: Knowledges of Intoxication
in Criminal Law 52
Arlie Loughnan
Introduction 52
The formalization of the law on intoxicated offending over
the nineteenth century 54
The development of expert and non-expert knowledges
of intoxication 58
Approaching lay knowledge of intoxication in criminal law 63
Conclusion 66
4 Intoxicants: The Formation of Health Expertise in the
Twentieth Century 69
Virginia Berridge
Introduction 69
1870s–1920s: the emergence of medical expertise
for drugs and alcohol 70
1960s: psychiatry ascendant for drugs and alcohol 73
1950s and 1960s: tobacco and public health epidemiology 75
1970s and 1980s: the public health model for drugs and alcohol 77
Expert committees and policy communities 78
v
vi Contents
1990s onward: new disciplines and crossing boundaries 79
Conclusion 81
Section 2 Spatial Politics
5 ‘The Relations of Inebriety to Insurance’: Geographies of
Medicine, Insurance and Alcohol in Britain, 1841–1911 87
James Kneale and Shaun French
Introduction 87
The UKT&GPI 90
Governmentality, risk and uncertainty in an era of
classic liberalism 93
Assessing intemperance 96
Rating and defining intemperance 98
Geographies of the Temperance and General Provident 100
Conclusions 104
6 Alehouse Licensing and State Formation
in Early Modern England 110
James Brown
Introduction 110
Geographical, institutional and administrative contexts 112
Licensing regimes 117
Strategies and motivations of the protagonists 123
The role of alehouses in state formation 126
Section 3 Culture and Practice
7 Renaissance Drinking Cultures and Popular Print 135
Phil Withington
8 On the Cultural Domestication of Intoxicants 153
Craig Reinarman
Introduction 153
Tracing a lineage 154
Comparing cases 157
Provisional propositions 165
9 Nudge Policy, Embodiment and Intoxication Problems 172
Angus Bancroft
Embodiment and liberal subjectivity 172
Contents vii
Neuronal public policy 174
How is intoxication embodied? 175
Embodied drug use 178
Key problem processes 179
Recovery and plasticity 181
Practices of intoxication 183
Conclusion 185
Section 4 Intoxication and the Self
10 Beastly Metamorphoses: Losing Control in Early
Modern Literary Culture 193
Cathy Shrank
11 Intoxicants and Compulsive Behaviour:
A Neuroscientific Perspective 210
Karen D Ersche
Introduction 210
The complex relationship between reward
and drugs of abuse 214
Neuropathology of drug addiction 220
Vulnerability markers for addiction 224
12 Praxis, Interaction and the Loss of Self-Control 232
Darin Weinberg
Introduction 232
Biomedical theories of addiction and their limitations 233
Sociological theories of addiction and their limitations 235
Toward a sociology of the loss of self-control 237
Conclusion 242
Section 5 Law, Morality and Science
13 Addiction and Responsibility 247
Alan Bogg and Jonathan Herring
Introduction 247
Criminal law and addiction 248
John Gardner on excuses 249
Conceptions of addiction 250
Developing a new response 252
Developing a legal response 256
viii Contents
Wider social responsibility 263
Conclusion 263
14 The Current Law of Intoxication: Rules and Problems 267
Rebecca Williams
Introduction 267
The specific–basic distinction 268
The basic intent rules only work for reckless result crimes 270
Voluntary intoxication, contrary to the views of Lord Elwyn-
Jones and the Law Commission, does not in fact necessarily
equate with the mens rea normally required for offences
of basic intent 271
The intoxication rules for basic intent crimes effectively
criminalize the intoxication itself to some extent 273
The rules on therapeutic intoxicants are not wholly clear, and
are based on the same problematic theory underlying the
rules of voluntary, recreational intoxication 274
Arguably, even where the defendant is permitted to use
evidence of intoxication to deny mens rea in principle,
the law may be too harsh 278
Conclusion 280
15 The Addicted Self: A Neuroscientific Perspective 283
Ciaran Regan
Introduction 283
Behavioural plasticity 285
Addiction and the dysregulation of bodily homeostasis 288
Reward pathways 289
Susceptibility of individuals to drug addiction 291
Cellular and molecular mechanisms of drug addiction 292
Epigenesis and the mechanisms of addiction 295
Index 301
Notes on Contributors
Angus Bancroft works in sociology at the University of Edinburgh. His
research has focused on a range of issues including deviance and pathology,
drug problems and families, and the culture of public problems. He has
written Drugs Intoxication and Society (2009 Cambridge: Polity Press) and,
with Ralph Fevre, Dead White Men and Other Important People: Sociology’s Big
Ideas (2011 Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Virginia Berridge is director of the Centre for History in Public Health at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. She
has published widely on substance use policy and history – alcohol, illicit
drugs and smoking – as well as on public health policy. She is a partner in
the History and Policy initiative.
Alan Bogg, University of Oxford, received his undergraduate and graduate
education in Oxford, being awarded his BA in law (first class) in 1997.
Thereafter, he was awarded the degrees of BCL (first class) and DPhil.
Following a period as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, Alan
returned to Oxford in 2003 to take up his fellowship at Hertford College.
Alan’s research focuses predominantly on theoretical issues in domestic,
European and international labour law and criminal law. His book, The
Democratic Aspects of Trade Union Recognition (2009 Oxford: Hart Publishing)
was awarded the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks’ Prize for Outstanding
Legal Scholarship in 2010.
James Brown is based in the Faculty of History, University of Oxford, where
he manages the research project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual
Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters’. He is inter-
ested in the social and cultural history of seventeenth-century England. His
doctoral thesis, a case study of public houses in Southampton, was confirmed
at the University of Warwick in 2008. He has published on public houses as
sites of surveillance and on the manufacture of beer in urban communities,
and has co-edited a collection of essays on the history of identity documen-
tation. He is currently co-editing a volume on the intellectual geography of
early modern Europe.
David Clemis is associate professor of early modern history and former chair
of the Department of General Education at Mount Royal University, Calgary,
Canada. His research focuses on understandings of alcohol intoxication and
conceptions of craving, habit and addiction in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. This work explores the writings of medical, legal and moral
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