In this presentation Christine discusses innovative form of multi-modal discourse analysis (MMDA) to explore the ways in which various digital technologies and social media are integrated into young adults’ drinking cultures in Aotearoa New Zealand (Levine and Scollon, 2004). Drawing on material from a 3-year study on young adults’ alcohol consumption and social media use supported by the Marsden Fund, Christine explains how different groups of young adults
engage with the celebritising process in the context of the night-time economy.

In his introduction to the 2012 Government Alcohol Strategy, the Prime Minister wrote that he would introduce minimum unit pricing to ‘tackle the scourge of violence caused by binge drinking’. Three years earlier, he had rejected the same policy on the grounds that it would punish moderate drinkers for the excesses of an irresponsible minority. Now it appears
minimum pricing may be dropped following a Cabinet revolt and a campaign by prominent trade associations. James discusses the paper which explores how policy dilemmas such as this reflect fundamental difficulties in defining alcohol as a political ‘problem’ – particularly, in recent years, between framing alcohol as an issue of health harms and / or antisocial behaviour.

The UK Labour Party has found alcohol policy particularly difficult to fit into party ideology or programmes. By the end of the nineteenth century Labour was split three ways on the issue: prohibitionists and temperance enthusiasts who saw drink as a contributor to poverty and social distress; libertarians who saw temperance as a distraction from the class war; and enthusiasts for state control along lines of disinterested management. These divisions persisted until the 1930s. But the post-1945 period saw equally marked tensions: from debates about nationalisation of drink in the new towns, to issues on tied houses and monopoly, to policy on alcohol-related health issues. After 1997 ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair liberalisation of alcohol sales represented part of an attempt to rebrand Labour as a modern party, no longer beholden to the ‘nanny state’ or old class-based politics. This backfired and he party seems not to have any coherent approach to such issues as minimum pricing or alcohol as a health issue. Part of the difficulty lies in the flexibility of the framing of alcohol policy. Is it a leisure, a trading, a health or a law and order policy issue?

Alcohol marketing is a global industry, and in many countries alcoholic drinks are amongst the most heavily advertised products. Alcohol is promoted using various strategies including television, radio and print advertisements, point of sale promotions and product placement and portrayal of alcohol consumption in the broadcast and social media. An important
question, and matter of much debate, is the extent these promotional activities influence drinking behaviour of young people. Many studies have been published which inform this debate. The focus of this presentation is the findings from a systematic review updated with recently published studies. The aim of the review was to evaluate the relationship between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing and subsequent drinking behaviour in young people. A systematic review of cohort (longitudinal) studies was conducted according to published guidelines. To date 16 ongitudinal studies have reported on the association between a range of above and below the line advertising and/or marketing exposure strategies. The data suggest that exposure to alcohol promotion strategies at baseline is
predictive of both uptake of drinking and increased frequency of drinking in young people.

How do we understand the often contradictory and incoherent twists and turns of government alcohol policy? Drink presents the state with a dilemma. Its role is to encourage industry, but the products of the drinks industry are problematic, seeming to threaten the health and order of the economy as a whole. The state negotiates a constantly shifting path through this conundrum. The neoliberal world that has developed over the past 40 years has brought with it a particular kind of state, and with it has emerged a peculiar kind of alcohol strategy, drawn from the orthodoxies of ‘new’ public health, but strangely in conflict with it. Phil discusses the paper, which explores those conflicts in the light of recent alcohol policy in the UK.

Professor Paul Gootenberg answers questions after his presentation on ‘Controlling cocaine: Policy ‘blowback’ and the hemispheric- historical origins of the Mexican Drug War, 1900-2000′

This paper considers the phenomenon of methylated spirit consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. In the wake of claims about the increased prevalence of ‘meths’ consumption at this time, there emerged a range of moralised anxieties about deviant drinking, together with calls for the tighter regulation of meths sales to combat its use as an intoxicant. While the consumption of meths was not unknown in the era before World War One, the 1920s saw
growing concerns about the manufacture and consumption of ‘red biddy’, a highly potent mix of meths and cheap red wine or port. That meths consumption was thought to be increasing provoked numerous legislative and medico-moral investigations, at both local and national level. Much of the ensuing debate centred on questions of control, given that the existing licensing apparatus contained no regulatory provisions relating to the sale and consumption of
meths. With red biddy linked overwhelmingly to abject poverty and vagrancy, lobbying groups such as the Society for the Study of Inebriety focussed on the social and moral problems associated with meths drinking, together with the considerable medical dangers posed to the individual consumer. This paper casts fresh light on discourses about
consumption and deviance, and in moving beyond representations of drunkenness associated with more common types of alcohol, adds new depth to understandings of intoxication and its regulation in modern Britain.

The Inebriates Acts of 1879 and 1898 resulted in the introduction of institutional ‘solutions’ to the problems of drug and alcohol addiction in Britain. The concept of inebriety was deployed within voluntary and compulsory medical institutions in order to target and control the behaviour of individuals and social groups. This paper examines Scottish medical responses to the Inebriates Acts using case studies of the State Inebriate Reformatory at Perth, Invernith Lodge Retreat and the Chrichton Royal Asylum. These contrasting case studies reveal that institutional treatment reflected different medical and political interests rather than a specific inebriate reform agenda. In late Victorian and early Edwardian Scotland, the concept of inebriety was used to confine the mad, the bad and the drunk within institutions that provided
medical treatment and moral reform for deviant behaviour. This established a framework for medical and political intervention in substance use that has lasting implications for alcohol policy in present day Scotland.

The focus of many current policy initiatives is to minimise risk to children, constructing them as vulnerable beings to be safeguarded. However, the material Annmarie explores in the paper, produced for children over a period of a hundred years, not only foregrounds and focuses upon risk as a constant presence in everyday life, but in many cases actively encourages children to seek it out and intervene.

In the late 1990’s, a transition to less regulated direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing in the United States paralleled an intensification of the federal anti-drug effort through Congress’s call for a media campaign directly targeting youth and parents. With other popular culture narratives, this advertising has deeply informed American cultural norms about drug use in the twenty-first century. The resulting tension between a pro-pharmaceutical drug market and anti-illicit drug criminal justice system represents broader social conflicts about drugs and health, user agency, substance efficacy, controlled use, and addiction. Through contemporary drug narratives, this talk will address questions of individual agency within a culture of medicalisation of substance use. It will explore how an emphasis on individual health and medical supervision to regulate our bodies have become effective discourses of social power that we internalise and practice–what Michel Foucault theorised as “technologies of the self.” Questions related to what Nancy Campbell calls “problem-solving and problem creating drugs” will be explored. Is there a difference between taking a drug to avoid depression and taking a drug to feel good? What are the bases for relevant critical distinctions with regard to licit and illicit substance use and consciousness? And can they be found within a medical model that strongly shapes cultural norms regarding drugs and psychoactive substances, especially in terms of how we conceptualise, discuss, regulate, and research them?

In his influential textbooks on medical jurisprudence, Alfred Swaine Taylor observed that the opium habit, while generally a personal vice, was viewed by the emerging life insurance/assurance industry as a risky behaviour that might preclude an individual obtaining life insurance coverage. Taylor and others, such as the equally influential Robert Christison, debated in the pages of their books, the truth of this statement: whether opium habit limited life spans, and should be considered by the medical profession as something more than a personal problem, however iatrogenic it may be. When examining the medicalization of addiction, historians have tended to look to two sources for epistemological
roots: medical science and the law. Yet neither of these forms of knowledge is removed from other social, political and economic influences. Like many professionals establishing both their authority and their financial viability, physicians were drawn to the insurance industry as a source of investment to secure their financial future. They were also wooed by the industry, since a medical doctor’s certificate was useful, and eventually required, to guarantee that the
applicant for insurance was healthy enough that insuring them did not pose an undue risk to the company and its investors. By the end of the century, many insurance companies were hiring physicians to manage corporate divisions dedicated to assessing risk, physician groups were setting prices for the medical exam (paid for by the insurance company) and medical literature on a range of illnesses often included commentary on how that illness might affect
the patient’s ability to obtain insurance. This paper looks at how the symbiotic but often fraught relationship between physicians and insurance companies affected the idea of habit as a medical condition. It uses the example of Canadian medical literature, highly influenced by both British and American developments in medical science and medical professionalization, to explore the intricacies of this relationship and whether and how life insurance affected
medical ideas. It posits that historians need to pay attention to the influence of private industry which, even if not directly involved in the practice of medicine (such as the pharmaceutical industry), may have had considerable impact on the development of a disease theory of addiction.

Moderate drinking ceased to be the main goal of the British temperance movement by the 1850s, but the idea of moderation continued to animate discussions here and elsewhere. This was partly the result of ongoing medical research and argument, but it may also have reflected the way these ideas travelled to unfamiliar places – including life assurance offices. A number of different strategies for separating moderate from excessive drinkers emerged from the dialogue between medicine and life assurance, from the teetotal insurance office that ended up giving policies to moderate drinkers to the use of a fixed daily limit by US firms in the early twentieth century. While these ideas of moderation seem to have disappeared into the background for much of the twentieth century, re-emerging as the ‘J-shaped’ curve of today,
these early developments anticipate many of the questions surrounding uses of the ‘unit’ in Britain today: was moderate drinking safe, or simply safer? How did moderation ‘work’ for rival experts, forms of knowledge and types of evidence? And what happened when limits were set by complex networks of actors with different goals?

Virginia Berridge discusses our attitudes to alcohol, tobacco and drugs. How, she asks, are our views on these substances defined, and why do they change? Does popular culture or regulation create our attitudes, and how do those things interact?

Through many centuries there has been an abiding idea that alcohol and dissolution are natural bedfellows, and to give one’s self over to drink is in effect to temporarily cast off the everyday self. Most return to habitual modes of being the following day and restore themselves to personal and social narratives, to biography and autobiography. Van Gogh’s
painting from 1888 offers the view that we are beset by the possibility of eternal dissolution, that at nighttime we might lose our coherent selves for good. One persistent understanding of the power of alcohol is release from the burden of a coherent self. Alcohol is antibiography. Don Paterson’s poem ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’ (1993) similarly locates the dissolution of identity within a public house. Here, ‘drawn, like a moth, to the darkened back room’ he plays himself
at pool. The self that wins walks out of the pub, leaving behind the ‘losing opponent’ self sullenly / knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time’. The poem sets the scene for a collection entitled Nil Nil and prepares the reader to accept the fissiparous power of alcohol as prequel to a self that will become nothing. The paper will meditate on these and other
examples of writers and artists who yoke self, social space and alcohol together, using drink to dissolve biography.

Cinema and modern conceptions of drug addiction emerged nearly simultaneously in the late- 19th century. And since the turn of the twentieth century, the visual imaginary of drug addition has had a powerful effect on popular conceptions of drug addiction and public policy. My paper, which grows out of a book-length study of drug addiction in the media, will
focus on the complicated ways in which commercial imperatives, government intervention, industry self-censorship, and changing consumption habits have worked together to define drug addiction as specific set of cultural narratives that bear little resemblance to either changing scientific theories or some kind of tangible, sociological reality. Throughout the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the visual representation of drug addiction has been a constant bone of contention. The common concern that has driven much of this debate has been the fear that the mere appearance of drug consumption on film would lead youth down the path to addiction, that it would spark a curiosity that could not be extinguished. This paper will trace the debates over the visibility of addiction since the renewed “War on
Drugs” in the 1980s, focusing on the ways that visible narratives shaped public policy by obfuscating changes in drug use patterns and new scientific insights into addiction.

Recent research (Barton and Husk 2012) suggested that in the United Kingdom (UK) we are seeing a shift from the traditional ‘pub-club’ drinking pattern to a ‘home-pub-club’ pattern. In the latter model often excessive early evening drinking is occurring in the private sphere in the absence of external control, leading to problems when the drinkers enter the public sphere. Adrian discusses pre-loading as a key aspect in the drinking patterns of many of the Night Time Economy (NTE).

In August 1989 the New Zealand Parliament passed into law the Sale of Liquor Act (1989). Far reaching in its intent, the Act’s supporters claimed that it would modernise New Zealand’s approach to alcohol, and the licensing of its sale. Released from the accumulation of over a century of often eccentric and frankly bizarre regulation, New Zealanders were to be returned to the normal society of drinkers. Those opposed to the Act saw things differently. New Zealand was caught up in a dangerous and ill thought-out experiment. New Zealand was not like the rest of the world. To let New Zealanders loose in a society where alcohol was widely available was to invite moral and medical perdition. The paper Alan discusses, examines the complex of spatio-temporalities that played into the making of the 1989 Sale of Liquor Act, and the regime of licensing that it established. Tracing out the debates around the Act, and its subsequent implementation, one encounters populations of French drinkers caught in the slow but inevitable grip of liver cirrhosis, a substance ethanol which put together with a whole range of other materials like food or chairs and humans, may or may not combine to make a temporarily erratic, irrational, and thus dangerous entities, American drivers aggregated in tables of ‘drunk driver’ related deaths, supermarket liquor aisles tempting suburban house wives into spontaneous purchases, to name just a few examples. The presentation outlines the common sense spatializations that organised the debate around reforming liquor licensing in New Zealand, and how these common sense spatializations create quite fantastical landscapes.

Amy talks about her paper, which explores the evolution of bourbon whiskey into a niche elite product.

Between 1729 and 1751 Parliament passed a series of Acts raising the duty payable on cheap spirits in an attempt to control excessive gin consumption. The 1736 Act in particular sparked impassioned debate concerning alcoholic consumption. Health, crime and the financial importance of the Sugar Colonies were all issues raised. ‘Mother’s Ruin’ (gin), the drink of the urban poor and associated with crime, eventually declined in popularity. Punch, made with
the more expensive brandy, arrack and occasionally rum, was drunk by all classes and an ‘inspiration’ towards debate and conversation. Punch was also the subject of moral condemnation as seen in Hogarth’s ‘Modern Midnight Conversation’ (1732-33) which shows the drunken effects of consuming several bowls of punch. Using the evidence of debates, letters and recipes, I will show how the impact of moral judgement, stirred by the Gin Acts, led to the style of punch evolving during the eighteenth century, from the undiluted drink of the early 1700s, to the classic punch with a ratio of one measure of spirits to four or five measures of weak (water, milk or tea). In the early nineteenth century, gin resurfaced as a fashionable ingredient in punch.

Jacek Moskalewicz discusses a paper, which presents results of a study on the history of addiction carried out within the
framework of the ALICE RAP project with the participation of researchers from Austria, Italy, Poland and the UK. This paper is restricted to the Polish historical experience and its aim is to follow changing meanings of addiction in the Polish medical journals from 1860 until 1930.

The United Kingdom has witnessed a steady rise in per capita alcohol consumption; much of this has been fuelled by drinking away from licensed premises. The aim of the presentation is to analyse ways in which drinkers who drink away from licensed premises bring temporal considerations of risk into play, and determine/ describe any risks to be associated with drinking.

Panagiotis discusses the increase in drug usage in 1980s Athens after restoration of democracy in 1974 and Western Europe’s cultural influence on Greece.

Richard talks about the history of a drinking culture in tourist destinations, such as Brighton in the UK and Hanko in Finland. He compares two of them and discusses the paradox integral to the towns identity.

The paper Virginia discusses surveys the historiography of addiction and the current state of play in historical writing about addiction, primarily to alcohol and drugs, but also tobacco. It reports on the initial findings of a cross-national historical study of concepts being carried out as part of the FP7 ALICE RAP programme. Here cross-national comparison of concepts in the period 1860-1930 shows how many concepts applicable to habitual use of drink and drugs were emergent in these years. The research shows that there were significant differences between the concepts used in different European countries and among the professional and scientific interests which promoted them. The paper concludes that the Anglo American tradition of ‘addiction history’ may have been over dominant and that we need to be more aware of European differences.

Alex discusses a paper which explores how addiction terminology was used in medical publications in Britain between 1860 and 1930 by exploiting the possibilities of digitised resources. Specifically, it identified differences in the use of concepts over time and between sources.