
Brain-Robbers
How Alcohol, Cocaine, Nicotine, and Opiates Have Changed Human History
- 368 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Brain-Robbers
How Alcohol, Cocaine, Nicotine, and Opiates Have Changed Human History
About this book
A psychiatrist examines how the world's four most important mind-altering substancesā alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opiatesāhave played a significant role throughout human history, and explains how these powerful drugs affect the brain and cause addiction. Alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opiates have spurred some of the greatest human pleasure and pain across time. Providing information that ranges as widely as from ancient Egypt to modern times, this book comprehensively addresses the good, the bad, and the very ugliest aspects of these substances, examining their history, their effects on the brain and body, and on civilization itself. Frances R. Frankenburg, MD, employs accessible, everyday language to explain the neurology of addiction and describe how these "brain-robbing" substances work to hijack the brain's pleasure systems to create powerful addictions. The author also provides perspective into the intertwined, inescapable, and often uneasy relationship between these substances and human culture, economics, and politicsāfor example, how individuals become physically or psychologically addicted to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opiates, while governments become financially "addicted" to the revenue, such as taxes, that can be collected from the sale and use of these substances.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Alcohol
- 2. Why We Need Water
- 3. Fermentation
- 4. Distillation
- 5. Alcohol and the Adams Family: The Scourge of Intemperance
- 6. Patent Medicines, Lydia Pinkham, and the Great American Fraud
- 7. Carry Nation: Hatchetation against Saloonacy
- 8. Cocaine
- 9. Sniffing Cocaine, Heroin, and Tobacco
- 10. William Stewart Halsted
- 11. Sigmund Freud and Cocaine
- 12. Nicotine
- 13. Tobacco and Illness: The Discovery
- 14. Women and Cigarettes
- 15. Opiates
- 16. Discovery of the Opiate Receptor
- 17. Pain and Anesthesia: The Role of Cocaine and Opiates
- 18. The Gladstones and Opium
- 19. Opium Smoking, the Opium Wars, and Emigration from China
- 20. The Brain
- 21. Addiction
- Glossary
- Index