In T.C. Boyle's semi-historical novel "Water Music", he talks about the 'Gin plague' that came to London in the 18th century. Apperently (due to its low price) when Gin first came to England it wracked the economy and impovered a creat amount of the population.
The novel even mentions an incident where a law maker was attacked by an angry mob, because he tried to raise taxes on Gin. So how was the problem eventually delt with? And how come the country still dominated the political landscape in the coming centuries, unlike China for example which had similar problems with morphium?
I can certainly make a great book recommendation about this very topic, The Book of Gin: A Spirited World History from Alchemists' Stills and Colonial Outposts to Gin Palaces, Bathtub Gin, and Artisanal Cocktails by Richard Barnett. I just finished it and they spend quite a bit of the book discussing the problem gin became in 18th c. England due to its relative inexpense and abundance.
I've studied this (albeit very briefly) and one of the ways was through a campaign promoting beer over gin. Those William Hogarth 'Gin Street' picture we all know and love are a part of the campaign. What most people don't see is the accompanying picture 'Beer Street', which shows the civilised and robust beer drinkers outside their traditional English tavern.
Bruce Alexander is a psychologist rather than a historian, but in his book The Globalization of Addiction he claims that addiction epidemics are usually a reaction to displacement of people that disrupts traditional culture. The gin plague was a response to the rapid urbanization of Britain where people were uprooted from the rural towns that they had inhabited for generations and took industrial jobs in the cities. By the time the Gin Act of 1751 was passed, two generations had been born in the cities so they were no longer displaced but integrated into an urban culture, so they simply stopped drinking as much (three generations is often given as a rule of thumb to recover from transgenerational trauma).
