ABSTRACT
This chapter includes three topics - gender, drink and drugs - which can, each in its own right, make claims on social attention. It begins, therefore, by trying very briefly to understand how and why alcohol and drugs came to be seen as problems. Drink and drunkenness, the lawless western frontier, waves of new immigrants, and new jobs and values challenging established modes of difference and respect, all became associated. In these circumstances, decreased consumption and the conspicuous avoidance of alcohol offered important means of social distinction, means by which statements of moral and social superiority could be made or reasserted. The nineteenth-century Temperance Movement in the US undoubtedly helped to create an image of alcohol as a singularly powerful substance. In the late nineteenth century, the Temperance Movement, emanating from the US, influenced attitudes to substances other than alcohol.
