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I am sometimes asked what attracted me to gin in the first place. It was not the beverage. I have not touched the stuff since I was five, at which time I took a good swig from a gin and tonic left unguarded by one of my parents. I ran yelping from the room, vowing to stick to beer and wine in future.

My next encounter with gin was equally unfortunate. I was a graduate student at Yale, where I worked as a bartender. I was not a very good bartender, and this was shown up when I concocted a screwdriver from gin and orange juice. The customer complained that there was gin in his drink; realizing my mistake, I blandly insisted that he was in the wrong, adding that perhaps the vodka was a little ‘off’. It was at this point that the customer became quite irate, and from this I concluded that gin, in addition to being a bad beverage, also leads to bad behaviour.

Years later, when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, I once again ran into gin, this time in the course of trying to learn more about the history of alcohol and other drugs. I probably had no business being at the Alcohol Research Group. I was a medievalist by training, and I had somehow managed to convince a bunch of epidemiolgists that they–and the US government–needed to know why medieval people drank so much. I was never much with Latin, the language of true medievalists, and so I naturally found myself drawn to texts written in English. But even sixteenth-century texts were hard going, and it was only a matter of time before I looked for something easier on the eyes, which in this case happened to be seventeenth-century sermons against drunkenness. From there it was a quick leap into the eighteenth century.

It was at this point that I became very curious about the gin craze of early eighteenth-century London. Two things struck me at once: not only had the episode been sadly neglected by historians, it also had all the markings of a modern drug scare. Set in what was then the largest city in the West, the gin craze featured an all-too-familiar cast of characters, complete with poor and poorly behaved addicts, failed mothers and their neglected infants, and hapless politicians in search of quick fixes to complex social problems.

By now I had also become quite adept at convincing unsuspecting people to fund my research. The first of these were at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where I was offered the unlikely position of research scientist, and the second were at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, where I was awarded a grant to go to London and study the gin craze in depth.

There I spent four very happy months, doubtless charming many people with lapses in grammar and gaffes in pronunciation. I divided my time between the Public Record Office, the London Metropolitan Archives, the Corporation of London Record Office, and the Surrey Record Office, entering records into databases that my very capable research associates then analyzed upon my return. Together, we produced six articles; these, very loosely, are the basis for Craze.

At its heart, Craze is a parable about drugs, about why some people take them and why others worry when they do. But I wanted to write the book with a light touch, on the assumption that people are much likelier to be persuaded when they are allowed to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions. In a way, I wanted to write about the gin craze–and about drugs in general–the way Jonathan Swift might have. That, of course, is sheer hubris, and I will doubtless have fallen short of the mark.

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