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  • Article

Inhaling happiness and gasping for a high

The rapid, short-lived high we get from whippets, reefers and vapes can be accompanied by long-term health consequences. The search is on for safer ways to get stoned.

  • Article

Drugs in Victorian Britain

Many common remedies were taken throughout the 19th century, with more people than ever using them. What was the social and cultural context of this development?

  • Article

Guerrilla public health

From safe-use guides to needle exchange schemes, Harry Shapiro reflects on 40 years of drug harm reduction in the UK.

  • Article

Going viral in the online anti-vaccine wars

‘Anti-vaxxers’ are taking their message online using powerful images as well as words. But is the pro campaigners’ response any better?

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Images

  • Tobacco : Its history, varieties, culture, manufacture and commerce, with an account of its various modes of use, from its first discovery until now / [E R Billings].
  • A tobacco plant (Nicotiana tabacum), its flowers and seeds, bordered by six scenes illustrating its use by man. Coloured lithograph, c. 1840.
  • Panacea; or the universal medicine, being a discovery of the wonderfull vertues of tobacco taken in a pipe, with its operation and use both in physick and chyrurgery / By Dr. Everard, etc.
  • Panacea; or the universal medicine, being a discovery of the wonderfull vertues of tobacco taken in a pipe, with its operation and use both in physick and chyrurgery / By Dr. Everard, etc.
  • To thine own self be true : I promise by the help of GOD, for my own sake, and as an example to others, to abstain from the use of Tobacco in every form, until I am at least 21 years of age... / The Primitive Methodist Anti-Cigarette League.
  • Eight illustrations of the kiln used in baking clay tobacco pipes. Engraving by Mutlow, c. 1812, after J. Farey.
  • The first DNA fingerprint. The first three lanes contain DNA from a woman, her mother and her father respectively. Lanes 4 - 11 contain DNA from assorted other species including mouse, baboon, lemur, cow, grey seal and tobacco (last lane). The DNA probe used in this experiment detected tandomly repeated short stretches of DNA called minisatellites whose length varies between individuals.
  • Lobelia tupa L Campanulaceae Tabaco del Diablo [Devil's tobacco]. Distribution: Central Chile. Dried leaves are smoked as a hallucinogen by the Mapuchu Indians of Chile. It was also used as a respiratory stimulant. The genus was named after Matthias de L’Obel or Lobel, (1538–1616), Flemish botanist and physician to James I of England, author of the great herbal Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia (1576). Lobeline, a chemical from the plant has nicotine like actions and for a while lobeline was used to help people withdraw from smoking, but was found to be ineffective. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Tussilago farfara L. Asteraceae. Coltsfoot. Distribution: Europe, N. Africa, W & N Asia . Culpeper (1650) writes: ‘Tussilago. Coltsfoot. ... they are admirable good for coughs and consumptions of the lungs, shortness of breath etc. It is often used and with great success taken in a tobacco pipe, being cut and mixed with a little oil of Annis seeds.’ It is hepatotoxic genotoxic and carcinogenic due to the pyrrolizidine alkaloids that it contains. It should not be taken internally (Medicines Control Agency, 2002). Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Two men face one another, one looks bemused and the other smokes a pipe upside down. Wood-engraving, mid-19th century.
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