How long does it take to read Forces of Habit?
David T. Courtwright
Forces of Habit by David T. Courtwright takes about 5 hours 5 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 5 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2001. 277 pages, about 76,175 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 28 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 5 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 10 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Offering a social and biological account of why psychoactive goods proved so seductive, David Courtwright tracks the intersecting paths by which popular drugs entered the stream of global commerce. He shows how the efforts of merchants and colonial planters expanded world supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less affluent purchasers into the market, effectively democratizing drug consumption. He also shows how Europeans used alcohol as an inducement for native peoples to trade their furs, sell captives into slavery, and negotiate away their lands, and how monarchs taxed drugs to finance their wars and expanding empires. Forces of habit explains why such profitable exploitation has increasingly given way, over the last hundred years, to policies of restriction and prohibition--and how economic and cultural considerations have shaped those policies to determine which drugs are readily accessible, which strictly medicinal, and which forbidden altogether.
Subjects: Prévention, Substance abuse, Psychotropic Drugs, Aspect économique, Psychotropes, Polytoxicomanie
