Warner's history of the 18th century England's gin craze is written in a surprisingly accessible manner. The book spans about 50 years, from the appearance of cheap gin in London around 1710, through various attempts to restrict its consumption, to the final death throes of anti-gin legislation.

There's no question that gin was problematic. The English were not used to drinking distilled spirits, so they drank gin the way they drank beer: by the pint. When a grain surplus at the turn of the century gave distillers the opportunity to use better-quality grain, gin production began to soar, and the poor who were then crowding into London (largely as a result of the grain surplus which made it difficult to survive as a farm laborer) found gin selling to be a lucrative occupation, and gin drinking a pleasant pastime. By the mid-1740s, the average, per capita consumption of gin in London was 2.2 gallons a year. And since rich people weren't drinking any gin at all, the amount of gin consumed by the gin drinking poor was actually much higher.

Warner examines the legislative attempts to eliminate the gin problem. The case studies of the various laws and associated campaigns are fascinating in their resemblance to contemporary anti-drug crusades. Reformers emphasized the problems gin caused to the families, by leading women to abandon or neglect their children, and by causing an upsurge in the birth rates of gin-addicted babies. In the final chapter of the book, Warner makes the comparison to the anti-crack campaigns in the 1980s explicit -- in both cases, reformers saw the drug as the cause of a whole host of social problems among the poor, rather than seeing the problems of poverty as the cause of drug use.

Although I really enjoyed this book, I did write my dissertation about American alcohol prohibition -- so it's a topic that I have a lot of interest in to begin with, and my evaluation of the book is consquently biased. The book is accessible with the right level of detail (not too much, not too little), so I think it would prove interesting to anyone with an interest in drug control or social policy as it relates to women.