• Prescription medications are highly regulated to make sure they are as safe and effective as possible.

• The last decade has seen an emerging black market for prescription medications particularly from unscrupulous online pharmacies,

• Some of the products sold illegally by these pharmacies are poor quality counterfeits

• Tobacco is the largest killer of all the psychoactive drugs, but smoking rates are now falling.

• Electronic cigarettes are safer than tobacco smoking because they only contain nicotine and none of the other harmful chemicals found in tobacco.

• The aggressive marketing of electronic cigarettes to young people has rapidly driven up their use causing concern that they will result in a new generation addicted to nicotine.

• If you don’t smoke, don’t vape!

• Young people are drinking less, but tend to binge drink when they do drink

• Reduce the many risks of alcohol intoxication but pacing drinking, avoiding drinking, understanding alcohol ‘units’ and knowing how to put a friend in the recovery position.

• There is emerging research suggesting that some illegal psychoactive drugs, such as cannabis and some hallucinogens, may have therapeutic value, but further research is needed to understand their potential benefits.

Although rarely at the center of the most influential human historical narratives, the stories of human-plant interaction are nonetheless sporadically recorded in a variety of literary genres and other cultural media across nearly five centuries. This chapter aims to provide a contextual outline of our present human–plant culture as it developed in North America through the early nineteenth century, and to orient readers to the most frequently discussed texts, questions, and resources in the field. It introduces the early modern history of settler cash crops – cotton, sugar, and tobacco – and the longer history of changing agricultural practice during the early contact period. Early American literature in English – poetry, herbals, prose tracts, and instructional writing – was deeply engaged with the movement of indigenous and imported plant species as they flowed in and out of North America as rapidly as humans moved into the region from the rest of the globe.

• ◦ The Spanish raw tobacco market offers a story of two cartels that operated simultaneously. The first cartel operated on the seller side of the market. It was set up by the three agricultural unions that managed contract negotiations for the tobacco producers (“the producer representatives’ cartel”). The second cartel, on the buyer side, was formed by the purchasers of raw tobacco (“the processors cartel”).

• ◦ The case study tells a rich story of cartel formation. Government regulation sought to establish fair prices for tobacco producers through a system of production quotas. This led those producers to form a cartel to collectively negotiate with downstream tobacco processors. The processors formed their own cartel to counterbalance the one upstream. We then have regulation inducing one cartel which then inspires a second cartel.

• ◦ The processors’ cartel exemplifies some of the challenges in achieving effective collusion as well as the critical complementary role of monitoring and punishing mechanisms. The cartel was ineffective in its first two years in spite of a high level of market concentration and effective monitoring. Only when an internal compensation mechanism was put in place did firms comply with the collusive outcome.

This chapter explores several legal opinions (pl. fatāwa) from the minority theological and legal tradition known as Ibāḍism, as represented by the work of the modern Ibāḍī jurist Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ (d. 1401/1981). The Ibāḍiyya are usually regarded as the inheritors of the early Khārijite movement and are thus neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī. Important Ibāḍī communities are today found in Oman and in smaller numbers in North Africa (Jerba Island in Tunisia, the Jabal Nafūsa mountains of Libya and the M’zab valley in Algeria). Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ was the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Ibāḍī Rennaisance’ (al-Nahḍa al-Ibāḍiyya) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Ibāḍī community in M’zab sought to find a place for themselves in their Sunnī-dominated environment, leading to an upsurge of Ibāḍī legal and theological scholarship. The fatwās excerpted here discuss the lawfulness of television and radio, eating the meat of non-Muslims, Pepsi and Coca Cola, smoking and various drugs.

The causes of ill health and death are changing and, as we live longer, new health-preventable problems emerge, bringing new challenges. Improving health (physical, mental or both) and promoting general well-being remain major priorities.

Just as important, the difference in health status between rich and poor continues to grow. At a global level, the picture is even more complex. Although there is some evidence that life expectancy is beginning to plateau in developed countries such as the UK, the biggest potential to improve health still lies in addressing inequality between or within countries.

Therefore, this chapter:

• summarizes the models of health improvement that are prevalent today;

• introduces a combined conceptual model to describe the factors affecting health in modern times; and

• presents some case studies of interventions designed to improve health which offer important insight and learning.

Chapter 2 traces the historical development of mass tort litigation from the 1970s through the 1990s, documenting plaintiffs attorneys initial unsuccessful attempts in the 1990s to extend public nuisance theory to mass tort products and marketing litigation. During this initial foray into public nuisance theory, courts instead universally defaulted to a narrow view of nuisance grounded in property law. In cases involving tobacoo, asbestos, lead paint, and gun litigation courts declined to accept plaintiffs public nusiance claims, refusing invitations to expand a claim for public nuisance beyond its grounding in real property concepts. Courts contended that these mass tort harms sounded in causes of action for traditional products liability, not public nuisance, and that public nuisance law had never been applied to products cases. Courts noted the deleterious effects of accepting an expanded concept of public nuisance, which would allow any plaintiff to describe a harm from a lawful product as producing a public nuisance. Such a concept would invite unlimited liability for manufacturers of legal products.

A prominent but under-appreciated concern for individuals with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders using cannabis is the co-use of tobacco. Rates of cannabis and tobacco co-use are on the rise, which may reflect the changing legal landscape surrounding cannabis use. Currently, there are no approved medications for cannabis use disorders and behavioural treatments yield only modest abstinence rates that decline once treatment is discontinued. Converging evidence suggests that treatments for cannabis use disorder may be augmented among co-users if tobacco use is considered and addressed, highlighting the need for a better understanding of cannabis use in the context of tobacco. This chapter reviews the evidence for: (1) mechanisms facilitating the high rates of tobacco use among cannabis users, including those with psychosis; (2) the interactive effects of co-use on the brain, clinical outcomes, and physical health; and (3) the implications for treating cannabis and tobacco co-use in general, and in psychotic disorders in particular. Overall, we present evidence that attests to the public health significance of cannabis and tobacco co-use and the urgent need for the development of empirically informed treatments for these individuals, particularly for those with co-occurring psychosis.

The critical importance of tobacco to the Zimbabwean economy is reflected by the profoundly flattering epithets deployed over the years to describe the crop: ‘leaf of gold’, ‘most promising weed’, ‘crucible’, ‘lifeblood’, ‘golden lining’. Tobacco is situated at the nerve centre of the body politic, central to the country’s political economy. Zimbabwe is the largest producer of tobacco in Africa, and the fifth largest producer of flue-cured tobacco in the world after China, Brazil, India and the United States.

This chapter discusses the impact of the 1966 tobacco embargo and the war of liberation, 1972–1980 on tobacco farming landscapes in Southern Rhodesia. It integrates the political and economic aspects of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 1965 into ecological narratives towards understanding how the pressures of economic sanctions and war prompted new patterns of agrarian development and conservation practices in tobacco farms that had an impact on the environment and landscapes.

This chapter uses the lens of political ecology and environmental history to interrogate the use of pesticides in tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1945 to 1980, and their effects on the human body, the body politic and the natural environment. It traces the growth of pesticide use from the end of the Second World War, which saw a turning point in the global pesticides’ regime as crop chemicals such as DDT became widespread. It explores the problems that arose with the use of these pesticides and connects this narrative with the various global debates on ‘environmentalism’ that arose in the 1960s, and how this impacted on the evolution of legislation and policies to curtail pesticide use in tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia. The chapter constructs a contextual reading of Silent Spring in Southern Rhodesia and Africa.