Frank J. Ivis’s research while affiliated with Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and other places

This report compares trends in the prevalence of the use of alcohol, cigarettes, cannabis, LSD and cocaine between American and Ontario adolescent students. Data from two repeated cross-sectional epidemiological surveys, one in the USA and the other in the province of Ontario, spanning the years 1975-1997were used. Overall, trends in alcohol, cigarette and cannabis use were similar in both studies: alcohol use has been steadily decreasing since the late 1970s, while both cigarette use and cannabis reached a peak in the late 1970s, decreased throughout the 1980s, and then began dramatic increases in 1992. In contrast, cocaine use has been consistently higher in the USA, especially during the 1980s, but LSD use has been noticeably higher in all time periods among Ontario students. The use of the more common drugs among students in both the USA and Ontario often follow consistent patterns, which suggests that changes in use are due to fundamental shifts in attitudes, rather than the policies or cultural values of a particular country. Less prevalent drugs (cocaine, LSD) show fewer similarities which may reflect deeper cultural differences.

In this paper we examine period or secular changes in the association between drug use and delinquency among Ontario adolescent students between 1983 and 1991. The results show that during this period drug use and drug-setting declined significantly, whereas reported non-drug-related delinquency increased. In addition to differing secular trends in rates of drug use and delinquent behaviour, the association between the two behaviours weakened. There was a steady decline in the correlations between drug use and delinquency across time, and the typological patterning of drug use and delinquency changed significantly.

The informer’s particular contribution was to pollute the public well, to poison social life in general, to destroy the very possibility of a community; for the informer operates on the principle of betrayal and a community survives on the principle of trust. (Navasky 1981) An intervention that rewards informers creates enormous stresses within the community that it targets, forcing each of its members to choose among three possible careers or alliances: solidarity with the larger community, collaboration with other informers, and membership in neither group (this last career is reserved for informers whowork on their own).

Social Science History 25.4 (2001) 563-587 An intervention that rewards informers creates enormous stresses within the community that it targets, forcing each of its members to choose among three possible careers or alliances: solidarity with the larger community, collaboration with other informers, and membership in neither group (this last career is reserved for informers who work on their own). From one community three are created, and for the moment each is weaker than its parent. Because informers’ operations are predatory, they are secretive; and because informers are subject to attack once they are exposed, both they and any alliances that they might form are under constant risk. These two criteria place societies of informers in a league with other secret societies, most notably, those compared and contrasted by Bonnie Erickson (1981). Within this structure, informers constitute a special and rarely studied group. They are recruited from the community on which they prey, only to be banished from it without being admitted into the society of their political masters. They are distinguished from their peers solely by the choices that they make, for when rewards are offered to betray individuals who are engaged in a newly proscribed activity, every member of the community must choose between solidarity and betrayal. Solidarity is a revocable choice, but betrayal is not. That is, once an individual becomes known as an informer, his or her reputation is beyond rehabilitation. Hence the creation of special prisons and prisons within prisons for informers, notorious sex offenders, and other inmates who must be segregated from the general prison population (Priestly 1980). Hence, too, the fate of an informer who “hang’d herself at St. Giles” in November of 1738, only to have “a Stake drove through her” upon being buried. Such, it was stated at the time, “is generally the Fate of such Wretches.” This study uses social network analysis in conjunction with qualitative analysis to compare and contrast two groups of informers in early Hanoverian London. The first operated in East London, in what was once Middlesex, and the second operated in Westminster. Both groups informed against individuals who sold gin and other distilled spirits without a license. They did so in order to collect a reward of �5 for each conviction under the so-called Gin Act of 1736. Our specific questions are these: To what extent did each group of informers enter into alliances among themselves? What form did these alliances take? What was the relationship between informers and local magistrates in the two communities? It should be emphasized from the very start that our data are sparse and incomplete. By implication, our results and conclusions are at best tentative: they shed only a partial light on a group whose activities were by their very nature based on deception and shrouded in secrecy. In part, this gap can be filled by supplementing our analysis with archival and printed data; at the very least, combining the two methods—social network analysis and qualitative analysis—provides a preliminary model for studying social structures that are organized around the twin principles of deception and betrayal. In this particular instance, the two methods also allow us to see how the responses of local magistrates helped determine the extent to which informers were able to operate and organize in their communities. The Gin Act of 1736 relied on informers for its enforcement, and in doing so it brought three groups of people into contact with each other. The first consisted of people who retailed distilled spirits without a license, the second of people who informed on them in order to collect a reward, and the third of people who tried and sometimes convicted unlucky retailers. The relations between the three groups were by no means constant; nor were they in all instances hostile, with the obvious exception of those between informers and their victims (Warner and...

This article examines how newspapers portrayed cheap distilled spirits, known as gin, and the people who drank it in eighteenth-century London. It shows that coverage did not coincide with movements in consumption; rather, coverage peaked with the passage of the Gin Act of 1736 and then declined and disappeared altogether just as consumption reached new heights in the early 1740s. Coverage then resumed in January 1751, by which time consumption was already in decline. Despite the fact that coverage and consumption did not move in tandem, there is little evidence to suggest that newspapers contributed to the making of a moral panic over gin and its supposed effects on the health, morals, and productivity of the working poor. In the 1730s, at least, newspapers were divided on the subject of gin; in the early 1750s, by contrast, the press was unanimous in its condemnation of gin, but, as in the 1730s, it generally avoided running sensational stories.

This study assessed potential ordering and wording effects of the alcohol use disorders identification test (AUDIT). In total, 688 respondents were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: Intact order/original wording (n=148), intact order/revised wording (n=183), split order/original wording (n=192), split order/revised wording (n=166). Changes to question order and wording had no discernable impact on the scores of the AUDIT. Our results suggest that alterations to the AUDIT can be made in order to integrate it within a larger survey without adversely affecting its measurement properties.

During the 1990s, rates of nonmedical drug use among adolescents escalated. We assessed data from 5 cycles of the Ontario Student Drug Use Survey for overall trends in the proportion of students reporting illegal drug use between 1991 and 1999. The survey is a repeated, cross-sectional, 2-stage cluster-design survey of students enrolled in grades 7, 9, 11 and 13. Outcome measures were prevalence of use of 17 drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, over the 12 months preceding the survey. The rates of drug use increased between 1993 and 1999. The 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the differences in proportions between 1997 and 1999 indicated significant increases in the overall use of 6 drugs: alcohol (95% CIdiff 6.1, 1.9-10.3), cannabis (95% CIdiff 46.3, 0.2-8.4), glue (95% CIdiff 2.3, 1.3-3.3), other solvents (95% CIdiff 5.0, 3.1-6.3), barbiturates (95% CIdiff 1.9, 0.4-3.4) and hallucinogens such as mescaline and psilocybin (95% CIdiff 3.5, 0.8-6.9). Fewer grade 7 students in 1999 than in earlier cohorts reported using alcohol or cigarettes by age 9. The public health implications of the findings are mixed. On the positive side, there is no evidence of increases in early onset of drug use. On the negative side, the overall proportion of students reporting illegal drug use has continued to rise.

Archival data about, and contemporary accounts of, the Gin Acts illustrate the careers of 198 informers known to have operated in Westminster between 1737 and 1741, providing an idea of their interrelationships. Visible links among the informers appear to have been generally weak. Most of the sample at hand operated as isolates on an opportunistic basis, informing only once. Their network, such as it was, seems to have functioned primarily as a clearinghouse, connecting informers with victims in neighborhoods where the informers were as yet unknown and thus less vulnerable to attack by the community.

Eighteenth-Century Life 24.2 (2000) 85-105 In October 1742, William Bird, keeper of a lockup in Westminster, stood accused of causing the death of one of his inmates, Phillis Wells. She had allegedly died as a result of dehydration and severe overcrowding, and her cries, along with those of the other women confined in the roundhouse, had gone unheeded. "Damn the Bitches," Bird is quoted as saying, "They want Gin." In his defense Bird claimed that there was a woman supplying the inmates "with Water through a Tobacco-Pipe," presumably from the outside; he also claimed to have "caught them drinking of Gin." In accusing the women of causing a commotion in order to obtain gin, Bird was appealing to an association that was already well-established in the minds of his contemporaries. Gin was commonly known as "the Ladies Delight," and took as its symbol "Madam Geneva," otherwise known as "Mother Gin." The latter was, in the words of one contemporary, "held in the highest Esteem by those of her own Sex, even of the first Quality, being admitted into their most private Apartments, ever at hand to administer Relief under the many Disappointments and Afflictions, so unfortunately incident to that tender Part of Creation." "Unfortunate ladies," we read in another source, "have had recourse to Drams for consolation, from time immemorial," while "widows tears" and the "Shreeks of desponding Matrons" are supposed to have greeted the passage of the Gin Act of 1736. The story of women and gin exists on two planes: for some it was an economic commodity to be sold with other goods, and for others it was a social commodity affording access to the shops and public houses where it was consumed. Gin was, if only for the generation that came of age between 1720 and 1750, central to the lives of working women in London; as such, materials from the time of the so-called "gin craze" or "gin epidemic" offer new insights into the extent to which gender mediated opportunities for employment and leisure in the capital. Of particular interest is the gap between women's role in the retail trade in distilled spirits and their role as consumers: while women tended to occupy the lowest rungs in the retail trade, as consumers they faced surprisingly few restrictions on their access to gin and the places where it was served. This scenario sets women in London apart from their peers in eighteenth-century Paris, where working-class taverns were predominantly male enclaves, and it probably also sets them apart from women elsewhere in early modern Europe. The same scenario raises the larger question of the extent to which men and women at the bottom of the social ladder played by the rules of their masters: to what extent did traditional barriers between the sexes survive in the brave new world that was early eighteenth-century London, and to what extent were they discarded and reinvented as men and women lived and worked in close proximity? Women have traditionally faced major obstacles in their access to alcohol and the social world with which it is associated. What is thus remarkable about the "gin craze" or "gin epidemic" is that this is one of the few periods in history in which men and women are found drinking side by side, and, in the process, inhabiting and constructing the same social world. They had inhabited very different worlds under the Tudors and first two Stuarts, at which time women's access to alcohol in all forms had come under sustained attack, as had their activities as alewives and brewsters; and they would again inhabit very different worlds as temperance came of age in the nineteenth century. With temperance, women would be cast as the victims of the men who drank liquor and the men who sold it, while the home, presided over by the long-suffering wife, would be cast as the sanctuary of sobriety, morally and physically isolated from the essentially masculine spheres of the workplace and public house. Temperance, however, introduced essentially ideological reasons for insulating women from alcohol and the places where it was served. Up until this point...

This study examines the interaction between legislation and popular culture, with a particular emphasis on the extent to which popular resistance undermined enforcement of the Gin Act of 1736. It is argued that popular resistance, while significant, had no effect on policy until members of the middle classes intervened in an attempt to restore the social relations that had existed before the Act took effect. It was only at this point that the Act became a dead letter. In this role members of the middle classes functioned as mediators between two cultures, one plebeian, the other patrician. As such, our findings suggest that the dialectic of plebeian culture and patrician culture, as variously articulated by E.P. Thompson, may be excessively stark, especially when applied to a setting as dense and heterogenous as early Hanoverian London. Our findings also suggest that working men and women in the capital worked and socialized side by side, sometimes as drinking companions, and sometimes as professional informers.