The history of drugs in France: a new overview

Since a few years the history of drugs has been a renewed research front in France. However the last published state of the art is almost thirty years old. This lack of an updated review of the literature hampers any entreprise of thematic, methodological and epistemological positioning within the field. It also narrows down the ability of historians to enlighten the public debate over psychoactive substances and addictions. This paper aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing a genealogy of the historical literature on drugs in France and by analyzing its structuring dimensions. Our literature survey identifies three major periods : the French historiography of drugs was born during the 1980s, a period during which it mainly focused on alcohol. At the turn of the 1990s, it encountered a phase of emulation and structuring which progressively integrated studies on narcotics, before falling back into a certain apathy in the mid-2010s. The literature review reveals that three main features characterize much of the published researches : a study framework focused on France in the modern era, preferentially dealing with licit substances and taking normative and/or a health approaches. In conclusion, we propose three avenues to explore in order to contribute to the renewal of the literature on the subject : the process of normalisation of illegal substances, the gender of drug industry players, and the colonial and decolonial issues involved.