Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s War on Drugs makes a useful contribution to Drug War historiography. George Fisher argues several positions: first, substance use prohibitions were predicated on a moral imperative to be reasonable alongside a moral taboo on euphoric states; second, American culture has embraced what Fisher calls “alcohol monogamy” (xiii), by which he means a longstanding acceptance of alcohol as the sole acceptable intoxicant; and third, other historians are wrong to argue that the War on Drugs began as a racist project. The book focuses primarily on antidrug legislation in the United States, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This book may interest scholars who work on American religious history but Beware Euphoria should be approached as a work of legal scholarship rather than religious studies or theology. Fisher relies almost entirely on primary sources (newspapers, legislative documents, etc.) with less engagement in secondary scholarship. While religion scholars might find this elision challenging it makes a lot of sense given Fisher’s legal background. While there is always space for expert testimony in a courtroom, prosecutors’ cases often succeed based on the original evidence they present rather than on third parties’ interpretations. Beware Euphoria thus offers a rich cache of primary data from the earliest stages of the War on Drugs along with some compelling arguments about how antidrug activists argued against intoxicants.

The “moral roots” portion of the title addresses an important element in early antidrug agendas, which is that while today we might imagine that drug laws are self-evidently necessary – a logical response to community safety, addiction, or the dangers of overdosing – antidrug reformers’ primary motivations were more about morality than practicality. Beware Euphoria argues that “the Western, largely Christian moral tradition” (xvi) shaped American moral norms about how to use one’s mind properly. It tracks moral objections to drinking, sex, sin, unreason, and illicit pleasure largely through an Augustinian lens. Fisher reads Augustine as emphasizing that reason must hold “mastery over flesh” (27). Pleasure – especially if experienced during necessary activities – was not intrinsically bad. He similarly draws from Thomas Aquinas, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and philosophers such as Kant and Plato to explain American cultural attitudes toward temperance as a moral virtue: some pleasures can be acceptable if they do not efface reason.

Beware Euphoria places that premise in conversation with the history of anti-alcohol movements, particularly those aimed at prohibiting strong liquor. Fisher writes that “in the eyes of traditional Western moralists, the sin has always lain in the excess” (141) and explains that there is a “moral formula that rescued alcohol from prohibition” (149). The formula he offers is that pleasure must first have “the excuse of necessity” (in this case social drinking) and the other criterion is that moderation must be possible, which is “a hard formula to fit” (149). This is the reason for alcohol monogamy – established cultural norms treated moderate drinking as a social good yet no such tradition existed for opium, cocaine, or cannabis. If the United States prohibited those intoxicants it was because they could not meet both criteria.

Although Fisher theorizes “tradition” and “morality” a little differently than I might have, I believe his argument has merit. Beware Euphoria assembles its data to show that while alcohol has at times been banned those bans rarely seem to last very long. It also presents good evidence that arguments favoring legalized alcohol frequently centered on the concepts of moderation and drinking’s prosocial effects. Furthermore, his interpretation of periodicals and legal documents echoes the kinds of moral claims people made of substance use around the turn of the century. Antidrug activists did sometimes employ medical, economic, or other presumably neutral arguments in service of their cause, but their chief complaint was nearly always about intoxication as an immoral act in its own right.

Beware Euphoria also makes a compelling argument that legislators and print media framed antidrug efforts using two motifs: first, they claimed that prohibiting substance use would protect white people (especially youth), and second, they posited that intoxicants undermined morality. Fisher is right to suggest that “the lure of completeness” (401) drove some anti-drug efforts as well; as the pharmacopeia expanded, legislators raced to prohibit intoxicants they saw as kindred to what they had banned already. His extensive discussion of antidrug laws – particularly those prohibiting cannabis – supports this claim.

Although Fisher’s book does many things well, his argument that other historians are wrong to attribute the Drug War to racism is less convincing. Beware Euphoria has multiple gaps that undermine its indictment of other histories, including these: it almost completely ignores existing scholarship on race; it too easily trusts that surface explanations in antidrug discourse were the real motives; and it largely omits discussion of global antidrug concerns, which were steeped in colonialism and race science and which influenced American thought. To be fair, Fisher’s argument that these laws centered on the defense of whiteness is correct. It is also reasonable to ask why states like Vermont or Wyoming, which had limited Black and Hispanic populations, would ban cannabis or cocaine if it was solely about race. Yet his claim that “it’s not true racial animus gave rise to our earliest antidrug laws” (448) relies mainly on the fact that many media and laws used race-neutral language. And yes, many of these laws were about preserving whiteness, yet his position that there is “a tendency of groups to guard most closely the morals of their own kind and to disregard the morals of others” (230) conflicts with almost the entire history of colonialism.

Beware Euphoria makes a useful addition to histories of the Drug War, particularly in the attention it pays to moral normativity. Fisher’s careful attention to detail also means Beware Euphoria explains some individuals’ roles who do not always get close attention (William Boos, Henry Finger, etc.) It makes a provocative argument for why alcohol survived while other intoxicants were banned. Overall this is good work that will benefit scholars interested in the War on Drugs.