Demons by Virginia Berridge, review As Berridge shows, state regulation can enforce little without general public acceptance. Gorbachev's anti-alcohol laws in the Eighties were a failure, as the culture at large rejected the need for them. And governments could begin to contemplate smoking bans only in the Nineties, once the majority of the population had already accepted the hazards. Berridge examines three substance categories. In the early 19th century, all three were available and culturally acceptable; by the beginning of the 20th century, alcohol and tobacco remained legal; opium and its derivatives - pills, lozenges, powders, plasters, liniments, tinctures, syrups and patent medicines, not to mention less-salubrious-sounding opium enemas - were not. In the 18th century, alcohol use had been routine: the upper-middle-class Gentleman's Magazine gave 87 terms for "drunk." In the 19th century, however, groups from many backgrounds found common focus in, first, moderating the amount of drink consumed, and next, advocating prohibition. Working-class improvement groups were joined by middle-class evangelicals and newly professionalized medical and pharmacological institutions, whose drive to bolster their credentials was predicated on controlling access. Increased governmental oversight of public health moved control further into legislative territory, and it also became a vote-winner - Lloyd George found popular success in castigating the great brewing industries. Money has always been key. In Victorian Britain, almost half of all government revenue came from alcohol, and there were few curbs on availability. In the 20th century, as taxation revenues from drink declined, curbs increased: if it didn't imperil income, the state was happy to control the source more tightly, with the First World War marking the shift to Prohibition in the USA, and limited opening hours in the UK. Berridge is excellent on these developments, and she is even better on the attitudes that lay behind them. Is the use of one of these substances socially acceptable, a personal weakness, a sin, an employment issue, a result of disease, or merely lack of willpower? Who frames the question influences the answer. And one of the major elements in shaping the answer, Berridge shows, is fear, whether purposefully inculcated, or growing out of some other societal change. If a substance is linked to a minority group, regulation often follows swiftly. In the late 19th century, the popular narrative of opium use became focused on Chinese "dens," despite the fact that in 1881 fewer than 1,000 Chinese lived in Britain, while millions of native-born Britons daily consumed opium-laced patent medicines without a qualm. A more common target has been economically independent women, whether it was 19th-century stories of women doping their children with gin or opium so they could go to work to feed them, or, in our day, the tabloid trope of the chain-smoking working-class single mother, held up for execration in a way her male equivalent rarely is. Berridge roams so widely, and so assuredly, that her occasional stumble is surprising. I would have liked a larger discussion of how middle-class values became societal norms in the 19th century and how, in the 21st, they may be shifting once again. At times I hesitated over her figures. Berridge says there were 140 deaths via narcotic drugs in 1868, which she calls "high" - in a population of 23 million? But these are quibbles. A vice, a sin, a crime, a disease - drugs, tobacco and alcohol have been all these things at some point. And, as Demons so ably and persuasively shows, they will be all those things again in the future. Demons: Our Changing Attitudes to Alcohol, Tobacco and Drugs Virginia Berridge Oxford University Press, 304pp, Telegraph offer price: £14.99 plus £1.35 p&p (RRP £16.99).