This is a serious collection that does not mind taking a few odd turns, as you would expect in a history of mind-altering substances.
Paul Gootenberg is a Latin Americanist and commodity studies specialist and a pioneer in the field of global drug history. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York and Chair of the Department of History. His books include Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, and he is the editor of Cocaine: Global Histories and, with Liliana M. Dávalos, The Origins of Cocaine: Peasant Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes. He has also published extensively on the economic and social history of nineteenth-century Peru.