What do a woman trying to jump from the balcony of her hotel on Stadium Street with her daughter, an unidentified man lying unconscious in Syntagma Square, a young woman disguised as a man wandering at night in the seedy neighborhoods of Piraeus, a musician exiled on an island in the Aegean, a German-Jewish educator who ends her life in Athens, and a wealthy expatriate forced to leave Egypt have in common?

These are individuals whose lives were marked by drugs in the early 20th century, in a transitional period when substances previously legal were prohibited. Essentially chronicles how the use and trafficking of drugs became a criminal offense and simultaneously emerged as a social problem, in a process that swept up individual destinies and shaped public policies.

Based on legislative provisions, police records, diplomatic documents, criminological, medical, and psychiatric sources, press articles, literary texts, and other forms of artistic expression such as rebetiko, the book examines the forms and extent of drug use in Greece. It studies the role played by both the institutional framework and the social representations of drugs.

It explores the extent to which these developments were linked to international trends and what the peculiarities of the Greek case were. However, the book is not only the history of the emergence of a new social phenomenon. It also analyzes broader concerns of Greek society expressed through discourses on “drug addiction” and explains why the use of psychoactive substances ultimately fueled a “moral panic” disproportionate to the scale of the phenomenon.

In this way, the “History of Drugs in Greece” aims to contribute to a sober public dialogue about addictive substances in a period when certainties and policies regarding drugs are undergoing radical renegotiation.