Elizabeth Kelly Gray is Associate Professor of History at Towson University.

"Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 is a unique and unreservedly recommended addition to community and academic library History of Medicine/Addiction collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists." -- J. W. Buck, Midwest Book Review

"Most US drug histories begin with Richard Nixon. Elizabeth Kelly Gray boldly begins hers with Benjamin Franklin. She brings fresh, unusual sources to bear on a story that runs from the Revolution to the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act, from laudanum to heroin. Gray's big theme matches her scope. Her long nineteenth century of drug use hardened habits of drug-policing-skewed by users' race, class, nativity, and motives-as much as it hardened drug habits themselves." -- David Courtwright, author of The Age of Addiction

"Habit Forming presumes nothing about the way in which the world of 'legal' drugs functioned and instead asks new and interesting questions. It considers the ways in which drugs impacted the everyday life and experience—both exotic and mundane—of users and their families. Its broad sweep is not merely chronological but takes in a range of substances—from the familiar accounts of opium and cocaine to less-told accounts of hashish and peyote—and shows how Americans' complicated and contradictory dialogue about drugs was layered with assumptions about race, gender, and class. This work offers a foundation on which we can build a sense of what the drug war would later become and reminds us there is no single or inevitable way for society to respond to the problem of drugs." -- Joseph F. Spillane, author of Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920