Mother's Ruin. The epidemic that made London drunk for fifty years

"Mother's Ruin - The epidemic that made London drunk for fifty years" chronicles the London Gin Craze of the early 18th century. When the government allowed unlicensed gin production to hurt the French wine trade, pint of gin became cheaper than a pint of beer. The result was catastrophic. Historian Charles Jack details the social collapse depicted in William Hogarth's famous print Gin Lane. Death rates outstripped birth rates.
Mothers sold their children's clothes for gin; men drank until they went blind. The spirit was so toxic it was often flavored with turpentine or sulfuric acid. "Mother's Ruin" explores the first modern drug panic. It analyzes the government's desperate attempts to pass the "Gin Acts" to tax the poor into sobriety and the riots that followed. It is a grim history of addiction, poverty, and the unintended consequences of economic protectionism.