Tom Crook and Mike Esbester (eds), Governing Risks in Modern Britain: Danger, Safety and Accidents c.1800-2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. xiv+315, £63.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-137-46744-7.

empirical study, but faced competition from methadone for public funding and esteem. It seemed therapeutic communities had arrived when the state of Illinois and then the Nixon administration embraced them as part of a mix of solutions to the drug-abuse problem, but the chaos and estrangement of the 1970s produced uneven results. The Reagan administration readily adopted the prohibitive moralism of the original therapeutic community. Clark provides a fascinating treatment of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign with a focus on the first lady’s partnerships – largely contrived for the television cameras – with the third generation of therapeutic communities. The rise of evangelism and the emerging national obsession with so-called family values aided the shift to prevention for teens rather than recovery for adults. In a disturbing development, parents embraced militant treatment centres, such as The Seed and Straight, Incorporated, to reform their drug-experimenting teenagers. While the tough love of the Synanon model remained, residents’ agency seemed much diminished. Just as some histories support the idea that the uses and effects of drugs are socially constructed, Clark offers good evidence that sobriety and recovery too can be made by humans. In framing the therapeutic community as a worthy innovation gone awry, she seems to point out its untapped advantages over harder technologies such as prison cells or additional drugs. The original gist of the recovery revolution had been that drug addicts could achieve recovery on their own terms and by their own processes, upending the authority of the medical establishment that had failed them. But those who recovered by entering a therapeutic community would have to be more religious than radical, would have to truly believe in the righteousness of abstinence.