What do a woman trying to jump from the balcony of her hotel on Stadiou Street, embracing her daughter, an unidentified man found unconscious in Syntagma Square, a young woman disguised as a man wandering at night in the notorious neighborhoods of Piraeus, a musician exiled to an Aegean island, a German-Jewish educator who ends her life in Athens, and a wealthy immigrant forced to leave Egypt have in common? They are individuals whose lives were marked by drugs in the early 20th century, in a transitional period when substances that were previously legal became prohibited.

On Substance narrates how the use and trade of drugs became a criminal offense and at the same time emerged as a social problem, in a process that dragged individual destinies and shaped public policies. Based on legislative provisions, police records, diplomatic documents, criminological, medical and psychiatric sources, newspaper articles, literary texts, and other forms of artistic expression, such as rebetiko music, the book examines the forms and extent that drug use took in Greece. It studies the role played by both the institutional framework and the social representations of drugs. It explores to what extent these developments were connected to international trends and what were the peculiarities of the Greek case.

However, the book is not only the story of the emergence of a new social phenomenon. It also analyzes broader concerns of Greek society that were expressed through discourses on "drug addiction" and explains why the use of psychoactive substances ultimately fueled a "moral panic" disproportionate to the dimensions of the phenomenon. In this way, "The History of Drugs in Greece" aspires to contribute to a sober public dialogue on addictive substances, at a time when certainties and policies regarding drugs are being radically renegotiated.