The best general history of drink in Canada is Craig Heron’s Booze: A Distilled History, covering European conquest to the present. Focusing specifically on the Colonial period is In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada by Julia Roberts. Two books consider public drinking in the twentieth century: Robert A. Campbell’s Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s Beer Parlours, 1925–1954 and Dan Malleck’s Try to Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario, 1927–44. More recently Malleck has published Liquor and the Liberal State: Drink and Order before Prohibition.
Readers looking for books on specific substances have a few options. For beer, there is Matthew J. Bellamy’s Brewed in the North: A History of Labatt’s, a history of one Canada’s oldest breweries. On spirits, there is The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram, by Faith Nicholas. Marcel Martel covers other drugs in Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy, and the Marijuana Question, 1961–1975, as does Erika Dyck in Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. Further, most of the essays in Pleasure and Panic: New Essays on the History of Alcohol and Drugs, from editors Malleck and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, concern Canada.
