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The introduction presents an innovative examination of the historically contingent nature of addiction as well as the context-specific reactions to smoking by describing the unique Russian cigarette (papirosy) and leaf (makhorka). The inhalation of tobacco and the high-nicotine Russian leaf created conditions for more addictive tobacco use with more profound health consequences earlier than anywhere else on the globe. By applying cultural history, gender theory, anthropology, material culture, and sensory studies to Russian smoking, the introduction sets up the construction of tobacco’s positive and negative image and the distinctions of space, class, and gender that the scent, sight, or mark of smoking created on the body, and by extension on social spaces and class structure.

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

James Benning’s turn from 16mm filmmaking to digital filmmaking after his RR (2007) released the already prolific Benning from his struggles with 16mm film projection and print damage and unleashed a new wave of digital productivity. This interview explores Benning’s many digital films, including the several films that are part of his Two Cabins project (focusing on the cabins, lives, and writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski), his Warhol-inspired portrait films—After Warhol (2011), Twenty Cigarettes (2011)—his three-hour-plus “single-shot” film, BNSF (2012), his cine-exploration of Vienna’s Naturhistorischesmuseum, and his personal epic, 52 Films (2015), an adventure into modifying a broad range of online postings from the internet—originally designed to be presented on fifty-two computers, but so far, shown mostly as interactive screenings with Benning present.

Recent years have confronted the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement System (DSS) with an intense wave of complex linkage disputes. US-Clove Cigarettes, which stands at the centre of this chapter, serves as the second case study in the investigation into the DSS’s goal-attainment endeavours in this category of WTO disputes. The chapter begins with a review of several jurisprudential milestones leading from the early US-Shrimp, examined in Chapter 5, to the more recent US-Clove Cigarettes, examined here, with a view to portraying the legitimation continuum of which the latter dispute forms a part. The chapter then discusses the intricate legitimacy setting in which US-Clove Cigarettes unfolded and, through a close goal-oriented analysis, shows how the intensified legitimacy concerns aroused shaped the goals pursued by the DSS and the judicial choices made towards their achievement. The chapter concludes by linking the goal-attainment efforts identified to the broader DSS goal-based effectiveness framework advanced in the book.

Before liability is incurred under the Consumer Protection Act 1987, a product containing a defect must cause damage. Section 1(2) of the Act provides a definition of ‘product’. It states that ‘product’ means ‘any goods or electricity and … includes a product which is comprised in another product, whether by virtue of being a component part or raw material or otherwise’. Notwithstanding the short title of the Act, the definition of product is sufficiently broad to have a wider application than merely to consumer goods. For example, disasters resulting from chemicals or aircraft could be litigated under the Act, as could asbestos and other toxic substances which have given rise to much litigation in the United States.