Find more information about the exhibit here: https://yivo.org/Cannabis

This panel discussion originally took place on May 5, 2022.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

What makes an addiction to a morning constitutional different from–or similar to–an addiction to Fentanyl? What are the biological and social factors to consider? Should the addict be thought of in binary terms, or addiction as a state that people move into and out of? They contemplate these questions through biological, anthropological, and literary lenses, drawing on Marc Lewis, Angela Garcia, and Thomas de Quincey. Late in the episode, there’s also a Sprockets joke.

Then, in Recallable Books, Gina recommends David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure, Elizabeth recommends When I Wear My Alligator Boots by Shaylih Muehlmann, and John recommends Sam Quinones’s Dreamland.

Discussed in this episode:

• Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
• Angela Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande
• Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar
• David Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good
• Shaylih Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands
• Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Methadone is a life-saving medication. But the current system for obtaining it—the opioid treatment program, commonly known as the methadone clinic—is punitive, unjust, and often humiliating. In this eye-opening book Liquid Handcuffs: Policing and Punishment in Methadone Clinics and the Future of Opioid Addiction Treatment (North Atlantic Books, 2026), social worker and journalist Helen Redmond takes readers inside the hidden world of methadone clinics, exposing the “culture of cruelty” that polices, punishes, and profits from those they’re meant to serve. Through patient stories and extensive interviews with methadone users and clinic workers, Redmond weaves a compelling argument against the current clinic system. She provides a detailed history of how methadone was first developed and why the current system for dispensing methadone arose in the U.S., tracing its entanglement with the carceral system and the “War on Drugs” as well as private equity firms and tech companies. She details the numerous barriers to enter and remain and treatment, as well as standard practices that shame and discriminate against patients, such as restrictions on take-home doses; daily attendance requirements; regular urine testing; and threats of cutting off medication for any infraction of clinic rules. She also explores the nuances of resistance to methadone clinics within communities of color, unpacking the political, racial, and cultural circumstances behind the opposition to methadone. Redmond persuasively makes the case for removing police agencies like the DEA from clinic administration, and shows how a transition to provider-prescribed pharmacy pickup, along with other tools of harm reduction such as safe-supply and peer-support services, would restore dignity to patients struggling with addiction—and save thousands of lives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? Why don’t they quit out of self-concern? Why does the rat in the experiment, alone in a cage, press the lever again and again for cocaine—to the point of death? In this pathbreaking book What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction (Princeton UP, 2026), Johns Hopkins University professor Pickard proposes a new paradigm for understanding the puzzle of addiction. For too long, our thinking has been hostage to a false dichotomy: either addiction is a brain disease, or it is a moral failing. Pickard argues that it is neither, and that both models stifle addiction research and fail people who need help. 

Drawing on her expertise as an academic philosopher and her clinical work in a therapeutic community, Pickard explores the meaning of drugs for people with addiction and the diverse factors that keep them using despite the costs. People use drugs to cope with suffering—but also to self-harm, or even to die. Some identify as “addicts," while others are in denial or struggle with cravings and self-control. Social, cultural, and economic circumstances are crucial to explaining addiction—but brain pathology may also matter. By integrating addiction science with philosophy, clinical practice, and the psychology and voices of people with addiction themselves, Pickard shows why there is no one-size-fits-all theory or ethics of addiction. The result is a heterogeneous and humanistic paradigm for understanding and treating addiction, and a fresh way of thinking about responsibility, blame, and relationships with people who use drugs.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in April 2026.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment--and the private industries that distribute them--generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food.

In Addiction, Inc: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.

Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment--and the private industries that distribute them--generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food.

In Addiction, Inc., historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Soon, the overwhelming temptations of fame, fortune, and drugs derailed his promising career. And by 1989, after failing his third drug test, Chris was banned from the NBA. His life then spiraled into addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and near-death experiences.

Yet, in 2000, a turning point came when he lost his father. This loss fueled Chris's resolve to change. With incredible strength and determination, he fought back from the depths of addiction.

Today, Chris is a beacon of hope and resilience. He is a motivational speaker, entrepreneur, and advocate, inspiring others with his journey of recovery from addiction, and redemption. From speaking to youth groups and drug rehab centers to sharing his powerful story with the NBA, Chris is now making a positive difference in the world.

Co-written with bestselling author Ron Chepesiuk, Out of Bounds: From Broken NBA Dreams to Redemption (WildBlue Press, 2025) describes in dramatic, heart-wrenching detail Chris's remarkable journey, which included finding his birth mother, and proves that it's never too late to rise again.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

For more information on Jonathan and his writing, visit:

Jonathan’s website: here

Jonathan’s Substack, Histories of Present Illness: here 
Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in April 2026.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky (Haymarket, 2020) explores the gendered inequalities that situate women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs in one of the most impoverished regions in the US.

Lesly-Marie Buer is a harm reductionist and medical anthropologist in Knoxville, TN.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In December 2022, AATOD worked with the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD) to initiate a first-of-its-kind census of all patients currently receiving treatment from government-certified opioid treatment programs (OTPs). Their findings, based on responses from over 1,500 OTPs nationwide, show the breadth and distribution of addiction treatment in America, and are the product of almost fifty years of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in the United States.

I spoke with Mark about his census results, as well as the history of MAT, and specifically methadone, treatment in America. You can see the full report here.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II (Penguin, 2025) tells the indelible stories of the veterans and their loved ones as they confronted the aftershocks of World War II. Veterans suffering from recurring nightmares, uncontrollable rages, and social isolation were treated by doctors who had little understanding of PTSD. They were told that they were suffering from nothing more than battle fatigue and that time would cure it. When their symptoms persisted, they were given electro-shock treatments and lobotomies, while the true cause of their distress would remain undiagnosed for decades to come. Women who had begun working outside the home were pressured to revert to their prewar status as housewives dependent on their husbands. Returning veterans and their families were forced to double up with their parents or squeeze into overcrowded, substandard shelters as the country wrestled with a housing crisis. Divorce rates doubled. Alcoholism was rampant. Racial tensions heightened as White southerners resorted to violence to sustain the racial status quo. To ease the veterans’ readjustment to civilian life, Congress passed the GI Bill, but Black veterans were disproportionately denied their benefits, and the consequences of this discrimination would endure long after the war was won.

In this richly textured examination, Dr. Nasaw presents a complicated portrait of those who brought the war home with them, among whom were the period’s most influential political and cultural leaders, including John F. Kennedy, Robert Dole, and Henry Kissinger; J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut; Harry Belafonte and Jimmy Stewart. Drawing from veterans’ memoirs, oral histories, and government documents, Dr. Nasaw illuminates a hidden chapter of American history—one of trauma, resilience, and a country in transition.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Mark Deuze investigates the systemic issues that make creative work both exhilarating and unsustainable. Drawing on extensive research and in-depth interviews with media professionals, he notes the hidden downsides of doing what you love and offers a candid analysis of how workplace structures, high workloads, and perceived injustices contribute to mental and physical distress.

But this book is not just about what's broken; it's about what can be done. Deuze provides a roadmap for rethinking the culture of creative industries and offers strategies for balancing passion with sustainability. A practical resource for media scholars and those navigating the highs and lows of a creative career, this work challenges us to imagine a healthier future for our labour of love.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

 Drawing from veterans' firsthand accounts as well as mental asylum and hospital records, government and medical reports, newspaper coverage of addiction, and advertisements, in Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis (UNC Press, 2025) Dr. Jonathan S. Jones unearths the poorly understood stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans in unflinching detail, illuminating the war’s traumatic legacies. In doing so, Jones provides critical historical context for the modern opioid crisis, which bears tragic resemblance to that of the post–Civil War era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

More of Shoshana's work:

- Her reporting on hospital drug testing

- Her reporting on moms reported to child welfare authorities for taking medication-assisted treatment during pregnancy

- The American Rehab podcast

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released next year.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade.

Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations.

Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Find Katie's podcast at Blocked and Reported, and more on her new book here.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released next year. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Susan Stewart asks a question others might prefer stay buried: what about women's lives have changed such that they drink more alcohol? Stewart’s participants share stories of the many social forces that encourage women to drink: increased marketing of alcohol to women, the growing presence of alcohol in the workplace, pressure to drink from friends and family, and that drinking provides an easy “time-out” from children and housework. Stewarts' unvarnished examination of women and drinking challenges readers to think through its implications to individuals, families, and society.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Her latest book, Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood, 2022), is an illustrated history of two centuries of Canadian heroin regulation that reveals the deep roots of our current failure to address the overdose death epidemic caused by criminalizing and pathologizing drug users and resisting harm-reduction policies. From its discovery in 1898, heroin was prescribed for therapeutic use in Canada. With little evidence of the harm of heroin, its prohibition has been tied up with colonization and systemic racism as well as class and gender injustice. Using documentary evidence and the experiences of people who use/used heroin, drug user unions and harm-reduction advocates, Boyd argues that in order to create a more just future, prohibition and punitive policies that drive the illegal overdose crisis must end.

Today’s host is Jay Shifman. Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, stigma-destroying speaker, podcaster, and event host. The survivor of two suicide attempts and an overdose, Jay holds a BA in Psychology from Northern Kentucky University and has put in numerous hours of independent learning acquiring certifications in mental health, substance misuse and addiction, and drug policy.

Jay founded his company, Choose Your Struggle, in 2015 with two distinct goals: ending stigma and promoting honest and fact-based education around the topics of Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy.

For more information, visit: https://jay.campsite.bio/ or find him on social media.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her second book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in 2026.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Born in Detroit and exposed to the music world from an early age, John Lee Hooker Jr. began singing as a featured attraction in his father's shows as a teenager. His father was a sharecropper's son who became known for hit songs like "Boogie Chillin," "I'm in the Mood," and "Boom Boom," and in 1972, he and his father performed live and recorded an album in Soledad Prison. Junior seemed to have a golden ticket to a successful music career as a child, but trouble brewed as his father's marriage was in trouble and ripped apart the family.
Drug addiction and a series of related crimes, including as a con player, landed Junior in and out of jails & prisons for several decades. An early brush with the law led to a sentence at Synanon, the infamous drug rehabilitation program turned religious cult. Later arrests resulted in time served in prisons including at Soledad, San Quentin, and Avenal.
Shot, stabbed, and convicted multiple times, Junior was at his lowest point doing time at a Santa Rita jail, but it was at that moment that he found the Lord. He emerged clean and sober and began a successful career as a blues singer, earning two Grammy nominations as well as the Bobby "Blue" Bland Lifetime Achievement Award. He eventually devoted himself fully to his faith. Reverend John Lee Hooker Jr. testifies, preaches, and performs gospel music in churches and prisons in both Germany and America.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.

In Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex describes how people become addicted. She highlights the toll that addiction took on Alex and all members of a family. Drawing from interviews with Alex’s friends, family members, therapists, teachers, and police officers—as well as files from his stays in hospitals, rehab facilities, and jails—Roos paints a compelling portrait of a young man whose life veered between happiness, anxiety, success, and despair. The book is part memoir, part sociological case study, and part policy proposal because it provides a strong challenge to extant treatment and policy options. As she explores how a punitive system failed her son, Dr. Roos calls for a community of action that would improve care for substance users and reduce addiction, realigning public health policy to address the overdose crisis.

Dr. PATRICIA ROOS is a Professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University. Among her many publications are the books Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations (coauthored with Barbara Reskin) from Temple University Press and Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies from University of Albany Press. After her son's death, Dr. Roos realigned her research and advocacy interests to explore mental health and substance use disorders, turning her grief into activism.

Mentioned:

• David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America from University of Chicago Press.
• Pat Roos on Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden addiction: Joe, Jill continue to show compassion

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In just his second professional season, he became the third player in NBA history to lead the league in both assists and steals—both Knicks team records. Richardson would also notch four All-Star appearances and twice being named to the All-Defensive team over eight seasons between the Knicks, Golden State Warriors, and New Jersey Nets.

But during that time, his time off the court was having a bigger impact on his career than what he was doing on the court.

On February 25, 1986, after three violations of the league’s drug policy, NBA commissioner David Stern would ban Richardson from continuing his professional career. His struggles with drugs and alcohol were well documented, and someone considered the next big thing became the first player in league history to be receive a lifetime ban.

For most people, this would be the end to their story—one in which their substance abuse would take over and their downfall inevitable.

However, that was not in the cards for Michael Ray Richardson.

In Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption (Sports Publishing, 2024), Richardson opens up about his life both on and off the basketball court, discussing all the highs and lows that made him both a hero and a villain. Though being reinstated to the NBA in 1988, he would instead have stints in the United States Basketball League and CBA before taking his talents to Europe. With stints in Italy, Croatia, and France, he would lead his teams to numerous championships in his decade-plus overseas.

Now back in the states and running youth basketball clinics, Banned is Richardson’s first opportunity to open up about his life, showing that though you may get knocked down—even from self-inflicted actions—the only person that can count you out is yourself. With forewords from Hall of Famers George “The Iceman” Gervin and Nancy Lieberman, this is the story of the Michael Ray Richardson as only he can tell it.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dayne Riley is an engaging and original study that explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Dr. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country’s relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Dr. Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West (University of Texas Press, 2024) Dr. Holly M. Karibo tells the story of how this institution—once framed as revolutionary for addiction care—ultimately contributed to the turn towards incarceration as the solution to the nation’s drug problem. Blending an intellectual history of addiction and imprisonment with a social history of addicts’ experiences, Rehab on the Range provides a nuanced picture of the Narcotic Farm and its cultural impacts. In doing so, it offers crucial historical context that can help us better understand our current debates over addiction, drug policy, and the rise of mass incarceration.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024), Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In the award-winning book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023), a trio of authors—Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg—explain how this arrangement came to pass, what impacts it has, and what needs to be done. This remarkable book won the 2023 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.

email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Mallinson and Hannah provide the reader with an excellent overview of policymaking designs and theories since their analysis takes up so many different dimensions of the policy process in the United States. They then move into the history behind the criminalization of marijuana, and the way in which this policy has clearly racialized roots. Green Rush highlights the ways that some of the shifts and changes in state policies started to make their way through different states, via action by state legislatures and or through state-wide referenda. With particular attention to a number of states, like California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, Mallinson and Hannah chart the ways that different states have gone about legalizing the medical use of marijuana, which has also been part of the pathway for other states to move towards decriminalization and legalization of adult use recreational marijuana.

Green Rush is an accessible policy analysis and provides important insight into the path that medical marijuana took as it became legal in one state after another. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States charts the policy changes themselves, but also pays attention to changing public opinion around cannabis and shifts in the war on drugs as well.

(I found this book so useful that I have adopted it to use in my Public Policy class.)

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968  (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) by Dr. Stuart Anderson traces the 350-year development of officially sanctioned pharmacopoeias across the British Empire, first from local to national pharmacopoeias, and later to a standardised pharmacopoeia that would apply throughout Britain’s imperial world. The evolution of British pharmacopoeias and the professionalisation of medicine saw developments including a transition from Galenic principles to germ theory, and a shift from plant-based to chemical medicines. While other colonial powers in Europe usually imposed metropolitan pharmacopoeias across their colonies, Britain consulted with practitioners throughout its Empire. As the scope of the pharmacopoeia widened, the process of agreeing upon drug standardisation became more complex and fraught. A wide range of issues was exposed, from bioprospecting and the inclusion of indigenous medicines in pharmacopoeias, to adulteration and demands for the substitution of pharmacopoeial drugs with locally available ones.

Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires uses the evolution of an imperial pharmacopoeia in Britain as a vehicle for exploring the hegemonic power of European colonial powers in the medical field, and the meaning of pharmacopoeia more broadly.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health (Princeton UP, 2024), Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health--actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life's turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain--from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods--a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend--work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders.

Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

As workers attempt new modes of employment in the era of the Great Resignation, they face a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and stubbornly unequal. With Handcrafted Careers, sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson dives headfirst into the everyday lives of workers in the craft beer industry to address key questions facing American workers today: about what makes a good career, who gets to have one, and how careers progress without established models.

Wilson argues that what ends up contributing to divergent career paths in craft beer is a complex interplay of social connections, personal tastes, and cultural ideas, as well as exclusionary industry structures. The culture of work in craft beer is based around “bearded white guy” ideals that are gendered and racialized in ways that limit the advancement of women and people of color. A fresh perspective on niche industries, Handcrafted Careers offers sharp insights into how people navigate worlds of work that promote ideas of authenticity and passion-filled careers even amid instability.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on how architectural designers, builders, and community planners negotiate a sense of identity and place for residents of newly constructed neighborhoods. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Offering a new way of thinking about one of the most enduring and successful products in history, Wood, Whiskey and Wine is a must-read for everyone from technology and history buffs to wine and whiskey aficionados.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History (Princeton UP, 2024), Christine Folch offers a wide-ranging exploration of the world's third-most popular naturally stimulating beverage. Folch discusses who drinks mate, and why, and whether this earthier caffeinated drink with its promise of a different buzz and a more authentic, spiritual connection to place can find a market niche beyond South America.

Folch traces yerba mate's odysseys across the globe, from South America to the Middle East and North America. She discovers that mate inspired the world's first written tango, powered early Jesuit and German nationalist utopias, ignited one of modern history's most devastating wars, and fueled Catholic conspiracies. And, Folch reports, mate is currently starring in puppet shows put on by Syrian dissidents.

By tracing yerba mate production and consumption as they change over time and place, from precolonial Indigenous beginnings to the present, Folch unravels the processes of commodification and their countervailing forces to show how accidents of botany intersect with political economic systems and personal taste. The stories behind the caffeinated infusions we prefer, she finds, are nothing less than the story of how the modern world is put together.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In this episode, host Richard Grijalva and Claudio Lomnitz discuss the long gestation of what became Sovereignty and Extortion, the challenges of writing for a broader public discussion, the affordances and responsibilities of a writer in a public-facing institution like El Colegio Nacional, the central ideas and arguments animating Sovereignty and Extortion, and the prospects facing president-elect Claudia Shienbaum Pardo's tenure in confronting the issues Lomnitz raised in these lectures. They also discuss the kind of traction that this work has produced in Mexico and the possibilities for collective, collaborative work that the topic warrants.  

Claudio W. Lomnitz is Campbell Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the author of several books in English and Spanish, including Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (Univ. of California Press, 1992), Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2014), and Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021). In 2021, he was named a member of El Colegio Nacional in Mexico City. Sovereignty and Extortion gathers the cycle of inaugural lectures he delivered at the Colegio, which was published in Spanish in 2022 by Ediciones Era as El tejido social rasgado.

Richard A. Grijalva is a scholar of Mexican and Mexican American Studies based in Austin, TX. From 2022-2024 he was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Exploring the effects of intoxicants such as caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, and psychedelics on film spectatorship, Dr. Szczepaniak-Gillece demonstrates how American movie theaters sought to cultivate a dual identity: as both a place of wholesome entertainment and a shadowy zone of illicit behavior. Movies under the Influence highlights the various legislative, legal, and corporate powers that held sway over the darkened anonymity of theaters, locating the convergence of moviegoing and drug use as a site of mediation and social control in America.

As much as substances and cinema are points where power intervenes, they are also settings of potential transcendence, and Movies under the Influence maintains this paradox as a necessary component of American film history. Recontextualizing a wide range of films, from Hollywood to the avant-garde, this book examines the implicit relationship intoxicants suggest between mass media, spectatorship, and governmental regulation and offers a new angle from which to understand cinema’s lasting role in evolving American culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024), David Pozen provides an authoritative, critical constitutional history of the drug war, casting new light on both drug prohibition and U.S. constitutional development. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, advocates argued that criminal drug bans violate the Constitution's guarantees of due process, equal protection, federalism, free speech, free exercise of religion, and humane punishment. Many scholars and jurists agreed. Pozen demonstrates the plausibility of a constitutional path not taken, one that would have led to a more compassionate approach to drug control.

Rather than restrain the drug war, the Constitution helped to legitimate and entrench it. Pozen shows how a profoundly illiberal and paternalistic policy regime was assimilated into, and came to shape, an ostensibly liberal and pluralistic constitutional order. Placing the U.S. jurisprudence in comparative context, The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a comprehensive review of drug-rights decisions along with a roadmap to constitutional reform options available today.

This book is available open access here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917 (U Nebraska Press, 2024), historical architect James Mallery describes how and why San Francisco became the titular "city of vice" by tracking the people and activities that local elites would rather have stayed hidden. In doing so, he paints a remarkable picture of a city undertaking remarkable growth and the limits of elite power to control the habits of a large, mobile, urban population. Through famous San Francisco neighborhoods like Chinatown and the Tenderloin, out to the city's "Outside Lands" outskirts, Mallery shows how neighborhoods are defined by more than just the sum of activities outsiders might see as immoral - they're complex places made up of of complex people, and that even the most run down neighborhood has a brilliant history worth telling.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (FSG, 2024) reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them--the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war.

This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia's own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs--a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take.

Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion.

By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023) highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the "politics of consumption" in Japan.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.

At the centre of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists - and star-crossed lovers - Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists and the founders of the Information Age.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioral conditioning of soldiers through the distribution of a mind-altering drug that was later hailed as one of the army’s “fathers of victory.” The daily wine ration arose from an unexpected set of factors including the demoralization of trench warfare, the wine industry’s fear of losing its main consumers, and medical consensus about the benefits of wine drinking. The army’s related practice of distributing distilled alcohol to embolden soldiers was a double-edged sword, as the men might become unruly. The army implemented regulations and surveillance networks to curb men’s drinking behind the lines, in an attempt to ensure they only drank when it was useful to the war effort. When morale collapsed in spring 1917, the army lost control of this precarious system as drunken soldiers mutinied in the thousands. Discipline was restored only when the army regained command of soldiers’ alcohol consumption.

Drawing on a range of archives, personal narratives, and trench journals, A Thirst for Wine and War shows how the French army’s intoxication of its soldiers constituted a unique exercise of biopower deployed on a mass scale.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

*Note to listeners: Ryan realized later he connected Julius Hobson with SNCC. Hobson was actually associated with CORE.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Marina Welker is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. 

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

It wasn’t always this way. The Constitution of the War on Drugs also details the “hidden history” of a brief legal moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when lawyers effectively argued for liberalized drug policies – on the sound basis of the Constitution. The moment was eventually overturned, but Pozen argues it could be a useful historical lesson for people interested in the effects of constitutional law on the drug war today.

A link to the digital edition of The Constitution of the War on Drugs will soon be available here.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is coming out soon from the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Recognized internationally as a leader in street medicine, Dr. Partovi started documenting her patients' stories so that others could hear their voices. By addressing the practical and moral considerations when treating each patient, Dr. Partovi developed her philosophies about what it means to be a "good doctor." Along the way, she began to understand how her personal ethics evolved--from a challenging childhood and complicated relationships with her parents, through professional hurdles--often, she had to push against a system that doesn't always put the patient first.

Renegade M.D.: A Doctor's Stories from the Streets (Bookbaby, 2024) is a powerful and inspiring memoir by Dr. Susan Partovi, a renowned street doctor who has dedicated her life to treating the impoverished around the world and people experiencing homelessness on LA's skid row. Through her stories, Dr. Partovi takes us on a journey to the heart of the challenges faced by those living on the streets, and shines a light on her unwavering commitment to advocate for social justice and to provide compassionate care to some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes are distributed by NBN, so be sure to subscribe to Blue Beryl!

Resources related to this episode:

• Christine Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face (2009)
• Pierce’s blog “In defense of a little romanticism… or, how Mr Miyagi inspired me to become a professor”
• Pierce Salguero, Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (2022)
• Dominic Steavu, The Writ of the Three Sovereigns: From Local Lore to Institutional Daoism (2020)
• Dominic Steavu, Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions (2015)
• Dominic’s Academia.edu page

Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024) by Kris Butler explores how drink maps of particular cities were published in an attempt to fight increasingly rampant alcohol consumption, from Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield to Oxford, London and Norwich. Featuring red symbols to indicate where alcohol was sold, these special street maps were posted prominently in public places, submitted as evidence, sent to Members of Parliament and published in newspapers to show just how inebriated a neighbourhood could be. They promoted the message that having fewer places to buy alcohol was the answer to reducing widespread crime, poverty and sickness. And they worked – at first. After consulting a drink map in one town, judges decided to close half the licensed shops because even then no one had to walk more than two minutes to buy a beer.

Illustrated with original maps, advertisements and temperance propaganda, the story of their brief history is told amidst a tangle of licensing laws, rogue magistrates, irate brewers, ardent temperance organisers and accounts of the complex role alcohol played across all levels of Victorian society.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose recent book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis (Regalo Press, 2024) is a deeply researched account of Greg turning to coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca to heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, Greg takes his readers on a journey across the globe. In his search for healing from personal and ecological trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche—and finds they have a lot in common. Mothership is one man’s audacious search for healing when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late—and what well-being means in a fracturing society on a dying planet.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico. It interprets the “security projects” of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective—as embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. By zooming in on security practices in Colombia and Mexico in that decade and juxtaposing the two contexts, this book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. To what extent and for whom do states produce order and disorder? Which social forces support and drive such state practices?

Expanding the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism and the coloniality of state power—thus linking political economy to postcolonial approaches—the book builds a theoretical lens to study state security practices. Different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influenced the state discourse on crime to very different extents. Security practices—which oscillated between dispersed organization by a multiplicity of actors and institutionalization with the military—materialized as horrific insecurity for social groups thought of as disposable. In tendency, putting security centerstage disabled dissent. The “security projects” exacerbated contradictions driven by a particular economic model and simultaneously criminalized precisely those that this model had already radically disadvantaged.

Alke Jenss is senior researcher at Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

• Joe and Nicole’s website
• Joe McGivney’s book, You’re a Miracle, on Amazon.com
• Blessed Fr Michael McGivney founder of the Knights of Columbus
• Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome on the NIH website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs. 

In DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (UNC Press, 2023), he shows how policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and structures of social and economic inequality.

Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonisation of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as part of a civilising mission: tidy vines, heavy with fruit, were symbolic of Britain’s subordination of foreign lands. Economically and culturally, nineteenth-century settler winemakers saw the British market as paramount. However, British drinkers were apathetic towards what they pejoratively called "colonial wine."

The tables only began to turn after the First World War, when colonial wines were marketed as cheap and patriotic and started to find their niche among middle- and working-class British drinkers. This trend, combined with social and cultural shifts after the Second World War, laid the foundation for the New World revolution in the 1980s, making Britain into a confirmed country of wine-drinkers and a massive market for New World wines. These New World producers may have only received critical acclaim in the late twentieth century, but Imperial Wine shows that they had spent centuries wooing, and indeed manufacturing, a British market for inexpensive colonial wines. This book is sure to satisfy any curious reader who savours the complex stories behind this commodity chain.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769–1920 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) Dr. Julia Ornelas-Higdon addresses these gaps in the historical narrative and popular imagination. Beginning with the industry’s inception at the California missions, Dr. Ornelas-Higdon examines the evolution of wine growing across three distinct political regimes—Spanish, Mexican, and American—through the industry’s demise after Prohibition. This interethnic study of race and labour in California examines how California Natives, Mexican Californios, Chinese immigrants, and Euro-Americans came together to build the industry.

Dr. Ornelas-Higdon identifies the birth of the wine industry as a significant missing piece of California history—one that reshapes scholars’ understandings of how conquest played out, how race and citizenship were constructed, and how agribusiness emerged across the region. The Grapes of Conquest unearths the working-class, multiracial roots of the California wine industry, challenging its contemporary identity as the purview of elite populations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the long war on drugs has reflected both the bipartisan mandate for urban crime control and the balancing act required to resolve an impossible public policy: the criminalization of the social practices and consumer choices of tens of millions of white middle-class Americans constantly categorized as "otherwise law-abiding citizens."" That is, the white middle class was just as much a target as minority populations. The criminalization of marijuana - the white middle-class drug problem - moved to the epicenter of the national war on drugs during the Nixon era. White middle-class youth by the millions were both the primary victims of the organized drug trade and excessive drug war enforcement, but policymakers also remained committed to deterring their illegal drug use, controlling their subculture, and coercing them into rehabilitation through criminal law. Only with the emergence of crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s did this use of state power move out of suburbs and reemerge more dramatically in urban and minority areas. 

This book tells a history of how state institutions, mass media, and grassroots political movements long constructed the wars on drugs, crime, and delinquency through the lens of suburban crisis while repeatedly launching bipartisan/nonpartisan crusades to protect white middle-class victims from perceived and actual threats, both internal and external. The book works on a national, regional, and local level, with deep case studies of major areas like San Francisco, LA, Washington, and New York. This history uses the lens of the suburban drug war to examine the consequences when affluent white suburban families serve as the nation's heroes and victims all at the same time, in politics, policy, and popular culture.

Matthew D. Lassiter is professor of history and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, where he is co-director of the Carceral State Project.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Our guest is: Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski, who is an assistant professor in the department of English at William & Mary. She is a scholar of early modern literature and culture; queer, feminist, and critical race theory; and the medical humanities. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Chronicle, Literary Hub, The Huffington Post, and other publications. Her current book project is Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may be interested in this playlist:

• The Academic Life episode on the book Chasing Chickens: When Life After Higher Education Doesn't Go The Way You Planned
• The Academic Life episode on the book Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD
• The Academic Life episode on Finishing Your Book When Life is a Disaster
• The Academic Life episode on mindfulness
• The Academic Life episode with Dr. Andrzejewski about ghosting people

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the podcast by downloading Academic Life episodes, and by sharing the show with a friend—because knowledge is for everybody.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dyck is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) as well as Culture's Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada (Manitoba, 2017).

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Courtwright is the author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2001) as well as Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Harvard University Press, 1982).

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities (Rutgers UP, 2023), Dr. Leontina Hormel chronicles how residents dealt with regulatory agencies, frequent boil order notices, threats of closure, and class-based social stigma over this period. Despite all this, what was seen as a dysfunctional, ‘disorderly’ community by outsiders was instead a refuge where veterans, women heads of households, and people with disabilities or substance use disorders were supported and understood. The embattled Syringa community also organized to defend the rights and dignity of residents and served as a site for negotiating with local government, culminating in a class-action lawsuit that reached the federal level. The experiences Syringa residents faced in this conservative, predominately white region of the United States are emblematic of the growing national and global crisis in affordable housing and home ownership, with declining work conditions and incomes for the working-class.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This interview focuses on Once You're Inside as well as Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery. Crash is the story of Helen Dempsey and her daughter Ann who both fall victim to the same regimen of overmedication at the hands of the mental health system. Helen struggles with intractable depression and initially turns to self-medication with alcohol, but finds herself unable to recover despite numerous drugs, hospitalizations, and electroconvulsive therapy. Ann vows to build a different life for herself, but eventually descends into the pain of a mysterious migraine and intractable darkness lasting for many years. She was severely overmedicated with opioids and psychiatric drugs and then Methadone, DHE-45 injections, Migrant nasal spray (for headaches) and injecribele Demerol (for really bad days) once she was off opiates. To keep her out of depression (maintenance), she was prescribed Wellbutrin, Elavil, Topamax, and Valium; Ann crashes her car twice. It took her 4 months of energy healing to discontinue the pain meds and two years later, about a year to get off of psych drugs. Because traditional medical treatments have failed her, she challenges her doctors' advice and discovers ways to heal the source of her physical and emotional pain without drugs. The question of why her mother never got well continues to haunt her long after her mother's death until she finds the missing puzzle pieces she'd searched for all her life stashed in a dusty box in her sister's attic.

You can find more about Ann as well as her books and other writings here. 

You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Vivid and at times deeply personal, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers new insights into a wide variety of intoxicating experiences, from the intimate feeling of connection among concertgoers to the adrenaline-fueled rush of a fight, to the thrill of jumping off a balcony into a swimming pool. Tutenges shows what it means and feels to move beyond the ordinary into altered states in which the transgressive, spectacular, and unexpected take place.

He argues that the primary aim of group intoxication is the religious experience that Émile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, the essence of which is a sense of connecting with other people and being part of a larger whole. This experience is empowering and emboldening and may lead to crime and deviance, but it is at the same time vital to our humanity because it strengthens social bonds and solidarity.

The book fills important gaps in Durkheim’s social theory and contributes to current debates in micro-sociology as well as cultural criminology and cultural sociology. Here, for the first time, readers will discover a detailed account of collective effervescence in contemporary society that includes: an explanation of what collective effervescence is; a description of the conditions that generate collective effervescence; a typology of the varieties of collective effervescence; a discussion of how collective effervescence manifests in the realm of nightlife, politics, sports, and religion; and an analysis of how commercial forces amplify and capitalize on the universal human need for intoxication.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (U Chicago Press, 2023), E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms—and particularly forms of expertise—emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dr. Monteith argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war. Antidrug activists expressed—and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives. Yet this book argues that racism was intertwined with religious impulses. Reformers pursued the “civilising mission,” a wide-ranging project that sought to protect “child races” from harmful influences while remodelling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States. Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress.

This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

First, we go back to the beginning. Historian Erika Dyck tells us the little-known story of an earlier period of psychedelic research, led by pioneers in — believe it or not — Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Dyke’s book Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies charts the early days of this medical research, and reveals important lessons for our current tensions. The book shows that deep rifts have always existed in psychedelic research, because the drugs sit uncomfortably in-between many different ways of knowing.

Then, muckracking psychonaut David Nickles is calling out the mainstream commodification of psychedelics, as well as the bullshit and abuse within the underground. Nickles is an underground researcher, harm reduction advocate, and journalist, who is also managing editor of Psymopsia, a psychedelics watchdog group. In 2018, he excoriated the psychedelic research community for playing nice with the emerging VC-backed psychedelic firms, like the Peter Thiel-funded Compass Pathways (Nickles’ talk is summarized here, but the full talk is available on Youtube). Since then, Nickles says things have only gotten worse. He documents much of that in Power Trip, an investigative podcast series on psychedelic therapy, produced by New York Magazine and Psymosia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

A bit about the book...

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics--across the board, consumption has shot up in the 21st century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love and intense hatred for drugs has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century.

Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses.

By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era (One World, 2023) follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack's destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a "crack house"; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark's most legendary group of drug traffickers.

Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

A journalist, author, and indispensable voice on issues of identity, justice, and patterns of power in America, Ramsey’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, WSJ Magazine, Ebony, and Essence, among a host of other outlets, and he’s worked at such venerable newsrooms as the Los Angeles Times and the Marshall Project. A native of Columbus, Ohio, where he saw the crack epidemic firsthand, Donovan now lives in LA. When Crack was King, released to great acclaim, is his first book.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dubai’s tolerance of alcohol is a more formalized version of Muslim tolerance—and clandestine drinking—of alcohol that dates back to its very inception, despite religious commands to the contrary. Professor Rudi Matthee tells that story in Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press / Hurst, 2023).

In this interview, Rudi and I chat about alcohol in the Islamic world: who drank it—and how they excused their behavior—and how non-Muslims ended up being a part of the Muslim drinking world.

Rudi Matthee is the John A. Munroe and Dorothy L. Munroe Chair of History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of four prize-winning monographs on Iranian history, and the editor or co-editor of another six books. He is currently President of the Persian Heritage Foundation.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

With case studies that include sake and soy sauce, antibiotics, and biotechnology, Arts of the Microbial World weaves a historical narrative integrated with both the development of modern Japanese science and industry on the one hand and imperialism, expansion, and defeat and rebuilding on the other. Additionally, Lee couches her analysis of Japan’s microbial industries in the context of our contemporary microbiotic moment of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, green chemistry, and lab-grown foods and pharmaceuticals. In this sense, Arts of the Microbial World will be of interest to scholars and students of Japan, the history of science, food, pharmaceuticals, and industry, but also to readers concerned about the possibilities of mobilizing non-Western technological breakthroughs in the quest for global sustainability.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In highlighting the evolution of consumer tastes through changing hierarchical relationships between the British metropole and colonies, as well as the evolution of business organizations and practices, Globalization in a Glass contributes to ongoing debates about globalization, empire, and trade. It argues that, despite the might and power of the British Empire as a colonizing force, the effects of globalization, imperial trade networks, and colonial migration led to the domination of the most popular Continental European style of beer, the Pilsner, over British-style ales.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

But the opium trade survived for decades, through to the end of the Second World War. How did that trade actually work? How was it possible to trade a good that was, at best, tolerated in the strange gap between legal and illegal. This trade is what Peter Thilly covers in his book The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022).

In this interview, Peter and I talk about opium, how people traded this quasi-legal good, and the changing opium trade–including a surprising source of illicit drugs in the region.

Peter Thilly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is currently working on a global microhistory of the 1853 Small Sword Uprising.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Opium Business. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The first biography of Frances Willard to be published in over thirty-five years, Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard (Oxford UP, 2022) explores Willard's life, her contributions as a reformer, and her broader legacy as a women's rights activist in the United States. In addition to chronicling Willard's life, historian Christopher H. Evans examines how Willard crafted a distinctive culture of women's leadership, emphasizing the importance of religious faith for understanding Willard's successes as a social reformer. Despite her enormous fame during her lifetime, Evans investigates the reasons why Willard's legacy has been eclipsed by subsequent generations of feminist reformers and assesses her importance for our time. 

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Tracing the processes by which social issues are constructed as biomedical ones that necessitate pharmacological intervention, Smirnova highlights how inequitable surveillance, policing, and punishment of marginalized populations intensify harms associated with both treatment and punishment, especially given that the distinctions between the two have become blurred. By focusing on the stories of people whose pain and pharmaceutical treatment led to incarceration, Smirnova challenges the binary of individual and social problems, effectively exploring how the conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment of substance use may exacerbate outcomes such as relapse, recidivism, poverty, abuse, and death.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

While this book is sure to interest anyone keen to learn more about modern Chinese history, the history of capitalism, and the history of global narcotics, this book should also be of interest to anyone looking to read about some truly fascinating individuals who made the 'opium business' happen. By uncovering the history of the tax farmers, roving gangs, smugglers, and 'opium kings' who moved, sold, and hid opium, Thilly's book reminds us that it was people — with competing motivations, complicated backgrounds, and networks of friends — who made the opium trade happen.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

As a young Latina and Native American lawyer and former wife of California’s attorney general and treasurer, Nadia Davis has long been subjected to public scrutiny. In this powerful ah-mage homage to finding one’s worth in the face of mental health struggles, addiction, and public shaming, Davis shares her remarkable story.

She reveals the depths of the darkness she went through, while gracefully offering transformational healing and an end to the choking grasp of shame.

Lyrical and captivating, Home Is Within You: A Memoir of Recovery and Redemption (Girl Friday Books, 2021) recounts the author’s experience of trauma and addiction amid a highly publicized abusive relationship.

Davis is brutally honest about her experiences and generous in revealing the paths she found to wholeness through spiritual advocacy, healthy co-parenting, and a dedication to preventing generational trauma.

Home Is Within You shares one woman’s courageous journey to recovery as a mother and as a woman, and her narrative is a defense of privacy, parenthood, and autonomy.

Nadia Davis is the mother of three sons, a writer, attorney, kundalini yoga teacher and former executive director and elected official.

She graduated from U.C.L.A. with a degree in Sociology and Specialization in Juvenile Justice, Loyola Law School with a Doctorate, and has received numerous state and national awards for her work improving the lives of others, including the John F. Kennedy Jr. Public Service Award, National Womens' Political Caucus Woman of the Year, and Hispanic Woman of the Year L.U.L.A.C. Her journey of recovery from childhood and adult trauma, a near death car accident, chronic pain, public shaming, addiction and mental health is an inspiration to many. She shows readers a way out of darkness into connection with their infinite true selves and our home within. Nadia lives in Southern California happily co-parenting her three sons. For more information, please visit her website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America examines patterns in the relationships between police, politicians, drug cartels, and criminal actors. These patterns are not necessarily new, but as Flom makes clear, they operate in different ways in different venues and with regard to different types of informal arrangements. In doing a cross national comparison as well as internal comparisons within country, Flom has been able to get at some distinctions that come from the colonial past that has also led to different racial configurations in these comparative urban environments. The research also measures different levels of both police and criminal violence, to gage the kinds of relationships that may be in place between these often-opposing entities. The relationship between the police, as subnational units, and politicians also figures into the various levels of police violence. The Informal Regulations of Criminal Markets in Latin America gets at the key variables that come into play in regard to police conduct and the kinds of policies that politicians are both articulating and trying to implement—often through the police.

This is a multi-dimensional analysis that explores criminal markets from important and unique perspectives. Flom worked at the National Ministry of Security in Argentina during the course of this research, and he is able to bring his scholarly expertise as well as his own experience to the research and analysis, making this a particularly rich comparison across countries and urban centers within those countries.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Based on a unique set of previously unused sources, this book is the first study of how the Russian Empire took part in the early modern global trade in medical drugs. The extensive and detailed records kept by the Moscow court show how ingredients produced elsewhere and passed through the massive, long-distance trade network of the early modern world were finally consumed. Looking at medicine as materia medica gives us a different perspective than when looking at practitioners, texts, and ideas.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture (Amherst College Press, 2020) argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of "violence" as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that "violence" itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize "brutality" as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror--all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible

This book is available open access here.

Host Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug's safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust (MIT Press, 2022), Mikkael Sekeres--a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA's cancer drug advisory committee--tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world. It took a series of tragedies and health crises, as well as patient advocacy, for the government to take responsibility for ensuring the efficacy and safety of drugs and medical devices. Before the FDA existed, drug makers could hawk any potion, claim treatment of any ailment, and make any promise on a label. But then, throughout the twentieth century, the government was forced to take action when children were poisoned by contaminated diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, an early antibiotic contained antifreeze, a drug prescribed for morning sickness in pregnancy caused babies to be born disfigured, and access to AIDS drugs was limited to a few clinical trials while thousands died. Sekeres describes all these events against the backdrop of the contentious 2011 hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin, in which he participated as a panel member. The Avastin hearings, he says, put to the test a century of the FDA's evolution, demonstrating how its system of checks and balances works--or doesn't work.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Mexico's Human Rights Crisis (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) offers a broad survey of the current human rights issues that plague Mexico. Essays focus on the human rights consequences that flow directly from the ongoing war on drugs in the country, including violence aimed specifically at women, and the impunity that characterizes the government's activities. Contributors address the violation of the human rights of migrants, in both Mexico and the United States, and cover the domestic and transnational elements and processes that shape the current human rights crisis, from the state of Mexico's democracy to the influence of rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the decisions of Mexico's National Supreme Court of Justice. Given the scope, the contemporaneity, and the gravity of Mexico's human rights crisis, the recommendations made in the book by the editors and contributors to curb the violence could not be more urgent.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at steve@stevebeitler.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada’s rich store of historical records.

Gregory P. Marchildon is the Ontario Research Chair in Health Policy and System Design with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Are we in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance? If so, what can we learn about the present moment through the history of psychedelic experiments in the past? Matt Oram discusses contemporary debates about LSD and MDMA and brings much-needed context with his new book, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Oram talks about the role of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry as well the field of drug regulation. He underlines, too, that the history of psychedelics is a lot more complicated than researchers have previously suggested.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Mike Jay is a freelance writer and public intellectual. He is the author of over a dozen books and regularly contributes to the the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and the Literary Review. He works as a curator and exhibit designer for the Wellcome Trust in London.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Then, on a cold day during Keri's senior year, the police stopped her. Caught with a Tupperware container full of heroin, she was arrested and ushered into a holding cell, a county jail, and finally into state prison. There, in the cruel "upside down," Keri witnessed callous conditions and encountered women from all walks of life-women who would change Keri forever. Two years later, Keri walked out of prison sober and determined to make the most of the second chance she was given-an opportunity impacted by her privilege as a white woman. She scored a local reporting job and eventually moved to Texas, where she started covering nothing other than: prisons. Now, over her career as an award-winning journalist, she has dedicated herself to exposing the broken system as only an insider could. 

Not just a story about getting out and getting off drugs, this rich memoir is about finding redemption within yourself, as well as from the outside world, and the power of second chances. 

Keri Blakinger is a staff reporter for The Marshall Project, an online news source about the criminal justice system. Her Twitter handle is @keribla.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The Psychedelic Handbook: A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and DMT/Ayahuasca (Ulysses Press, 2022) is a complete manual that is accessible to anyone with an interest in these "mind-manifesting" substances. Packed with information on psilocybin, LSD, DMT/ayahuasca, mescaline/peyote, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, 5-methoxy-DMT ("the toad"), and Salvia divinorum/salvinorin A, this book is your ultimate reference for understanding the science and history of psychedelics; discovering their potential to treat depression, PTSD, substance abuse, and other disorders, as well as to increase wellness, creativity, and meditation; learning how to safely trip and explaining what we know about microdosing; and recognizing and caring for negative reactions to psychedelics.

Clinical research psychiatrist, founding figure of the American psychedelic research renaissance, and best-selling author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Dr. Rick Strassman shares his experience and perspectives as neither advocate nor foe of psychedelics in order to help readers understand the effects of these remarkable drugs.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed globally everyday. Coffee has a myriad of health benefits the overwhelming majority are which not known to the lay public and even physicians. There has been a plethora of research published in peer reviewed scientific journals attesting to the health benefits of coffee. They are mechanistic explanations and often a dose dependent benefit. Coffee drinkers have a lower risk of seven common cancers, cirrhosis of the liver, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's Disease, and many other common ailments. Astoundingly coffee drinkers, both women and men have lower total and cause specific mortality. Telomeres are caps at the end of our chromosomes that protect the chromosomes from sticking to each other and from fraying. Shorten telomere length implies accelerated cellular aging and is seen in mothers of chronically disabled children and care givers of folks with Alzheimer's Dementia. Longer telomere length is seen in individuals who exercise, meditate, are on the Mediterranean diet and those who drink coffee. Here is a mind boggling fact. Increase caffeine intake is linked with shortened telomeres, while increased coffee intake is linked with longer telomeres. Coffee has thousands of constituents and it is not caffeine that confers the health benefits.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (UNC Press, 2021), La Verne University professor Allyson Brantley describes how labor activists built a coalition that punctured the aura surrounding the iconic beer brand and created lasting change within the company. Chicano activists, union organizers, and LGBTQ protesters found common ground in aligning against Coors, and the story of their boycott movement - its failures as well as its successes - shows that activism and coalition building were vibrant and viable strategies, even during the depths of Reagan era conservatism. The story of Coors is the story of corporate union busting, New Right conservatism, and grassroots activism, all poured into one can.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-

You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————

For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Time magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme follows Monsees and Bowen as they create Juul and, in the process, go from public health visionaries and Silicon Valley wunderkinds to two of the most controversial businessmen in the country.

With rigorous reporting and clear-eyed prose that reads like a nonfiction thriller, Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul (Henry Holt, 2021) uses the dramatic rise of Juul to tell a larger story of big business, Big Tobacco, and the high cost of a product that was too good to be true.

Jamie Ducharme is a correspondent at Time magazine, where she covers health and science.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

He discusses a range of candidates that reliably grow in the right areas and which in combination might produce an effect similar to the so-called 'classic' psychedelics. These early ecstatic experiences, he suggests, contributed to the emergent concept and ritual techniques of mysticism.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This book delivers the unadulterated facts about the new legal segment of one of the world's oldest industries. In witty, accessible prose, economists Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner take readers on a whirlwind tour of the economic past, present, and future of legal and illegal weed. Drawing upon reams of data and their own experience working with California cannabis regulators since 2016, Goldstein and Sumner explain why many cannabis businesses and some aspects of legalization fail to measure up, while others occasionally get it right. Their stories stretch from before America's first medical weed dispensaries opened in 1996 through the short-term boom in legal consumption that happened during COVID-19 lockdowns. Can Legal Weed Win? is packed with unexpected insights about how cannabis markets can thrive, how regulators get the laws right or wrong, and what might happen to legal and illegal markets going forward.

Robin Goldstein is an economist and author of The Wine Trials, a controversial exposé of wine snobbery that has become the world’s best-selling guide to cheap wine. Daniel Sumner is Frank H Buck, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. Together they take readers on a tour of the economics of legal and illegal weed, showing where cannabis regulation has gone wrong and how it could do better.

John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dr. Bickford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. You can learn more about his work here. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at steve@stevebeitler.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

But in his book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (U Minnesota Press, 2019), Professor Anthony Hatch observes a feature of mass incarceration essential to its everyday function that many of us had never considered: the large-scale, persistent use of psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants, not for medical care but rather to control the behavior of incarcerated people. Making a persuasive claim drawn from his training in STS and sociology, Hatch observes how the drugs are used at the level of individual brain chemistry to commit “soul murder” with enormous systemic implications and political stakes. What’s more, the carceral elites’ use of psychotropic drugs for the purposes of pacification, not care, of their wards extends to other (often state-backed) settings of “captive America,” including the military, foster care, elder care, and international detention centers. “Is it possible for the US carceral state to exist without psychotropics,” Hatch asks. “I think we can say the answer is no.”

Silent Cells accomplishes more than the (important) tasks of documentation and analysis. It is a work of liberatory social science. The book is of a piece with Hatch’s abolitionist agenda that he pursues through his generous and generative scholarly and activist engagements, including his work as director of the Black Box teaching laboratory and chair of the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “Prison.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu .

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. Recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at noelandsteve@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Todd R. Clear is University Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. He was also the founder of Rutgers University-Newark’s New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) consortium.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and public policy, The Urge: Our History of Addiction (Penguin, 2022) illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction.

Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Cheng Kung University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton's separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s-1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else's melodrama.

Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man's incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.

Dr. Horton is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven. 

Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here.

For more information, visit: https://jay.campsite.bio/ or find him on your favorite social media platform.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. Recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at noelandsteve@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Carl Erik Fisher, author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction (Penguin Press, 2022), has expertise in law, ethics, and policy related to psychiatry and neuroscience. His personal struggle with addiction in combination with his professional expertise converges to help us understand the forces that have shaped addiction throughout our history. On this episode of POTC, Carl and Yael discuss the social contingencies and historical contexts that lead to addiction, substance use disorder, and co-morbid mental health issues. Join us in this episode to learn more about commonly held beliefs about addiction, prescribers’ blind spots to certain medications, and much much more!

Yael Schonbrun is a licensed clinical psychologist who wears a number of professional hats: she a small private practice specializing in evidence-based relationship therapy, she’s an assistant professor at Brown University, and she writes for nonacademic audiences about working parenthood.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (U Chicago Press, 2021), Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The oral histories associated with Opioid Reckoning will be archived with the University of Minnesota's Social Welfare History Archives. Learn more at the Minnesota Opioid Project.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Empires of Vice won the Giovanni Sartori Best Book Award, Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association, and got honourable mentions from the committees for the Charles Taylor Book Award, Interpretive Methodologies and Methods section of APSA, and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association.

This is the fifth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to featuring an exemplary monograph in interpretive political or social science. The others are Natasha Behl on Gendered Citizenship, Lisa Wedeen on Authoritarian Apprehensions, James Scott on Against the Grain, and Sarah Wiebe on Everyday Exposure. To download or stream episodes in the series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.

Nick Cheesman is an associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The use and trade in illegal drugs is a global phenomenon. It is viewed by governments as a significant social, legal, and health problem that shows no signs of abating. The key questions explored throughout this book are what governments and other bodies of social regulation should do about illicit drugs, including drug policies aimed at improving health and reducing harm, drug laws and regulation, and the role of research and values in policy development. Seeing policy formation as dynamic iterative interactions between actors, ideas, institutions, and networks of policy advocates, the book explores how policy problems are constructed and policy solutions selected, and how these processes intersect with research evidence and values. This then animates the call to democratise drug policy and bring about inclusive meaningful participation in policy development in order to provide the opportunity for better, more effective, and value-aligned drug policies.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of drug policy from a number of disciplines, including public health, sociology, criminology, and political science.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its "drug wars"--until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America's divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.

Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.

By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself--ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.

David Herzberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo is also the author of Happy Pills in America from Milltown to Prozac. David is also the co-editor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. 

Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Scott Cunningham is a professor of economics at Baylor University. He researches topics including mental healthcare, sex work, abortion and drug policy. He is active on Twitter, has a blog on Substack, and frequently conducts workshops on causal inference methods. A complete web version of his book is available here.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions probes the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.

Adam Lehrer speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about addiction and class, our fetish for the artist flirting with death, communing with his heroes, his experience of the opioid crisis, and the role for art criticism in unraveling these issues. Lehrer reads a chapter on Darby Crash from Communions.

Adam Lehrer is a writer and art critic, but he’s also a former heroin addict himself. He blogs at Safety Propaganda.

• A Statement On My Severed Relationship With The Quietus
• Art's Moral Fetish
• Darby Crash
• Frisk, film based on a novel by Dennis Cooper
• Dash Snow
• Beautiful Boy, film based on memoirs by David and Nic Sheff
• Zoë Tamerlis Lund

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Why?

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Hachette, 2021) is the latest attempt to answer that question.

Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve several distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication.

From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with case studies and science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Jonathan Morris is research professor in Modern History at the University of Hertfordshire, and Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. He is an historian of consumption and consumer societies. Jonathan has also published Coffee: The Comprehensive Guide to the Bean, the Beverage and the Industry; and is a judge for the Specialty Coffee Association's Best New Product Awards. Instagram and Twitter: @coffeehistoryJM. Listen to Jonathan’s “A History of Coffee."

Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The Opioid Epidemic in the United States: Missed Opportunities and Policy Failures (Routledge, 2021) examines the origins, development, and rise of the opioid epidemic in the United States from the perspective of the public policy process. The authors, political scientists Kant Patel and Mark Rushefsky, discuss institutional features of the American political system that impact the making of public policy, arguing that the fragmentation of that system hinders the ability to coherently address policy problems, taking the opioid epidemic as an example. The book begins with a brief historical examination of the history of the problem of opioid addiction and crises in the United States and public policy responses to past crises, but the main focus is on the current national public health emergency.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

 Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Voeten interprets drug cartels as ultra-capitalist predatory corporations thriving in a neoliberal, globalized economy. They use similar branding and marketing strategies as legitimate business. He also looks at the anthropological, individual level and explains how people can become killers. Voeten compares Mexican sicarios, West African child soldiers and Western jihadis and sees the same logic of cruelty that facilitates perpetrating 'inhumane' acts that are in fact very human.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

With ethnographic attention to the encounters between patients, clinicians, and bureaucrats, the volume shows that OST sustains the realities it is meant to address. The chapters follow one particular patient through complex clinical and legal battles as they fight to achieve a better quality of life. The study provides ethnographic insight that captures the individual, experiential aspects of addiction treatment, and how these experiences find a register within different domains of treatment and policy, including the familial, social, legal, and clinical.

Offering a rare view of addiction treatment in a Scandinavian welfare state, this book will be of interest to scholars of medical and legal anthropology and sociology, and others with an interest in drug policy and addiction treatment.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

El Chapo waged ruthless wars against his rivals and former allies, plunging vast areas of Mexico into unprecedented levels of violence, even as many in his home state of Sinaloa continued to view him as a hero. This unputdownable book, written by a great new talent, brings El Chapo’s exploits into a focus that previous profiles have failed to capture. Hurowitz digs in deep beyond the legends and delves into El Chapo’s life and legacy—not just the hunt for him, revealing some of the most dramatic and often horrifying moments of his notorious career, including the infamous prison escapes, brutal murders, multi-million-dollar government payoffs, and the paranoia and narcissism that led to his downfall. From the evolution of organized crime in Mexico to the militarization of the drug war to the devastation wrought on both sides of the border by the introduction of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, this book is a gripping and comprehensive work of investigative, on-the-ground reporting.

Interview by Pamela Fuentes Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University-NYC campus and editor of New Books Network en español

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country’s relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

She's appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, Salon and Texas Monthly, where she is a writer-at-large. Today we are talking about her recent story “In Mobile City Everybody Knows Your Name” from August 2021 Texas Monthly. A very fresh piece.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines.

French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts.

Examining a range of influences on the wine industry, wine trade, and wine itself, the book explores religion, economics, politics, revolution, and war, as well as climate and vine diseases. French Wine is the essential reference on French wine for collectors, consumers, sommeliers, and industry professionals.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Whites and Reds illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, and, of course, the growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries. Because wine was domesticated by virtue of imperialism, its history reveals many of the instabilities and peculiarities of the Russian and Soviet empires. Over two centuries, the production and consumption patterns of peripheral territories near the Black Sea and in the Caucasus became a hallmark of Russian and Soviet civilizational identity and cultural refinement. Wine in Russia was always more than something to drink.

Stephen Bittner is Professor of History at Sonoma State University. In addition to Whites and Reds, he is the author of The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw (2008) and the editor of Dmitrii Shepilov’s memoir, The Kremlin’s Scholar (2007). 

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The author presents compelling new evidence for advancing an understanding of technological innovation in antagonist contexts, as well as the symbiotic and co-evolutionary character of the process of technological innovation in the War on Drugs. This book will appeal both to practitioners and scholars interested in the War on Drugs and the production of technologies in outlaw contexts.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

But Westermann's book is broader than its title suggests. At the heart of Westermann's examination is the way in which commonly held understandings of masculinity fueled violence--symbolic, sexual and physical.  He explores the way hypermasculinity led to soldiers to humiliate Jews and other victims as a way of feminizing them. He examines the extensive trophy-taking practiced by Germans in the East. He outlines how widespread sexual violence was. And more.

Westermann uses a wide variety of primary sources ranging from photos to diaries to interviews to understand the behaviors and beliefs of perpetrators. It is a remarkably challenging book to read. But it is a necessary one.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Zampini, G. F., Buck-Matthews, E., Killick, A., & Salter, L. (2021). "We, ourselves and us: Tensions of identity, intersubjectivity and positionality stemming from the people and dancefloors project." International Journal of Drug Policy, 103096.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

On every page of Las Biuty Queens: Stories (Astra House, 2021), Iván Monalisa's unique narrative talent is on display as he/she artfully transforms the language of the streets, making it his/her own -- rich with rhythm and debauchery. This bold new collection positions Ojeda as a fresh and necessary voice within the canon of world literature.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The book is based on multi-sited anthropological research in Southeast Asia, Europe and the US, and presents insights from collaborative and contrasting analysis. Hardon brings new perspectives to debates across drug policy studies, pharmaceutical cultures and regulation, science and technology studies, and youth and precarity in post-industrial societies.

This book is available open access here. 

Geert Slabbekorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Through analysis of 30 years of newspaper content, Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate (Routledge, 2021) examines the social and cultural contours of this heated debate and explores how proponents and critics of the controversial social issues of drug policy and incarceration frame their arguments in mass media. Additionally, it looks at the contemporary public debate on the "War on Drugs" through an analysis of readers' comments drawn from the comments sections of online news articles.

Through a discussion of the findings and their implications, the book illuminates the ways in which ideas about race, politics, society, and crime, and forms of evidence and statistics such as rates of arrest and incarceration or the financial costs of drug policies and incarceration are advanced, interpreted, and contested. Further, the book will bring to light how people form a sense of their racial selves in debates over policy issues tied to racial inequality such as the "War on Drugs" through narratives that connect racial categories to concepts such as innocence, criminality, free will, and fairness. Debating the Drug War offers readers a variety of concepts and theoretical perspectives that they can use to make sense of these vital issues in contemporary society.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Increasing state regulations and interventions led to the proliferation of a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural ‘embeddedness’ of criminal anarchy in Dutch society.

Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, Drug Smuggler Nation: Narcotics and the Netherlands, 1920-95 (Manchester UP, 2021) investigates the deeper and hidden grounds of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies.

Geert Slabbekorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XIII tried to remove them from the city altogether. More than just a local study, this book shows how the popular classes often worked together with local elites to shape policies that affected them.

This joyful conversation lingers on the delights of the archive, a variety of historical methodologies, and the contours of the historical craft.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America.

This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism’s excesses and make it work for everyone.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Kenneth V. Faunce's new book Heavy Traffic: The Global Drug Trade in Historical Perspective (Oxford UP, 2020) helps students to understand globalization not as an inevitable or natural process, but instead as one that is created by and responds to a variety of human motivations. Examining the international trade in coffee, alcohol, opium, heroin, and cocaine, which have had a significant impact on economies and societies in countries around the world, it offers insight into globalization as a historical process, thereby helping to make sense of today's interconnected world, where products grown or produced in only a handful of places circulate widely, with varying impacts on local populations.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Intoxicating Zion: A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel (Stanford UP, 2020) is the first book to tell the story of hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Trafficking, use, and regulation; race, gender, and class; colonialism and nation-building all weave together in Haggai Ram's social history of the drug from the 1920s to the aftermath of the 1967 War. The hashish trade encompassed smugglers, international gangs, residents, law enforcers, and political actors, and Ram traces these flows through the interconnected realms of cross-border politics, economics, and culture. Hashish use was and is a marker of belonging and difference, and its history offers readers a unique glimpse into how the modern Middle East was made.

Haggai Ram is an historian of the modern Middle East at Ben Gurian University of Negev. His teaching and research focus on the social and cultural history of Iran, Palestine-Israel, and the Levant region.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter’s Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia University Press, 2014) focuses on this sub-culture of surfers who started moving drugs in hollowed out surfboards and suitcases with false bottoms but soon used large cargo ships to move tons of marijuana worth millions of dollars. As the scammers linked up with American veterans of the war in Vietnam and with the Thai, Chinese, and Japanese criminal underworld, the operations became large international conspiracies, making fortunes for some and ruining the lives of others. The story takes some surprising twists and turns, with scruffy surfers and hippies making their way from the Hippy Trail in Afghanistan and the beaches of Bali to massive mansions in Montecito and Tahiti, but also with some of its subjects winding up in a Thai, Vietnamese, and American jails. In the most tragic chapter, Maguire and Ritter’s research reveals how a surfer from Seal Beach, California, was tortured in the Khmer Rouge’s infamous S-21 prison before Comrade Duch ordered his brutally murder, just weeks ahead of the Vietnamese invasion which ended the genocidal regime. Using oral history techniques and Mike Ritter’s numerous connections from his previous career as a “scammer”, Thai Stick is an engaging tale of tropical adventure, easy riches, and devastating loss, but also an insightful economic history that links Southeast Asia to the United States.

Peter Maguire earned his doctorate in American History at Columbia University. His dissertation focused on the Nuremberg trials and American legal history in the context of the Cold War, becoming his first book, Law and War: An American Story (Columbia University Press, 2001). In the 1990s he went to Cambodia where he reported on the tail end of the civil war and the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, even helping to track down and interview some of the guards from the Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison in Phnom Penh. In 2005 he published Facing Death in Cambodia, also with Columbia University Press. He has published widely on a range of subjects. His work has appeared in periodicals ranging from The New York Review of Books and The Diplomat to The Surfers Journal. He has taught at a variety of institutions including Columbia, Bard, and the University of North Carolina Wilmington on topics ranging from human rights law and the war on drugs to the history of surfing. Mike Ritter spent years in the smuggling world, only to face federal charges long after his retirement as a scammer.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Campbell tunes readers’ ears to the politics of evidence, the health effects of stigma, and the racism of false medical claims as she listens, amid a century of contention, to the quietness of “undone science.” As evidence, this intrepid book uses visual culture, vernacular documents, oral histories, and (expertly explained) scientific publications. It connects American histories at federal and local levels with the UK and especially Scotland. And it relates medical communities and activist networks without imposing false divides or drawing caricatures of either. The book builds on Campbell’s four previous books on the history of addiction, gendering knowledge, and social theory from the position of Science and Technology Studies.

The interview was a collaborative project among participants in the Vanderbilt University course, American Medicine & the World. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Irreverent, cynical, and surprisingly erudite, Chas Smith tells us time and time again that he hates being a surf journalist and despise the surfing industry. “I was supposed to have waved goodbye to this shallow end of the swimming pool years ago. I was supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter by now, spilling valuable words on the plight of Syrian refugees while dodging bullets. Or maybe in the White House briefing room being shouted down by the press secretary for speaking truth to power. Or front row at the Fendi show in Paris, across from Anna Wintour … anywhere but here.” But there he is. Bopping about Southern California’s heart of the surfing industry. Driving from surf industry event to surf industry event, surrounded by increasingly desperate surf industry figures grinding their jaws and trying to get into the bathroom to snort a few lines. All the while, he sardonically observes the surfing industry’s free fall as he gulps down yet another vodka cocktail. Doing his best to find meaning in perhaps the shallowest subculture we could imagine. He is a detached and disgusted observer of the surf industry’s apocalypse who delivers his dispatches in insightful and often hilarious prose. Even if you don't know which side on the surfboard to wax, you’ll find it hard not to be drawn into Chas Smith’s history of surfing.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Michelle Newhart and William Dolphin's The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience (Routledge, 2018) takes the first comprehensive look at how patients negotiate incomplete medicalization and what their experiences reveal about our relationship with this controversial plant as it is incorporated into biomedicine. Is cannabis used similarly to other medicines? Drawing on interviews with midlife patients in Colorado, a state at the forefront of medical cannabis implementation, this book explores the practical decisions individuals confront about medical use, including whether cannabis will work for them; the risks of registering in a state program; and how to handle questions of supply, dosage, and routines of use.

Individual stories capture how patients redefine and reclaim cannabis use as legitimate―individually and collectively―and grapple with an inherently political identity. These experiences help illustrate how stigma, prejudice, and social change operate.

By positioning cannabis use within sociological models of medical behavior, Newhart and Dolphin provide a wide-reaching, theoretically informed analysis of the issue that expands established concepts and provides new insight on medical cannabis and how state programs work.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Luna examines the entanglements, both intimate and financial, that define their lives. Using the concept of obligar, she delves into the connections that tie sex workers to their families, their clients, their pimps, the missionaries, and the drug dealers—and to the guilt, power, and comfort of faith. Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border (University of Texas Press, 2020) scrutinizes not only la zona and the people who work to survive there, but also Reynosa itself—including the influences of the United States—adding nuance and new understanding to the current Mexico-US border crisis.

The book has been recently awarded the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology for its “vibrant ethnographic detail and deft work across conceptual fields.”

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Sarah Luna is the Kathryn A. McCarthy Assistant Professor in Women's Studies in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Tufts University, with a focus on issues of sexual labor, migration, race, borderlands, and queer studies.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured on City & Society, entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography, and Anthropology News.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of "good" citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public.

Dr. Jennifer J. Carroll is a medical anthropologist, research scientist, and subject matter expert on substance use and public health interventions to prevent overdose. She earned her PhD in cultural anthropology and her MPH in epidemiology at the University of Washington. She currently holds appointments as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel’s book. It’s not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts.

Israel also wrestles for a future she hopes to make for herself and her young sons, one full of grace and gratitude. “You have to find a gift in every hard thing.” That’s advice that Israel once received. And her book, in which she wrestles with the pain and grief and beauty of life, is her gift to us.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

A Spiritual Pathway to Recovery from Addiction: A Physician’s Journey of Discovery (The Meadows Farm, Inc.) is the memoir of a group of physicians going through an intensive rehab program for addiction to drugs and alcohol. It is presented as a collection of their stories and the lessons they encountered during their time together.

As they proceed on a course of personal self-discovery, they share their past experiences, fears, and hopes. As the lessons of recovery begin to sink in, their thinking and behavior change from that of a self-absorbed ego-driven wreck to someone capable of changing their life for the better, without drugs or alcohol.

In his memoir, Dr. Meadows shares his insight into the spiritual pathway to recovery from addiction.

Linville Meadows, M.D. is an Honors graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and studied at Duke University.

For more information about Dr. Meadows and his book, please visit https://www.spiritualpathwaytorecovery.com/welcome

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website at https://drelizabethcronin.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (University of Chicago Press) is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us.

Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life.

Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live.

Joe Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

As this team of researchers and mental health professionals revive the field of psychedelic science, they are haunted by the past and by one person in particular: psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with people working on scientific psychedelia, Giffort shows how today’s researchers tell stories about Leary as an “impure” scientist and perform his antithesis to address a series of lingering dilemmas that threaten to rupture their budding legitimacy. Acid Revival presents new information about the so-called psychedelic renaissance and highlights the cultural work involved with the reassembly of dormant areas of medical science.

This colorful and accessible history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of psychedelic medicine is infused with intriguing narratives and personalities—a story for popular science aficionados as well as for scholars of the history of science and medicine.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky (Haymarket, 2020) explores the gendered inequalities that situate women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs in one of the most impoverished regions in the US.

Lesly-Marie Buer is a harm reductionist and medical anthropologist in Knoxville, TN.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. She is interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. Lappas' work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership.

Lappas’s book places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Blending memoir, biography, and original reporting, Schwarz examines her attempts to preserve her authentic life and decide what is most important in it. Attention: A Love Story (Pantheon, 2020) will resonate with readers who want to determine their own minds, away from the siren call of their screens.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

On Drugs (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) explores Australian philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of addiction, which begins when he is a student at the University of Sydney and escalates into a life-threatening compulsion.

In a memoir by turns insightful and outlandish, Fleming combines meticulous observation with a keen sense of the absurdity of his actions. He describes the intricacies of drug use and acquisition, the impact of drugs on the intellect and emotions, and the chaos that emerges as his tightly managed existence unravels into hospitalisations, arrests and family breakdown. His account is accompanied by searching reflections on his childhood, during which he developed acute obsessive compulsive disorder and became fixated on the rituals of martial arts, music-making and bodybuilding.

In confronting the pathos and comedy of his drug use in Sydney, On Drugs also opens out into meditations on the self and its deceptions, religion, masculinity, mental illness, and the tortuous path to recovery.

On Drugs is a uniquely Australian experience of a universal quest for oblivion.

Dr Matthew Thompson is a literary journalism specialist recently with the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia but now based in the USA. Dr Thompson has a special focus on the conflict areas of the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. He is the author of MAYHEM, Running With The Blood God, and My Colombian Death. For more information visit https://matthewthompsonwriting.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020), Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu consider the case for using drugs to alter our love relationships. Earp, who is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and and Health Policy at Yale University, and Savulescu, the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, note that drugs that alter sexual desire and attachment are already available, although are restricted or illegal. What is needed, they argue, is more research into the interpersonal effects of drugs, and more discussion of the ethics of their use for non-medical purposes. Let’s turn to a fascinating interview on a complex topic with no easy answers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Laurence Monnais is a Professor of History at the University of Montreal.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This collection of seventeen essays focuses on the mythologies and representations of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption (or rejection) in the literature and culture of the US South. Picken and Dischinger argue in the introduction that the relationship between the US South and alcohol has been overdetermined in popular imagination. The region is simultaneously known for its “dry” counties, temperance laws, and religious teetotalers as well as “hard­drinking authors, bootleggers, moonshiners, and distillers, to name but a few.” Picken and Dischinger interrogate the assumption that alcohol consumption is a community-building activity, arguing that drinking together, like eating together, often obscures underlying and persistent inequalities of race, class, and gender. Representations of Southern drinking culture tend to reify rather than resist hegemonic power structures. The collection explores and deconstructs these contradictory stereotypes through analysis of literary, historical, and pop culture representations of drink and drinking. Essays focus on a variety of texts and subjects from female blues singers, male country musicians, and Mardi Gras cocktails to the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and John Kennedy Toole – among many other representations in literature and film.

Conor Picken is an Assistant Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Compassio Learning Community at Bellarmine University. His teaching and research encompass 20th- and 21st-century American Literature, southern literature, modernism, and social change.

Matthew Dischinger is a Lecturer at Georgia State University. Matt works at the intersections of American Studies, Southern Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. His research explores contemporary U.S. Multi-Ethnic literatures, literary melancholia, and speculative aesthetics.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), Travis Lupick explains the concept of harm reduction as a crucial component of a city’s response to the drug crisis. It tells the story of a grassroots group of addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who waged a political street fight for two decades to transform how the city treats its most marginalized citizens.

Over the past twenty-five years, this group of residents from Canada's poorest neighborhood organized themselves in response to the growing number of overdose deaths and demanded that addicts be given the same rights as any other citizen; against all odds, they eventually won. But just as their battle came to an end, fentanyl arrived and opioid deaths across North America reached an all-time high. The "genocide" in Vancouver finally sparked government action.

Twenty years later, as the same pattern plays out in other cities, there is much that advocates for reform can learn from Vancouver's experience. Fighting for Space tells that story—including case studies in Ohio, Florida, New York, California, Massachusetts, and Washington state—with the same passionate fervor as the activists whose tireless work gave dignity to addicts and saved countless lives.

Manuel Arredondo is a Clinical Social Worker and Public Health advocate in Oakland, CA.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

After recounting the prehistory of naloxone―the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of “reanimatology”―Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists―whom she calls the “protagonists” of her story―Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Benjamin Breen is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Maziyar Ghiabi is a Lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

David Farber is Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas.

Matthew Johnson teaches history at Texas Tech University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Tobacco has left an indelible mark on the American South, shaping the land and culture throughout the twentieth century. In the last few decades, advances in technology and shifts in labor and farming policy have altered the way of life for tobacco farmers: family farms have largely been replaced by large-scale operations dependent on hired labor, much of it from other shores. However, the mechanical harvester and the H-2A guestworker did not put an end to tobacco culture but rather sent it in new directions and accelerated the change that has always been part of the farmer’s life.

In When Tobacco Was King, Bennett examines the agriculture of the South’s original staple crop in the Old Bright Belt—a diverse region named after the unique bright, or flue-cured, tobacco variety it spawned. He traces the region’s history from Emancipation to the abandonment of federal crop controls in 2004 and highlights the transformations endured by blacks and whites, landowners and tenants, to show how tobacco farmers continued to find meaning and community in their work despite these drastic changes.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Emily Dufton is a drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Jeanette M. Fregulia is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. Jeanette’s research focuses on merchants and material, cultural, and social exchanges between early modern Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as on the role of gender in the history of Mediterranean exchanges. In addition to PhD in Renaissance Italian History, she holds a Master’s Degree in Middle East Area Studies from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and continues to actively pursue research in the history of the Middle East and Islam.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Vivian Percy's new book Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic (Radius Books, 2018) is the narration of a mother and daughter’s long painful journey from tragedy, through opioid addiction, toward redemption. Its cautionary tale sheds light on drug dependency, suicidal depression, sexual exploitation and misdiagnosed mind disorders. We discover that these are symptoms of much larger societal issues: the decimation of the family, childhood traumatization, and a culture devoid of human values. These pages unmask a mental health industry focused more on profits than people, which regularly betrays those in its keeping, and the complicity of Big Pharma and insurance companies in these schemas. We see firsthand the abuse, negligence and illicit activities going on in psychiatric and rehab facilities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In his book, The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience (Canongate Books, 2017) he sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control.

Evans’ exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey drawing on personal experience, interviews, and readings from ancient and modern philosophers. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and thought-provoking journey through under-explored terrain, which Evans creatively maps out like a tour through a festival, with stops at the major pavilions along the way. [complete with a cutely drawn festival map at the front of the book]

Jules Evans is policy director at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which was published in 19 countries and was a Times Book of the Year. Evans has written for The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Spectator and WIRED and is a BBC New Generation Thinker. He also runs the London Philosophy Club, the world’s biggest philosophy club.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Yet “religions” (if that’s the right word, and I think it is) have appeared in modern times among people who (dare I say) think pretty much the way I do–and perhaps you do as well. How does this happen? Well, Ann Taves, has written a wonderful book that attempts to answer this question, and in a way that is very respectful of the new religions she studies. It’s called Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (Princeton University Press, 2016) and I highly recommend it to you.

In the interview, we spend most of our time talking about Bill Wilson and the emergence of Alcoholics Anonymous, a “spiritual path” (to use her excellent phrase) that I myself have walked. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Macy offers readers a familiar story of industrial exploitation and economic distress in central Appalachia, only, instead of focusing on the coal industry’s role in this history, Macy describes exploitation that resulted from big pharmaceutical companies selling large quantities of prescription opioids in central Appalachia. Building on the work of authors such as Sam Quinones (Dreamland), Anna Lembke (Drug Dealer, MD), and Keith Wailoo (Pain), Macy argues that the sale and use of prescription opioids increased in part after medical professionals began to push the idea that new standards for the assessment and treatment of pain were needed in the 1990s.

The book looks critically not just at the over-prescription of opioids, but, paraphrasing Lembke, Macy also suggests that readers think critically about the “broader American narrative that promotes all pills as a quick fix” (136). As you’ll hear Macy say at the end of the podcast, she wants readers to think about “being better consumers and better listeners who are open to what’s happening on the ground.”

Chelsea Jack is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. She focuses on sociocultural and medical anthropology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This book explains cannabis in a clear and accessible manner. Parts of this book could be used in any Sociology course discussion about drugs, and the book would be a good addition or supplement to any course around the social context of drugs or racialization and history of policies.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dr. Edward Khantzian is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and past president of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. He is distinguished scholar, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, specializing in addictions for more than fifty years.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City and Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Enter Charles Dederich. In 1958, Dederich, a veteran of AA and ex-drug addict, decided that addicts should take their treatment into their own hands, much like Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had done with AA in the late 1930s. He took what he learned in AA, adapted it, and created a long-term residential “therapeutic community” expressly for addicts and run by addicts. He called it Synanon, and with it he started what Claire D. Clark calls “the recovery revolution.”

In her terrific book, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2017), Clark tells the story of Dederich and those who followed him (literally and chronologically) in trying to find a way to treat narcotics addiction. It’s a tale of ebbs and flows, successes and failures, enthusiasm and exhaustion lasting sixty years. Clark makes clear that the “recovery revolution” is not over by any means–we are still groping toward a good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing (Soft Skull Press, 2013) includes personal, autobiographical reflections as well as detailed cultural and political histories of the many interactions between drugs and religion, specifically Islam. From the beginning of the book the reader expects the story to culminate in the author’s experiential encounter with a visionary plant brew called ayahuasca, indigenous to South America and now popular throughout the globe, as a portal into the spiritual world. The twists and turns leading up to this encounter give the book some amount of narrative suspense, but it’s a page-turner in any case. The reader, during her journey through Knight’s narrative, will learn about how coffee was initially banned by Muslims and how socio-economics allowed wine–although explicitly forbidden by authoritative religious texts–a status over marijuana, which was not explicitly forbidden but still seen as a drug for the lower classes. The reader also learns about philosophical debates over authority to interpret Islamic metaphysical doctrines and how the world of academia functions. That the book’s subtitle includes writing makes itself clear throughout the text as well, and readers who enjoy reflecting on the recreational as well as existential dramas of written language will find themselves gripped by Knight’s process. He wrote the book, moreover, during his transition into a PhD program in religious studies, after already making a name for himself as a successful author of several books. Because of the liminal space from which he writes Tripping with Allah, as well as its artistic precision, the book should appeal to broad audiences and Islamic studies specialists alike.

Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

This is one of the many thing I learned from reading Eugene Raikhel‘s fascinating book Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016). An anthropologist, Raikhel tells us the tale of how the Soviet discipline of “narcology”–the diagnosis and treatment of addiction– evolved during Soviet times and how it adapted after the USSR fell. I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that Russians treated and continue to treat alcoholism quite differently that we do in the U.S., though that’s changing (AA has arrived in Russia, something we also discuss). Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The image we get from the media and the law enforcement of meth use is as cooked as Walter White’s meth. In actual fact, very few peoples use meth (even in “Methland,” aka the Midwest) and most of those who do are not dysfunctional “tweekers.” This is not to say that meth isn’t a problem; it is, just like cocaine, heroin, abused prescription medications, and, above all, alcohol. But it isn’t as different from these “normal” drugs as the media and authorities would have us believe. It’s a powerful stimulant. It’s used for a variety of purposes, some of them having nothing to do with getting high (as a stimulant, meth is especially attractive to those who work long, hard hours). Some people can use it without acting like or appearing to be “tweekers.” The typical meth user is employed, acne-free, has a mouth full of teeth and takes care of his or her children. Just like the typical user of Adderall or any number of legal and widely prescribed amphetamines. Yet, according to the media and authorities, there is a “meth epidemic” that we should all fear as if it were something absolutely unprecedented. And, because meth is so particularly dangerous (so the line goes), we should throw all the meth users in jail forthwith. No thought is given to harm-reduction. As Linnemann shows, our twisted, distorted understanding of meth is beyond hypocritical; it’s positively harmful, particularly for the users and their families.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Blitzed details how Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theo Morell, administered vitamin concoctions and hormone injections common to athletic doping to pump up Hitler’s ailing body during the war years. Though Hitler had promised to cleanse the nation of drug abuse, he himself became utterly dependent on drugs to survive. Military defeat and destruction took their toll on Nazism embodied, Morell increasingly looked towards methamphetamine and oxycodone (Eukodal) to keep Hitler wake and alert during the last apocalyptic years of the Reich. In so doing, Morell himself built an impressive medical empire based on quack medicines and bought political access. Ohler shows how in the final months of the conflict, Morell’s supplies of drugs ran out, exposing Hitler’s frail body to his inner circle with health crises, symptoms of chemical withdraw, and fits of madness.

James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In perhaps the most poignant contribution to feminist research agendas, across disciplines, Johnson concludes our interview by explaining her unique metaphor of refraction. Noting the notorious difficulty of seeing and articulating discursive power structures, Johnson recognises that the ability to articulate what is being said to us or about us, and identifying who is doing that saying, is a cornerstone to feminist scholarship as it allows us to identify against whom can we protest, deny, and challenge. Her metaphor of refraction is thus a way of thinking about material objects, once they have become tropes, such as the HPV vaccine across national contexts, and being able to see it as a prism that refracts the discourses within which it was originally entangled. This image of refraction forces us to think of a material object like the HPV vaccine as creating a spectrum of visible actors, concerns and values. And it is these visible things that help us to articulate discourses – which then allow us to protest and possibly erase their problematic power structures.

Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Foreshadowing our contemporary moment in which the Rio Grande Valley is associated with criminality, violence, and drug trafficking, Diaz argues, (1) that it was the creation and enforcement of national borders by the U.S. and Mexican states that led to smuggling by establishing a market for contraband goods; and (2) that border people were proactive agents in negotiating and obstructing state efforts to regulate and criminalize activities that were common practice and essential to life along the U.S.-Mexico border.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJ’s dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

As Sam Quinones explains in his remarkable book Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), the Oxycontin crime wave was an early moment in the emergence of a full-blown Opiate epidemic in the United States. For many young doctors working in “pain management in the 90s and naughts, Oxycontin was remarkable indeed. It gave them just what their predecessors in the eternal fight against pain lacked: a supposedly non-addictive opium-based medication that they could prescribe far and wide without fear of hooking their patients on it. And with all the best intentions, prescribe it far and wide these doctors did.

But it wasn’t non-addictive at all; masses of patients become dependent. And not only them. Drug-users learned that “Oxy” afforded a wonderful high, and it became highly coveted “on the street.” The rub was that this new “wonder drug” was either hard to get–unless you had access to a “Pill Mill”–and/or very expensive. So Oxycontin addicts got desperate. Some, like the ones the press was screaming about in Boston, stole the drug from the local CVS and the like. Most, however, turned to an old drug that was easier to get and cheaper: Black Tar Heroin from Mexico. In the wake of Oxycontin, Black Tar spread from the Southwest across much of the U.S., even to places like Western Massachusetts, where I live now and the heroin epidemic is in full, tragic swing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Medical Monopoly charts the history of property rights over medicines at the dawn of the 19th century through World War I. The important broader transition here is that while before the Civil War–at least in medicine–patents were seen as tantamount to granting problematic monopoly, by the end of the 19th century they were understood as the best available regulatory mechanism for preventing more problematic imitation. Whereas patent medicines had previously been linked to quackery, the emergence and rapid expansion of the “ethical” pharmaceutical industry after the Civil War was due to its adherents advocating for more effective regulation of commerce within medicine. Rather than reverting to secrecy, firms began to circulate and publish information on new remedies and the results of studies to physicians. As the explosion of new medicines remained at pace with the boom of consumer goods in the late 19th century, patenting and corporate investment in monopolistic practices became understood as a mechanism to advance the public good. The expansion of laboratory science and norms of chemical manufacturing in the 20th century only bolstered this union further.Medical Monopoly is a fascinating and important read that people interested in medical policy should pay attention to.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In her excellent book Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective (Left Coast Press, 2012), Lisa L. Gezon, Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology, University of West Georgia, analyzes the production and consumption of Khat on the island nation of Madagascar. Taking a cultural, medical, and anthropological approach, Gezon looks at the use of khat in pharmacological, cultural, political, economic and environmental contexts.As a student of plant drugs/medicines/intoxicants, her summary of the manner in which khat’s effects have been mischaracterized by many so called experts has echoes of reefer madness inspired characterizations of cannabis and its users.Like so many drugs, khat is a powerful force in the local economy, and the factors that have allowed khat to provide income for small hold farmers rather than becoming part of a centralized and commercial monoculture are worthy of further analysis.

In addition to teaching me about the specifics of khat consumption in Madagascar, the background material provided a great primer on CMA approaches to substance use, as well as on the history, pharmacology and policy surrounding Catha edulis.

I have been thinking a great deal about the economic forces that influence the consumption and availability of drugs.There are similarities and differences between poppy production in Afghanistan or the Golden Triangle, cannabis production in the Emerald Triangle, and khat production in Madagascar.The peaceful and widely distributed economic benefits of smallholder farming on Madagascar make this study particularly fascinating.

Lisa Gezon was a pleasure to interview, and was very patient with my still developing interviewing skills.Her research included extensive field work as well as research, and the book is almost encyclopedic in its synthesis of the literature, the findings of her studies as well as her excellent and insightful analysis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Generic opens with evocative stories about the legal and scientific crises and personal tragedies wrought by tense relations between medical science and industry. We then learn about early debates over international standardization of chemical names and the emergence of firms that marketed generics as a specific kind of product that were a part of the very same consumer-driven value system their proponents wanted to replace. These anonymous drugs prompted research that could establish sufficient similarity between them, while at the same time provoking disputes of authority between physicians and pharmacists that produced a new regulatory regime and standards which were embodied and shaped by emerging large, bureaucratic health care providers. In the end, the story of generics as champions of access and affordability in an age of elusive therapeutics and ‘me-too’ drugs designed to cash in on innovation is complicated by the global changes in production and trade they have wrought. Are ‘global’ drugs perceived as ‘universal’? Jeremy’s book will promote discussion and thought about the medical mundanities we so often take for granted. Generic takes the philosophically-inflected themes of the history of science into a realm of pressing urgency, and reveals fascinating parallels that actually make it more enjoyable for a broad audience.

This interview is the first half of a pair of new books on the pharmaceutical industry; be on the lookout for my next interview with Joseph M. Gabriel about his new book: Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

According to Sharon K. Farber‘s Hungry for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties (Aronson, 2013), our desire for ecstasy is first and foremost a psychic defense that protects us against on-going or anticipated trauma. When reality (as we perceive it, which, of course, is not always or even often accurately) becomes “too much” for us, we seek refuge in altered states of consciousness. The most attractive of these, of course, is ecstasy. It makes everything frightening just “go away.” Sometimes, the ecstatic state appears spontaneously. More often, however, especially in our culture, it is consciously induced by self-harming and drug-taking. For most of us, this sort of self-medication “works.” For a large minority, however, it ends in addiction and death. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s book trace this second crisis, paying special attention to Japanese colonial rule in Korea and in the Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT) in southern Manchuria as Korea became the “global capital of morphine” and the KLT port handled “the second-highest volume of banned drugs in the world.” The third moral crisis brings us to the end of Moral Nation and the thick of the “hiropon age” of the 1950s, when methamphetamine production and usage skyrocketed in postwar Japan and the nation saw its first full-fledged domestic drug plight. Kingsberg locates a changing cast of “moral entrepreneurs” who motivated these three crises, shedding light on the formative roles of merchants and mass society in this chapter of global narcotic history. It is a wonderful, meticulously researched book that contributes significantly to the histories of Japan, of drugs, and of global politics. Enjoy!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Reading the book made me think that they were almost outside the scope of the podcast; this is not organised crime but the occasional foray into crime. It is also the story of invincible young men taking on the impossible in an often amateurish manner and succeeding. However, as Maguire explains, the lure of money can change people and some of the people in the story reverse this equation. This is a story of a time that has passed. There was an innocence in the story during the 1960s and 70s that has been overtaken by the hard edge of the international drug trade. This is an important and overlooked story in the history of crime. The book provides an insight into how people can turn to crime in a manner that contradicts the strongly held theories of the life-course criminologists. I hope the book inspires others to study these marginal areas of crime. As you will hear in the interview, I have volunteered to do so myself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In her book The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), historian Kathleen J. Frydl argues that there is a better way to control drugs. She points out that prior to the “War on Drugs” the Federal government had controlled the distribution of narcotics and other drugs largely (though not entirely) by means of taxation. The “Federal Bureau of Narcotics” was a branch of the Department of the Treasury. The run up to Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and the war itself changed all that: enforcement of drug laws was transferred to the Department of Justice. Essentially, the Fed had criminalized drug distribution and use and told the states to aggressively pursue distributors and users, or else.

According to Frydl, this was a disastrous move. Better, she says, to de-criminalize and even legalize drugs, control them by means of taxation, and support prevention and treatment initiatives. It’s a controversial position, and near the end of the interview we debate it at some length. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Lance Armstrong now joins a notorious collection of athletes who have been stained by allegations or proof of doping: baseball’s Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, sprinter Marion Jones, swimmer Michelle Smith, cross-country skiers Olga Danilova and Larissa Lazutina, Chinese swimmers of the late 1990s. Chris Cooper begins his study of the science of doping with what was perhaps the most shocking episode of a champion athlete caught doping: Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who set the world record in the 100-meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics only to be stripped of his record and gold medal days later. As Cooper points out, athletes had long been using anabolic steroids. And indeed, Johnson was not the only sprinter in that race to have been found using drugs. But the fall of the gold medalist in the Olympics’ marquee event brought the use of performance-enhancing drugs to broad public attention. Since 1988, great athletic accomplishments have been viewed with suspicion, while athletes have been obligated to pee in cups.

Athletes still take performance-enhancing drugs. Why? What benefits, if any, do they gain? Chris’ book, Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport (Oxford University Press, 2012), addresses these questions. As a researcher in biochemistry, Chris explains what the drugs do, and whether they work. We learn from the interview that doping does provide a clear advantage, in some instances. But in other cases, the drug’s effects are slim–which raises the question: should they be banned?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

An assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavior health at the University of Iowa, Prussing lived for three years on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, working with community organizations, building long-lasting relationships, and gathering testimonies of alcohols’ often disruptive impacts on the lives of many Northern Cheyenne. While many young women have embraced the 12-step program, others – particularly of the older generation – find its moral assumptions foreign and unhelpful. What emerges from Prussing’s account is not a reductive and totalizing “Cheyenne culture” but rather a complex negotiation of tradition, community, and recovery in the face of persistent colonial challenges. This nuance and attention to detail makes Prussing’s call for indigenous self-determination in health care all the more powerful.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the 1940s, when smack-using bebop players (think Charlie Parker) taught the “Beat Generation” that heroin was hip. Neither was my generation the last to succumb to a heroin fad. The triad of music, heroin, and cool united again in the 1990s, when drug-addled pop-culture icons such as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), and Calvin Klein (of “heroin chic” fame) taught “Generation X” the same lesson. History, or at least the history of heroin, repeats itself.

For white, middle-class folks like me heroin chic was an episode, a rebellious moment in an otherwise “normal” American life. But as Schneider makes clear, the passage of heroin from cultural elites to the population at large was not always so benign, particularly in the declining inner-cities of the 1960s and 1970s. Here heroin had nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with earning a living and escaping reality. For millions of impoverished, hopeless, urban-dwelling hispanics and blacks, heroin was a paycheck and a checkout. The drug helped destroy the people in the inner-city, and thus the inner-city itself.

In response to the “heroin epidemic” of the 1960s and 1970s, the government launched the first war on drugs, focusing its energy on “pushers.” But there were no “pushers” because–and this is the greatest insight in a book full of great insights–pushing was not the way heroin use spread, either among middle-class college kids or the down-and-out of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. No one pushed heroin on anyone. Rather, users taught their friends how to use; in turn, those friends–now users–taught their friends, and so on. Heroin stealthily spread through personal networks. The only part of the process that was visible was the result: in the case of suburban college kids, bad grades and rehab; in the case of poor urban hispanics and blacks, crime and incarceration.

Not surprisingly, when the heroin “epidemic” ended, it was not due to the war on drugs. Heroin simply fell out of fashion, in this case being replaced by another fashionable drug, powder and crack cocaine. Today we are fighting cocaine just as we fought heroin, and, by all appearances, with similar success.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In her new book Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Teresa Gowan explores how these different ways of thinking, and talking, about homelessness not only shape the public policy responses to it, but also affect how homeless individuals themselves come to see their identities, daily struggles, and challenges. Gowan initially set out to produce an ethnographical study of homeless recyclers in San Francisco. Over time, however, the project expanded to look at how these individuals navigate different narratives of homelessness, depending on their relationship to the informal recycling economy, the city’s shelters and treatment centers, and their time spent in correctional facilities. As you’ll hear in this interview, the different ways that we traditionally think about homelessness–what Gowan identifies as sin talk, sick talk, and system talk–converge in interesting ways when placed in the context of actual life on the streets.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

“Crank,” however, remained, ever ready to make people feel good when they had nothing much to feel good about. And as Nick Reding explains in Methland. The Death and Life of an American Small Town (Bloomsbury, 2009) America’s midland didn’t have much to feel good about in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Globalization was hammering the industries that had long supported places like little Oelwein, Iowa, the subject of Reding’s attention. Light manufacture, meatpacking, and agriculture were all in decline. Wages were dropping, poverty rising, and people were leaving for the coasts (as I had). Misery loves company, but there was less and less company to be had in Oelwein. Misery, however, also loves drugs, and there was plenty of meth to go around thanks to a peculiar alliance between: 1) big pharma–which opposed any legislation to limit the sale of the essential over-the-counter ingredient in meth; 2) south-of-the-border drug cartels–who took said over-the-counter ingredient and made massive quantities of meth; and 3) some down-on-their luck Iowans–who arranged for the import of said drug. In some ways, meth did what it was supposed to do: it made sad people happy and tired people strong. But it also destroyed the lives of users, their families, and their communities. The bi-costal press reported that the hicks of flyoverland had been possessed by a new kind of “reefer madness.” The rest of the story–globalization, lobbying by big pharma, the drug cartels–it missed for the most part. Nick Reding didn’t, and we in Iowa owe him a debt of gratitude.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery