New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) is powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues legend John Lee Hooker. 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

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined. 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

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump's border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we 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

In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal a great deal about a given society in a particular historical moment. Nina uses alcohol as a lens to analyze the history of French colonization in North Africa. Who consumed alcohol, in what places, how much, and what kinds, what was viewed as healthy and what was viewed as dangerous, even criminal, can help us approach larger questions of gender, class, and nation. If you want to learn more, check out her new book, Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). The book explores how the mythologizing of one distilled alcohol led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit's relationship with empire. Some claim that French soldiers were given daily absinthe rations during France's military conquest of Algeria to protect them against heat, diseases, and contaminated water. In fact, the overenthusiastic adoption of the drink by these soldiers, and subsequently by French settlers, was perceived as a threat to France's colonial ambitions - an anxiety that migrated into French medicine. At the height of its popularity in the late nineteenth century, absinthe reigned in the bars, cafés, and restaurants of France and its colonial empire. Yet by the time it was banned in 1915, the famous green fairy had become the green peril, feared for its connection with declining birth rates and its apparent capacity to induce degeneration, madness, and murderous rage in its consumers. Dr. Nina Studer is a historian working on the 19th and 20th century history of French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. Her work focuses on the history of drinks, in particular tea, coffee, Fanta/Coca-Cola, Orangina, wine and absinthe. Her doctorate, published as  The Hidden Patients: North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry (Böhlau, 2015) is available via Open Access. Currently she works as an associate researcher at the Institut Éthique Histoire Humanités at the University of Geneva, part of Dr. Francesca Arena's team looking into the medical history of wet dreams between the 18th and the 20th century. The SNSF-project has the title: “Nuits polluantes: masculinité et médecine en Suisse et en France (XVIII – XX siècles)”. The image for this episode is an advertisement for the Algerian wine "Sénéclauze" from 1933, from the personal collection of Nina S. Studer. Many thanks to Nina for sharing it with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Historian Emine Ö. Evered's Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates. 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

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities. 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 2015, Patricia Roos's twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for a more compassionate and effective approach to addiction treatment. 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

Michael Ray Richardson was a star in the making. After a stellar collegiate career at the University of Montana, where he was voted first team All-Big Sky Conference as a sophomore, junior, and senior, the future seemed bright. Taken fourth overall in the 1978 NBA Draft by the New York Knicks, Richardson was billed as “the next Walt Frazier.” 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

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. 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

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country's Chinese population. 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 popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol's decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024), alcohol's respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. 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 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed rise in drug use reached a fevered pitch, the emergence of the nation's first “narcotic farms” in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky, marked a watershed moment in the treatment of addiction. Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impacts on the American West. Throughout its operation from the 1930s to the 1970s, the institution was the only federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi River. Designed to blend psychiatric treatment, physical rehabilitation, and vocational training, the Narcotic Farm, its proponents argued, would transform American treatment policies for the better. The reality was decidedly more complicated. 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 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints.  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

Today I'm speaking with Jeffrey Pilcher, Professor of Food History at the University of Toronto. We are discussing his new book, Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity (Oxford University Press, 2024). While beer, or even alcohol for that matter, is not consumed in many parts of the world, its near universality is still astonishing. Even in the Middle East, where alcohol is largely forbidden, non-alcoholic beer sells well. Perhaps most surprising is that in nearly every place where beer is consumed (with the exception of Ireland's Guinness) the pale lager dominates in popularity. This wasn't always the case, and the story of how this came to be is a textbook example of the standardization driven by the forces of globalization. Examined as a commodity, beer offers as important a window into understanding the development of our modern world as does oil or McDonalds. Analyzed as a cultural artifact, beer tells us something about how people identify, what groups they belong to, and what livelihoods they pursue. Hopped Up is an excellent history that will appeal to historians and beer-drinkers of all stripes— whether you prefer Guinness, Sapporo, Bud Light, or non-alcoholic beer. 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

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new capitalist whose race-based exploitation engages not only labor but racialized consumption. This arrangement is upheld through US drug policy, which over the past century has created a split legal system—one punitive system that criminalizes drug use common among Black, Brown, and lower-income communities and another system characterized by compassion and care that medicalizes, and thus legalizes, drug use targeted to middle-class White people. 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

Political Scientists Dan Mallinson and Lee Hannah, both experts on state-level politics and the policy making process, have a new book that focuses on the state-level process of legalization of medical cannabis across the United States. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States (NYU Press, 2024) is a book that needed to be written, since it is an important exploration not only of the continuing policy conflicts and tensions around marijuana in the United States, but it specifically focuses on how states have taken up this issue and what they each did in moving towards medical marijuana's accessibility. The marijuana question in in the United States remains a fascinating federalism dynamic, with national laws in conflict with state laws, and state laws operating in different ways, around both medical marijuana and legalized recreational use of cannabis. 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

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standards for drugs. In 1813 the Royal College of Physicians of London considered a proposal to develop an imperial British pharmacopoeia - at a time when separate official pharmacopoeias existed for England, Scotland, and Ireland. A unified British pharmacopoeia was published in 1864, and by 1914 it was considered suitable for the whole Empire. 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

Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration fundamentally create the conditions for substance use, individuals are increasingly experiencing the paradoxes of care and punishment by being propelled into a new regime of recovery which creates new pharmaceuticalized identities. By shedding light on how addiction and the impetus for healing moves through families and institutions of the state, Khan provides an account of the different competing forces that shape substance use, recovery, and relapse. Through a combination of archival research and ethnography, the book makes a case for disentangling punishment from 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

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways. 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

Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer (U California Press, 2024) unpacks the problems and privileges of pursuing a career of passion by exploring work inside craft breweries. 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

Brewed from the dried leaves and tender shoots of an evergreen tree native to South America, yerba mate gives its drinkers the jolt of liquid effervescence many of us get from coffee or tea. In Argentina, southern "gaúcho" Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, mate is the stimulating brew of choice, famously quaffed by the Argentine national football team en route to its 2022 FIFA World Cup victory.  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

Barrels – we rarely acknowledge their importance, but without them we would be missing out on some of the world's finest wines and spirits. For over two thousand years they've been used to store, transport and age an incredibly diverse array of provisions around the globe. In this comprehensive and wide-ranging book titled Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels (Reaktion, 2024), now available in paperback, Henry H. Work tells the intriguing story of the significant and ever-evolving role wooden barrels have played during the last two millennia. 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

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke UP, 2024), Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico's sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization. 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

Movies under the Influence (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) by Dr. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and mind-altering substances from early cinema through the psychedelic 1970s. Dr. Szczepaniak-Gillece examines how the parallel trajectories of these two enduring aspects of American culture, linked by their ability to influence individual and collective consciousness, resulted in their being treated and regulated in similar ways. Rather than looking at representations of drug use within film, she regards cinema and intoxicants as kindred experiences of immersion subject to corresponding forces of ideology and power. 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

An interview with Dr. Mustapha Sheikh on his co-authored paper on alcohol, Islam and the ontic. Learn more 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 U.S. government's decades-long "war on drugs" is increasingly recognized as a moral travesty as well as a policy failure. The criminalization of substances such as marijuana and magic mushrooms offends core tenets of liberalism, from the right to self-rule to protection of privacy to freedom of religion. It contributes to mass incarceration and racial subordination. And it costs billions of dollars per year—all without advancing public health. Yet, in hundreds upon hundreds of cases, courts have allowed the war to proceed virtually unchecked. How could a set of policies so draconian, destructive, and discriminatory escape constitutional curtailment? 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

San Francisco began its American life as a city largely made up of transient men, arriving from afar to participate in the gold rush and various attendant enterprises. This large population of men on the move made the new and booming city a hub of what "respectable" easterners considered vice: drinking, gambling, and sex work, among other activities.  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

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. 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

John T. Maier's The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction (Routledge Press, 2024) defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities - disabilities of the will - and that addiction is best understood as a species of volitional disability. This theory serves to illuminate long-standing philosophical and psychological perplexities about addiction and addictive motivation. It articulates a normative framework within which to understand prohibition, harm reduction, and other strategies that aim to address addiction. The argument of this book is that these should ultimately be evaluated in terms of reasonable accommodations for addicted people and that the priority of addiction policy should be the provision of such accommodations. What makes this book distinctive is that it understands addiction as a fundamentally political problem, an understanding that is suggested by standard legal approaches to addiction, but which has not received a sustained defense in the previous philosophical or psychological literature. This text marks a significant advance in the theory of addiction, one which should reshape our understanding of addiction policy and its proper aims. 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

In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan's expanding imperial territories. 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

Today I talked to Benjamin Breen about his book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024). 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

Adam Zientek, Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers' experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends. 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

Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century domestic politics and policies. He received his PhD in U.S. urban history from the University of California San Diego in 2014, and his writing has appeared all over the place, from edited volumes to academic journals, to the Washington Post and Zocalo Public Square. He's also currently the senior co-editor of the Urban History Association's blog The Metropole, where he recently authored a great article called “Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation's Capital, 1967-1973.” While it's not a book, “Heroin and Chocolate City” is a deeply-researched article that offers compelling new insights into how Washington, D.C., responded to heroin use in the late 60s and early 70s, when both D.C., and heroin, were really unique. *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

Indonesia is the world's second largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024) moves beyond a focus on the addictive hold of nicotine to examine how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, class, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity's cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it.  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

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024). An expert in constitutional law, Pozen argues that the drug war has been an unmitigated disaster, in terms of money, efficacy, and human rights. But even as activists peel off the drug war's more unsavory aspects through cannabis and psychedelic legalization, Pozen also argues that they've neglected to consider the impact America's courts could have on rectifying oppressive drug laws. 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

Dr. Susan Partovi first experienced poverty medicine volunteering at a dump site in Tijuana during high school. There, she recognized the need for all people to have access to quality medical care. Over the years, she has worked in various facilities around Los Angeles County, incorporating her renegade method of going the extra mile for her patients. As Medical Director of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, she works to provide a safety net of care for the underserved skid row community and surrounding neighborhoods. 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

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Dominic Steavu, a historian of Chinese religion and healing from UC Santa Barbara. We discuss the central role of the body in medieval Daoist practices, and talk about the Daoist use of psychedelics to facilitate mystical experiences. Along the way, we touch on talismanic tattoos, internal alchemy, and embodied nonduality. Plus, Dominic reveals what he thinks about aliens and the Wu-Tang Clan. 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

What is a ‘drink map'? It may sound like a pub guide, yet it actually refers to a type of late nineteenth-century British map designed specifically to shock and shame people into drinking less. 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

A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man's quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well. Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he's never told them is how he's lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.  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

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. 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

Lifelong alcoholic Joe McGivney drank himself into brain damage and permanent disability. The day after being placed into the assisted care he would need for rest of his life, he sprang back to full recovery, restored health—it was a medical impossibility—for which he credits the intercession of Blessed Father Michael McGivney, his distant relative and the founder of the Knights of Columbus in the nineteenth-century Catholic charitable brotherhood and who is now being considered for canonization on the basis of the recorded intercessory miracles like the one Joe experience two years ago. 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

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing. 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