New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
211 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★ - 8 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Drugs, Addiction, and Recovery about their New Books
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Episodes
Susan Partovi, "Renegade M.D.: A Doctor's Stories from the Streets" (Bookbaby, 2024)
April 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDr. 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 s...
Psychedelics, Mysticism, Aliens, and the Dao (Pierce Salguero and Dominic Steavu)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDr 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 ...
Kris Butler, "Drink Maps in Victorian Britain" (Bodleian Library, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesWhat 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 t...
Greg Wrenn, "Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis" (Regalo Press, 2024)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesA 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. Mot...
Alke Jenss, "Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesParamilitaries, 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, 20...
Miracle Man (with Joe McGivney)
March 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourLifelong 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 canonizat...
Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 17, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWith 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 his...
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesImperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine indust...
Julia Ornelas-Higdon, "The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769–1920" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesCalifornia’s wine country conjures images of pastoral vineyards and cellars lined with oak barrels. As a mainstay of the state’s economy, California wines occupy the popular imagination like never before and drive tourism in famous viticultural regions across the state. Scholars know remarkably little, however, about the history of the wine industry and the diverse groups who built it. In fact, contemporary stereotypes belie how the state’s commercial wine industry was born amid social turmoi...
George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourGeorge Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University Press. George has been teaching and writing in the realms of evidence, prosecution practice, and criminal legal history since 1995. He began practice as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and later taught at the law schools of Boston College, Harvard, and Yale. Beware Euphoria is the most recent among...
Matthew D. Lassiter, "The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs" (Princeton UP, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesMost accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly enough urban heroin addicts in America to sust...
Inside Addiction and Sobriety in Academia
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourHow do the pressures of academia affect our relationships with ourselves, our work, and with substance use? Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski joins us for a candid conversation about her recent HuffPost article on her struggle to get and stay sober. 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...
Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesThere's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cann...
Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesToday I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018) is a collection of letters which were carefully curated by Erika and Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, and Patrick Farrell. During our discussion, Erika recounts the special relationship between two intellectual juggernauts, Huxley and Osmond, and their discu...
David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesWe are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, vice, and capitalism. His new book is called The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019). During our discussion, Courtwright walks us through the emergence of the worldwide commodification of vice and shares his views on "limbic capitalism," the network o...
Sean Howe, "Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s" (Hachette Books, 2023)
December 10, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesIt wasn’t easy writing a biography the mysterious, shape-shifting Thomas King Forçade, but after nine years of research and extensive interviews, Sean Howe did it. His new book, Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s (Hachette Books), chronicles the life and times of Forçade, an enigmatic figure of the center of America’s counterculture, who crafted several iconic lives for himself before his tragic death in 1978. Linking the history of the undergr...
Leontina Hormel, "Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesIn rural northern Idaho in the winter of 2013-2014, Syringa Mobile Home Park’s water system was contaminated by sewage, resulting in residents’ water being shut off for 93 days. By summer 2018 Syringa had closed, forcing residents to relocate or face homelessness. 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...
Ann C. Bracken, "Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery" (Charing Cross Press, 2022)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAnn Bracken has published three poetry collections, The Altar of Innocence, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom, Once You’re Inside: Poetry Exploring Incarceration, and a memoir entitled Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery (Charing Cross Press, 2022). She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland, and she’s a frequent contributor to Mad in America’s family section. She volunt...
Sébastien Tutenges, "Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
October 19, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesFor two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves? 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 conce...
E. Summerson Carr, "Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesMotivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. 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...
Andrew Monteith, "Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs" (NYU Press, 2023)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMany people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as Dr. Andrew Monteith shows in Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (NYU Press, 2023), the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Dr. Monteith argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
The Past and Present of Psychedelic Medicine
September 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourPsychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing — a tool for personal revelation, cosmic oneness, spiritual enlightenment, whatever people have called it — and make it just another product in late stage capitalism? From something that is potentially radical, to something that is brutally commodified, instrumentalized, hyped, and turned into the next meme stock craze. The venture capitalists and techno-optimist libertarians ...
Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesBenjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the (usually negative) effects of neoliberal capitalism, writing about NGOs, labor leaders, and healt...
Donovan X. Ramsey, "When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era" (One World, 2023)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesThe crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality. When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderst...
Rudi Matthee, "Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop's Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesWhen meeting an expatriate friend on my first trip to Dubai, the host at the restaurant where we were meeting quickly ushered me up to the second floor. For foreigners, he said—before handing me a wine list. 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...
Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
July 16, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesVictoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration of the social history of microbial science in modern Japan. Lee shows that Japanese scientists and artisans in food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries harnessed a combination of premodern and modern understandings of the microbial world to create a productive approach positing microbes “as living workers” in important industries. With case s...
Meg Bernhard, "Wine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesToday I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage. While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the d...
Methadone and Covid-19
July 12, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesHelen Redmond is a Harlem-based documentary filmmaker, journalist, licensed clinical social worker, and professor at NYU. As senior editor and a multimedia journalist at Filter, a website that covers drug news, she’s been documenting America’s addiction crisis and treatment system for years. Her new documentary, Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone & COVID-19, is currently on tour across the United States. We discuss the impacts the pandemic has had on methadone access in America – as ...
Malcolm F. Purinton, "Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
July 03, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesGlobalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Malcolm Purinton charts the spread of Pilsner beer from its inception in 1842 to clearly show the changes wrought by globalization in an age of empire. Its rise was dependent not only on technological innovations and faster supply chains, but also on the increased connectedness of the world and the political and economic structures of empire. Drawing upon a wide range of archival ...
Christopher H. Evans, "Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard" (Oxford UP, 2022)
May 21, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesFrances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. Emphasizing what she called "Do Everything" reform, Willard became a central figure in international movements i...
Pharmacological Histories Ep. 4: Andy Roberts on LSD's Cosmic Courier
May 16, 2023 22:40 - 1 hourMichael Hollingshead, the man who turned Timothy Leary onto LSD, managed to fundamentally influenced modern drug culture whilst remaining virtually anonymous in popular culture at large. In this episode, biographer Andy Roberts talks us through the life of a key character in psychedelic history. Of all the figures associated with the history of LSD there is none more enigmatic than Michael Hollingshead. Appearing as if from nowhere, he turned Timothy Leary on to LSD in 1962, and was influenti...
Michelle Smirnova, "The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain" (Duke UP, 2023)
May 15, 2023 04:00 - 1 hourIn The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain (Duke UP, 2023), Michelle Smirnova argues that the ongoing opioid drug epidemic is the result of an endless cycle in which suffering is medicalized and drug use is criminalized. Drawing on interviews with eighty incarcerated individuals in Missouri correctional institutions, Smirnova shows how contradictions in medical practices, social ideals, and legal policies disproportionately criminalize the poor for ...
Peter Thilly, "The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the opium trade — but not through the relatively well-trodden history of the ‘Opium Wars.’ Instead, in this wonderfully rich book Peter Thilly investigates the little known social history of the opium trade in coastal southern Fujian province. The Opium Business focuses on the relationship between the state and local businesses, charting how it changed as opium went from contraband to tax stap...
Pharmacological Histories Ep. 3: Bita Moghaddam on Ketamine
May 12, 2023 17:37 - 30 minutesIn this episode, Bita Moghaddam discusses the emergence of ketamine as a combat anesthetic in the Vietnam war, its transformation into a recreation drug central to club culture, and its current transition into a treatment for depression. Ketamine, approved in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of depression, has been touted by scientists and media reports as something approaching a miracle cure. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series chronicles the as...
Pharmacological Histories Ep. 1: Nancy D. Campbell on Naloxone
May 08, 2023 14:55 - 42 minutesDrawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists; Nancy D. Campbell has drawn together a history of a defining tragedy of contemporary life; the overdose. I ask her about the reality of drug overdoses and one of the tools being used by activists to prevent more deaths--Naloxone. For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alley...
Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture
May 02, 2023 14:36 - 32 minutesIn Break On Through, Lucas Richert explores Anti-psychiatry, psychedelics, and radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. In this interview Lucas discusses the issues that run through the sixties and seventies and how they're forming debates about mental health today. "Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s g...
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
April 28, 2023 13:51 - 55 minutesAuthor of High Weirdness, Erik Davis discusses psychedelic politics, media paranoia, conspiracy theories, and consensus reality in the time of COVID-19. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced rea...
Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesMike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind. 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 journ...
Nadia Davis, "Home Is Within You: A Memoir of Recovery and Redemption" (Girl Friday Books, 2021)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesHome Is Within You 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. Ly...
Hernán Flom, "The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesPolitical Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Instead of tracking the path that illegal drugs take or examining how the criminal justice system works in Latin American countries, Flom has focused, instead, on the illegal drug markets as economic and political institutions to examine how they actually operates within Brazil and Argentina. From this perspective, we learn quite a lot about market f...
Clare Griffin, "Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesClare Griffin's book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) introduces the reader to the dynamic and complex world of early modern Russian medical drugs, from the enthusiasm for newly imported American botanicals to the disgust at Western European medicines made from human corpses. 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 dr...
How Do We Treat Opioid Addiction?
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesMark Parrino has been involved with the delivery of health care and treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) since 1974. As the president of the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, Inc. (AATOD), he works with treatment providers across the country to develop and improve treatment protocols. 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 rec...
Judy L. Mandel, "White Flag: A Memoir" (Legacy Book Press, 2022)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesCheryl said many times that "I'm done with that life, I'll never go back to it." But she did. When her Aunt Judy finds her in jail after two years of thinking she may be dead, she hopes and prays this is a second chance for her niece. Her sensitive, funny, bookworm niece. Her big sister's eldest daughter, the sister who has since died. And through writing White Flag: A Memoir (Legacy Book Press, 2022), bestselling author Judy L. Mandel finds that it didn't start with Cheryl, but that the tent...
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 27, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesHabitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 (Oxford UP, 2023) traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried ‘Hasheesh Candy’, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use ...
Tricia Starks, "Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 11, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesSeeing cigarette smoking as a cultural phenomenon of Western modernity is perhaps easier when the test case is outside the US where the narrative is dominated by Big Bad Tobacco and litigation. Tricia Starks's two volume study does just that. Her second volume, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2022) traces the rise and fall of cigarettes during the Soviet period. (Her first volume covered the pre-Revolutionary era.) In a beautifully written and jargon-fre...
Carlos Alberto Sánchez, "A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture" (Amherst College Press, 2020)
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesContemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limit...
Divine Intoxication: A Discussion about Alcoholism, Grace, Sainthood, and Women in the Church
January 01, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesAuthor Heather King discusses her journey from the alcoholic abyss to redemption and new life (which she described in her book, Parched, 2006), St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the Little Way (whom she wrote about in her book, Shirt of Flame, 20011), the Communion of Saints, literature, women in the Church. In this conversation, we talk over the “Little Ways” that we may look for in our lives to follow the Way of Jesus—as women, men, parents, clerics, lay-people, writers, teachers, workers, and eve...
Mikkael A. Sekeres, "Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust" (MIT Press, 2022)
November 04, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesHow the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin. 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), ...
Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, "Mexico's Human Rights Crisis" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
October 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourLawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the active support or acquiescence of government actors. The sharp increase in the number of victims of homicide, disappearances and torture over the past decade is unparalleled in the country's recent history. According to editors Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, the war on drugs launched in 2006 by President Felipe Calderón and the corrupting ...