New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Kenneth Anderson, "Sanitariums, Hospitals, and the Belladonna Cure: Volume Three of the Untold History of Addiction Treatment in the United States" (The HAMS Harm Reduction Network, Inc., 2022)

29 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Author and experienced harm reductionist Kenneth Anderson is back on the New Books Network to discuss the three new titles in his series exploring th...

Kaitlin P. Reed, "Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California" (U Washington Press, 2023)

27 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Despite it's centrality to a hippie counterculture which claimed an environmentalist ethos, California's "green rush" of cannabis growing from the mid...

Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis

20 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Mentioned in the Bible and discussed in numerous traditional texts, cannabis has long been a part of Jewish life. For millennia, Jews have been buying...

Kim Embrey, "Coca and the Victorians: From Botanical Curiosity to Regulated Drug, 1835–1912" (Transcript Publishing, 2025)

12 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The South American coca plant was established in 19th-century Britain as a medical product before it became a globally restricted drug. Drawing on bot...

Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

06 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Colombian village of Briceño might, at first glimpse, look like many communities in the rural Global South. Many of the people living there rely ...

167* Addiction with Gina Turrigiano (EF, JP)

26 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Recall This Book's second episode (January 2019) John and Elizabeth spoke with their brilliant Brandeis colleague, the MacArthur-winning neuroscien...

Helen Redmond, "Liquid Handcuffs: Policing and Punishment in Methadone Clinics and the Future of Opioid Addiction Treatment" (North Atlantic Books, 2026)

03 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A hard-hitting exposé of how methadone clinics fail people in recovery—and an urgent, unapologetic case for their abolition.  Methadone is a life...

John Beyer, "Live a Little Better: One Man's Journey of Survival, Sobriety, and Success" (Worth, 2025)

25 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

John Beyer is the founder and owner of Men on the Move, one of the East Coast's premier moving and self-storage companies. While although John's journ...

Hanna Pickard, "What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction" (Princeton UP, 2026)

24 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Hanna Pickard has written a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction.  Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively?...

Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of p...

Chris Washburn and Ron Chepesiuk, "Out of Bounds: From Broken NBA Dreams to Redemption" (WildBlue Press, 2025)

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Highly promising basketball player Chris Washburn was selected third overall in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Golden State Warriors. But a chance encounte...

Jonathan Gleason, "Field Guide to Falling Ill" (Yale UP, 2026)

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Jonathan Gleason spent ten years writing the ten essays in his debut collection, Field Guide to Falling Ill (Yale UP, 2026). In them, Gleason braids...

Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by doc...

Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)

18 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Habitual 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,...

Jamie Rowen, "Worthy of Justice: The Politics of Veterans Treatment Courts in Practice" (Stanford UP, 2025)

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past three decades, jurisdictions across the United States have developed alternatives to traditional criminal procedures and punishments for...

David Nasaw, "The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II" (Penguin, 2025)

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In its duration, geographical reach, and ferocity, World War II was unprecedented, and the effects on those who fought it and their loved ones at home...

Mark Deuze, "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick" (Intellect Books, 2025)

14 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, musi...

Bradley J. Borougerdi, "Cannabis: A Global History" (Reaktion, 2025)

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Bradley Borougerdi joins Jana Byars to talk about Cannabis: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025). An international cultural history of the multifuncti...

Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, t...

Meg Bernhard, "Wine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of...

Shoshana Walter, "Rehab: An American Scandal" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

08 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the...

Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings ...

Katie Herzog, "Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

30 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After 20 years of fighting and failing to get sober using abstinence-based methods, journalist Katie Herzog found a simple, inexpensive, and effective...

Susan D. Stewart. "On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

20 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined ...

Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022)

24 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics rela...

Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER...

Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019)

04 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on th...

Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018)

03 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks ex...

Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

26 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Hea...

Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019)

20 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest...

Owen Flanagan, "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse" (Oxford UP, 2025)

11 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of bein...

John Lee Hooker Jr., "From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)

05 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) is powerful memoir of redemption from the so...

Jonathan D. Cohen, "Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)

20 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have d...

Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics

31 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games...

Alcohol

03 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcoho...

Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the histo...

Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 L...

Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

03 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 R...

Michael Ray Richardson, "Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption" (Sports Publishing, 2024)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and to...

Benjamin T. Smith, "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade" (W. W. Norton, 2021)

03 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 t...

Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)

25 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 r...

Holly M. Karibo, "Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West" (U Texas Press, 2024)

11 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a s...

Aisha M Beliso-de Jesús, "Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease" (Duke UP, 2024)

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called ...

Jeffrey M. Pilcher, "Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity" (Oxford UP, 2024)

06 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 Tra...

Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by ra...

Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah, "Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States" (NYU Press, 2024)

28 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standard...

Sanaullah Khan, "Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self" (Lexington Books, 2023)

03 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditi...

Camilla Nord, "The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health" (Princeton UP, 2024)

20 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific devel...

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson, "Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer" (U California Press, 2024)

17 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer (U California Press, 2024) unpacks the problems and privileges of pursuing a career of...

Christine Folch, "The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History" (Princeton UP, 2024)

01 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 efferves...

Henry H. Work, "Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels"(Reaktion Books, 2024)

01 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ov...

Claudio Lomnitz, "Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico" (Duke UP, 2024)

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 Extorti...

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, "Movies Under the Influence" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

13 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Movies under the Influence (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) by Dr. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and ...

On Alcohol, Islam, and the Ontic

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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/a...

David Pozen, "The Constitution of the War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

29 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 s...

James Mallery, "City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

16 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 atte...

Angela Garcia, "The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos" (FSG, 2024)

09 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 Ci...

John Thomas Maier, "The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction" (Routledge, 2024)

26 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 p...

Judith Vitale et al., "Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan" (Brill, 2023)

22 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the earl...

Benjamin Breen, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central, 2024)

14 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

Adam Zientek, "A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

24 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Ryan Reft, "Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973" (2024)

20 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century dom...

Marina Welker, "Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia" (U California Press, 2024)

18 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 perc...

John O'Brien, "States of Intoxication: The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation" (Routledge, 2018)

29 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Is alcohol a universal feature of human society? Why is problematic in some countries and not others? How was alcohol helped build the modern state? T...

David Pozen, "The Constitution of the War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 Drug...

Susan Partovi, "Renegade M.D.: A Doctor's Stories from the Streets" (Bookbaby, 2024)

21 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Susan Partovi first experienced poverty medicine volunteering at a dump site in Tijuana during high school. There, she recognized the need for all...

Psychedelics, Mysticism, Aliens, and the Dao (Pierce Salguero and Dominic Steavu)

08 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 th...

Kris Butler, "Drink Maps in Victorian Britain" (Bodleian Library, 2024)

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 specificall...

Greg Wrenn, "Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis" (Regalo Press, 2024)

27 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 tr...

Alke Jenss, "Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

18 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times p...

Miracle Man (with Joe McGivney)

01 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Lifelong alcoholic Joe McGivney drank himself into brain damage and permanent disability. The day after being placed into the assisted care he would n...

Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023)

17 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug educatio...

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigoro...

Julia Ornelas-Higdon, "The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769–1920" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

03 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

California’s wine country conjures images of pastoral vineyards and cellars lined with oak barrels. As a mainstay of the state’s economy, Californ...

George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

03 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial M...

Matthew D. Lassiter, "The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs" (Princeton UP, 2023)

02 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Most 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 pop...

Inside Addiction and Sobriety in Academia

25 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do the pressures of academia affect our relationships with ourselves, our work, and with substance use? Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski joins us for a can...

Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)

02 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madnes...

Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018)

30 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: Th...

David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)

26 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Cou...

Sean Howe, "Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s" (Hachette Books, 2023)

10 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

It wasn’t easy writing a biography the mysterious, shape-shifting Thomas King Forçade, but after nine years of research and extensive interviews, ...

Leontina Hormel, "Trailer Park America: Reimagining Working-Class Communities" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

24 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In rural northern Idaho in the winter of 2013-2014, Syringa Mobile Home Park’s water system was contaminated by sewage, resulting in residents’ wa...

Ann C. Bracken, "Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery" (Charing Cross Press, 2022)

31 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections, The Altar of Innocence, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom, Once You’re Ins...

Sébastien Tutenges, "Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

19 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance part...

E. Summerson Carr, "Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

14 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to ta...

Andrew Monteith, "Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs" (NYU Press, 2023)

08 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as Dr. Andrew Monteith shows in Christian Na...

A Better Way to Buy Books

12 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...

The Past and Present of Psychedelic Medicine

01 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing — a tool for personal revelati...

Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023)

15 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Benjamin 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,...

Donovan X. Ramsey, "When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era" (One World, 2023)

12 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The 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...

Rudi Matthee, "Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop's Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World" (Oxford UP, 2023)

03 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When 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 floo...

Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

16 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration...

Meg Bernhard, "Wine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

15 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of...

Methadone and Covid-19

12 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Helen Redmond is a Harlem-based documentary filmmaker, journalist, licensed clinical social worker, and professor at NYU. As senior editor and a multi...

Malcolm F. Purinton, "Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

03 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Malcolm Purinton charts the spread ...

Peter Thilly, "The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China" (Stanford UP, 2022)

08 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Opium is an awkward commodity. For the West, it’s a reminder of some of the shadier and best forgotten parts of its history. For China (and a few ot...

Christopher H. Evans, "Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard" (Oxford UP, 2022)

21 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the ...

Pharmacological Histories Ep. 4: Andy Roberts on LSD's Cosmic Courier

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Hollingshead, the man who turned Timothy Leary onto LSD, managed to fundamentally influenced modern drug culture whilst remaining virtually an...