New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Carl Hart speaks with Kim about America’s punitive drug laws, and how we might change them for the better. He argues that we should legalize and regulate the sale of all drugs, in the same way we regulate the sale of alcohol, to improve the health, equity, and liberty of our society.Dr. Hart is a professor of behavioral neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. You can learn how his scientific research in Neuropsychopharmacology relates to the politics of human experience in his new book Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (Penguin Random House 2021).Image: Creative CommonsMusic used for promotional material: ‘A Better Tomorrow’ by astrofreq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and the US-China trade dispute have heightened interest in the geopolitics and security of modern ports. Ports are where contemporary societal dilemmas converge: the (de)regulation of international flows; the (in)visible impact of globalization; the perennial tension between trade and security; and the thin line between legitimate, illicit and illegal. Applying a multidisciplinary lens to the political economy of port security, Ports, Crime and Security: Governing and Policing Seaports in a Changing World (Bristol UP, 2021) presents a unique outlook on the social, economic and political factors that shape organized crime and governance. Advancing the research agenda, this text bridges the divide between global and local, and theory and practice.Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Cannabis "legalization" hasn't lived up to the hype. Across North America, investors are reeling, tax collections are below projections, and people are pointing fingers. On the business side, companies have shut down, farms have failed, workers have lost their jobs, and consumers face high prices. Why has legal weed failed to deliver on many of its promises? Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics (U California Press, 2022) takes on the euphoric claims with straight dope and a full dose of economic reality.This book delivers the unadulterated facts about the new legal segment of one of the world's oldest industries. In witty, accessible prose, economists Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner take readers on a whirlwind tour of the economic past, present, and future of legal and illegal weed. Drawing upon reams of data and their own experience working with California cannabis regulators since 2016, Goldstein and Sumner explain why many cannabis businesses and some aspects of legalization fail to measure up, while others occasionally get it right. Their stories stretch from before America's first medical weed dispensaries opened in 1996 through the short-term boom in legal consumption that happened during COVID-19 lockdowns. Can Legal Weed Win? is packed with unexpected insights about how cannabis markets can thrive, how regulators get the laws right or wrong, and what might happen to legal and illegal markets going forward.Robin Goldstein is an economist and author of The Wine Trials, a controversial exposé of wine snobbery that has become the world’s best-selling guide to cheap wine. Daniel Sumner is Frank H Buck, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. Together they take readers on a tour of the economics of legal and illegal weed, showing where cannabis regulation has gone wrong and how it could do better.John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military (Duke UP, 2021), Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-protective gear, to the development and spread of new performance enhancing drugs during the global War on Terrorism. In his examination of government efforts to alter soldiers' bodies through new technologies, Bickford invites us to contemplate what constitutes heroism when armor becomes built in, wired in, and even edited into the molecular being of an American soldier. Lurking in the background and dark recesses of all US military enhancement research, Bickford demonstrates, is the desire to preserve US military and imperial power.Dr. Bickford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. You can learn more about his work here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Few substances have been researched as extensively, and debated as fiercely, as cannabis. In Marijuana on My Mind: The Science and Mystique of Cannabis (Cambridge University Press, 2022), psychiatrist Timmen Cermak offers a balanced, science-based analysis of how marijuana affects people physiologically, psychologically, and spiritually. Cermak draws on current understandings of the brain and nervous system to describe how cannabis achieves its effects as well as how it can pose risks to some individuals. Cermak believes that most people can enjoy cannabis safely as long as they apply sensible guidelines and precautions. Far different in tone from the heated polemics that cannabis can inspire, Marijuana on My Mind is a deeply informed assessment of what we know about cannabis and how people can deploy that knowledge wisely. Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at steve@stevebeitler.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Chris Grosso is a youth mental health group facilitator with Newport Academy, public speaker, writer, and author of Indie Spiritualist (Beyond Words/Simon & Schuster, 2014), Everything Mind (Sounds True, 2105) and Dead Set On Living (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, 2018). He writes for Revolver Magazine, ORIGIN Magazine, and Huffington Post, and has spoken and performed at Wanderlust Festival, Celebrate Your Life, Yoga Journal Conference, Sedona World Wisdom Days, Kripalu, Sun Valley Wellness Festival, and more.Chris is passionate about his work with people who are in the process of healing or struggling with addictions of all kinds. He speaks and leads groups in detoxes, yoga studios, rehabs, youth centers, hospitals, conferences, and festivals worldwide. He is a member of the advisory board for Drugs over Dinner, hosts The Indie Spiritualist Podcast on Ram Dass’s esteemed Be Here Now Network and is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and unjustly impacts Black and Brown individuals and communities. With postwar efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies, our era of mass incarceration reproduced the old logics of white supremacism that uphold racist capitalism in this new setting. These are the things we know.But in his book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (U Minnesota Press, 2019), Professor Anthony Hatch observes a feature of mass incarceration essential to its everyday function that many of us had never considered: the large-scale, persistent use of psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants, not for medical care but rather to control the behavior of incarcerated people. Making a persuasive claim drawn from his training in STS and sociology, Hatch observes how the drugs are used at the level of individual brain chemistry to commit “soul murder” with enormous systemic implications and political stakes. What’s more, the carceral elites’ use of psychotropic drugs for the purposes of pacification, not care, of their wards extends to other (often state-backed) settings of “captive America,” including the military, foster care, elder care, and international detention centers. “Is it possible for the US carceral state to exist without psychotropics,” Hatch asks. “I think we can say the answer is no.”Silent Cells accomplishes more than the (important) tasks of documentation and analysis. It is a work of liberatory social science. The book is of a piece with Hatch’s abolitionist agenda that he pursues through his generous and generative scholarly and activist engagements, including his work as director of the Black Box teaching laboratory and chair of the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “Prison.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction (Hachette Go, 2021) tells a long-running, but largely unknown, story of how a few people and groups – propelled at first by the AIDS pandemic -- swam against one of the most powerful policy tides in America – our nation’s 50-year war on drugs. Maia Szalavitz’s book is a personal and political history of the idea of harm reduction, which is a philosophy, a set of health practices, and a call to action. Harm reduction is a powerful alternative to virtually all of the “conventional wisdom” about drugs and drug policy. Harm reduction starts by asserting that the health and safety of drug users, their families, and their communities should be the top priority of drug policy. Undoing Drugs is a global story, with stops in Liverpool, Amsterdam, the San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver, Glasgow, and New York. By giving life to the saying that “the personal is political,” Szalavitz shows how America might still turn away from the massive failures of the drug war to embrace an approach that seeks to put people first.Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. Recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at noelandsteve@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In 2015, Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University and his wife Professor Anne Case published a paper highlighting the rising mortality rate among middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans. They described "deaths of despair" which were often related to drug and alcohol poisoning and suicide. They followed up with a widely read book: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020). In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the issue of life expectancy and asks what trends relating to life expectancy are likely to occur in the future.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Over the last 40 years, the US penal system has grown at an unprecedented rate―five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. In The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America (New York University Press, 2013), criminologists Todd Clear and Natasha Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, this book charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of force have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end.Todd R. Clear is University Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. He was also the founder of Rutgers University-Newark’s New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) consortium.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery