New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

On a spring day in 2015, Dr. Travis Rieder’s life changed. A motorcycle accident, a shattered foot, and a long series of surgeries later, the John Hopkins University bioethicist had a far deeper understanding of opioid use in America than he ever planned. In his new book In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids(Harper Collins, 2019), Rieder shares the story of his accident and treatment, while also exploring the complicated history of opioid use in the United States, the challenge of treating something as subjective as pain, and alternatives to our reliance on these drugs. His recommendations—for medical practitioners and for individual patients—are insightful and necessary as America continues to grapple with the unanticipated effects of widespread opioid use.Emily Dufton is a drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Marijuana. Weed. Cannabis. Pot. Whatever term you use, this intoxicant and medical product leads to long discussions. Emily Dufton visits the podcast to talk about the ups and downs and highs and lows of cannabis in the United States, all detailed in her book Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). She sheds light on the pro-marijuana activism in the 1970s and anti-marijuana parents' movement in the 1980s. Overall, she recounts a fascinating story about the acceptance of demonization of weed and what this suggests about the present moment.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Afghanistan and the United States have a complicated relationship. And poppies have often been at the center of the problem between the two countries. In James Tharin Bradford's new book, Poppies, Power, and Politics: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2019), he reevaluates the Afghan state, opium, and international drug regulation. Bradford offers a new perspective on this US/Afghan relationship and underlines ways of thinking about drugs in the United States. As the U.S. deals with an opioid crisis, this timely book underlines how we think about licit and illicit substances and forces.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

How do women -- especially poor and low-income women with histories of childhood sexual trauma and drug addiction -- respond to and deal with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis? How do some manage to not merely rebuild their lives, but remake them entirely? Why do others fail? Join us to talk to Celeste Watkins-Hayes about her book Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality(University of California Press, 2019). You'll hear what she learned from a decade’s long immersion in the lives of these remarkable women, and what lessons that has to offer to politicians, policymakers, and service-providers.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Starks illustrates how tobacco influenced facets of life, politics, morality, and culture in the 19th century from the perspectives of tobacco users, producers, and objectors. The book includes full-color ads for tobacco and papirosy cigarettes that add to the book’s rich prose. From Tolstoy’s anti-tobacco screed to the “Tobacco Queens” of St. Petersburg, Starks uses primary sources to craft an edifying narrative of the history of tobacco and tobacco consumption in the imperial period.Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender.Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry. He talks about the role of pharmacies and drug experiments in prison settings, and he underlines the ways that institutions themselves can be addicted to drugs. These are just a few of the topics that he examines in his recent book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America(University of Minnesota Press, 2019). And, importantly, he also offers thoughts about recovery from this addiction.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jeanette M. Fregulia about the movements of coffee beans, coffee drinking, and coffee houses from Ethiopia and Yemen, across the Mediterranean region, through Western Europe, and to the Americas. In A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), Fregulia examines the geographic movements of coffee beans through global trade as well as the social and cultural movements of coffee drinking from a medicine to an aid in religious ritual to an elite domestic drink to a public event in the coffee house. Covering a wide ranging chronology from the sixth century to today, the story of coffee as it moves East to West shares much in common with the movements of other foods like chocolate, sugar, tea, and olives, but Fregulia argues that coffee is unique among global foodstuffs for the way it transformed social structures and social behaviors to become part of the pubic sphere. Fregulia’s history decenters the European perspective of global market and cultural exchanges by drawing on archives of primary sources from Islamic histories as well as European travel narratives. For early modern Europeans, Fregulia argues, consuming coffee was a product of imperialism and Orientalism, arising from the general acquisitiveness of early modern Europeans who “consumed the East in new forms of art and architecture, in the pages of travel narratives, with the collection of artifacts, and in luxurious adornments for the body” (99). Fregulia brings a new perspective to a familiar drink by intertwining cultural, political, economic, religious, and legal histories altogether through the story of one rich and tantalizing brew.Jeanette M. Fregulia is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. Jeanette’s research focuses on merchants and material, cultural, and social exchanges between early modern Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as on the role of gender in the history of Mediterranean exchanges. In addition to PhD in Renaissance Italian History, she holds a Master’s Degree in Middle East Area Studies from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and continues to actively pursue research in the history of the Middle East and Islam.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Normal turned to PTSD and a substance abuse nightmare for Jenny the instant a taxi struck her, catapulting her twenty feet across a busy New York City street. Jenny is one of the lucky ones to have survived the drug rehabilitation system, which routinely fails those at risk. Her story is multiplied across the U.S. in the shattered lives and torn-apart families of millions of Jennies.Vivian Percy's new book Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic (Radius Books, 2018) is the narration of a mother and daughter’s long painful journey from tragedy, through opioid addiction, toward redemption. Its cautionary tale sheds light on drug dependency, suicidal depression, sexual exploitation and misdiagnosed mind disorders. We discover that these are symptoms of much larger societal issues: the decimation of the family, childhood traumatization, and a culture devoid of human values. These pages unmask a mental health industry focused more on profits than people, which regularly betrays those in its keeping, and the complicity of Big Pharma and insurance companies in these schemas. We see firsthand the abuse, negligence and illicit activities going on in psychiatric and rehab facilities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

People have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring.In his book, The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience (Canongate Books, 2017) he sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control.Evans’ exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey drawing on personal experience, interviews, and readings from ancient and modern philosophers. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and thought-provoking journey through under-explored terrain, which Evans creatively maps out like a tour through a festival, with stops at the major pavilions along the way. [complete with a cutely drawn festival map at the front of the book]Jules Evans is policy director at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which was published in 19 countries and was a Times Book of the Year. Evans has written for The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Spectator and WIRED and is a BBC New Generation Thinker. He also runs the London Philosophy Club, the world’s biggest philosophy club.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery