New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

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, 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 health care. Quick Fixes expands this examination into the world of drugs, examining nine different kinds of intoxicants, and five “orienting claims” that place their use within in larger capitalist histories.A bit about the book...Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics--across the board, consumption has shot up in the 21st century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love and intense hatred for drugs has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century.Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses.By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

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 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 Misunderstood Era (One World, 2023) follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack's destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a "crack house"; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark's most legendary group of drug traffickers.Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.A journalist, author, and indispensable voice on issues of identity, justice, and patterns of power in America, Ramsey’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, WSJ Magazine, Ebony, and Essence, among a host of other outlets, and he’s worked at such venerable newsrooms as the Los Angeles Times and the Marshall Project. A native of Columbus, Ohio, where he saw the crack epidemic firsthand, Donovan now lives in LA. When Crack was King, released to great acclaim, is his first book.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

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 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 of Alcohol in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press / Hurst, 2023).In this interview, Rudi and I chat about alcohol in the Islamic world: who drank it—and how they excused their behavior—and how non-Muslims ended up being a part of the Muslim drinking world.Rudi Matthee is the John A. Munroe and Dorothy L. Munroe Chair of History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of four prize-winning monographs on Iranian history, and the editor or co-editor of another six books. He is currently President of the Persian Heritage Foundation.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop's Door. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. 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

Victoria 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 studies that include sake and soy sauce, antibiotics, and biotechnology, Arts of the Microbial World weaves a historical narrative integrated with both the development of modern Japanese science and industry on the one hand and imperialism, expansion, and defeat and rebuilding on the other. Additionally, Lee couches her analysis of Japan’s microbial industries in the context of our contemporary microbiotic moment of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, green chemistry, and lab-grown foods and pharmaceuticals. In this sense, Arts of the Microbial World will be of interest to scholars and students of Japan, the history of science, food, pharmaceuticals, and industry, but also to readers concerned about the possibilities of mobilizing non-Western technological breakthroughs in the quest for global sustainability.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. 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

Today 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 drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Helen 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 well as the changes it hasn’t made – and put addiction treatment into a larger historical perspective.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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Globalization 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 sources from Europe, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this study traces the spread of industrial beer brewing in Europe from the late 18th to the early 20th century to show how a single beer style became the global favourite through advances in science, business and imperial power.In highlighting the evolution of consumer tastes through changing hierarchical relationships between the British metropole and colonies, as well as the evolution of business organizations and practices, Globalization in a Glass contributes to ongoing debates about globalization, empire, and trade. It argues that, despite the might and power of the British Empire as a colonizing force, the effects of globalization, imperial trade networks, and colonial migration led to the domination of the most popular Continental European style of beer, the Pilsner, over British-style ales.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

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 other countries), it’s a symbol of national humiliation, left to the past–unless it needs to shame a foreign country.But the opium trade survived for decades, through to the end of the Second World War. How did that trade actually work? How was it possible to trade a good that was, at best, tolerated in the strange gap between legal and illegal. This trade is what Peter Thilly covers in his book The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022).In this interview, Peter and I talk about opium, how people traded this quasi-legal good, and the changing opium trade–including a surprising source of illicit drugs in the region.Peter Thilly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is currently working on a global microhistory of the 1853 Small Sword Uprising.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Opium Business. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. 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

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 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 in support of prohibition, women's suffrage, and Christian socialism. A devout Methodist, Willard helped to shape predominant religious currents of the late nineteenth century and was an important figure in the rise of the social gospel movement in American Protestantism.The first biography of Frances Willard to be published in over thirty-five years, Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard (Oxford UP, 2022) explores Willard's life, her contributions as a reformer, and her broader legacy as a women's rights activist in the United States. In addition to chronicling Willard's life, historian Christopher H. Evans examines how Willard crafted a distinctive culture of women's leadership, emphasizing the importance of religious faith for understanding Willard's successes as a social reformer. Despite her enormous fame during her lifetime, Evans investigates the reasons why Willard's legacy has been eclipsed by subsequent generations of feminist reformers and assesses her importance for our time. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 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

Michael 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 influential in Leary's years at Harvard, Millbrook, and beyond. A Zelig-like character, Hollingshead was a key player in London's early LSD scene. In 1965 he went to London to establish a cultural beachhead for Leary's LSD philosophy at the World Psychedelic Centre in Chelsea. Following a spell in prison, where he dosed KGB spy George Blake, he continued to pursue adventures with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, established a psychedelic commune, created the first electronic I Ching installation, published an underground magazine, and spent time in Nepal, before dying a mysterious death in Bolivia in the 1980s.Psychedelic trickster guru, or conman and charlatan? Exactly who Hollingshead was and what his motives were remain unclear. Some believed he was working for the secret services, others that he was just a Leary wannabe, his aspirations destroyed by his deviant personality and addiction to alcohol and opiates. Divine Rascal is the first reliable biography of one of psychedelia's key figures, without whom the trajectory of LSD in the world would have been radically different. 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