Drawing 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 alleys--an ugly death awaiting social deviants--neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD, Nancy Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned--and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and "reversal" after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.After recounting the prehistory of naloxone--the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of "reanimatology"--Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists--whom she calls the "protagonists" of her story--Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster. 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 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 gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification. In Break on Through, Lucas Richert investigates the radical challenges to psychiatry and to the conventional treatment of mental health that emerged in the 1970s and the lessons they offer for current debates.Drawing on archives and government documents, medical journals, and interviews, and interweaving references to pop (counter)culture into his account, Richert offers fascinating stories of the decade's radical mental health practices. He discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans; the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other); the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s; the development of DSM III; and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA.Many of these issues have resonance today. Debates over medical marijuana and microdoses of psychedelics echo debates of the 1970s. With rising rates of such disorders as anxiety and depression, practitioners and patients continue to search for therapeutic breakthroughs. 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

Author 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 reality--but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?In High Weirdness, Erik Davis--America's leading scholar of high strangeness--examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality. 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

Mike 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 journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. 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

Home Is Within YouAs 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.Lyrical and captivating, Home Is Within You: A Memoir of Recovery and Redemption (Girl Friday Books, 2021) recounts the author’s experience of trauma and addiction amid a highly publicized abusive relationship.Davis is brutally honest about her experiences and generous in revealing the paths she found to wholeness through spiritual advocacy, healthy co-parenting, and a dedication to preventing generational trauma.Home Is Within You shares one woman’s courageous journey to recovery as a mother and as a woman, and her narrative is a defense of privacy, parenthood, and autonomy.Nadia Davis is the mother of three sons, a writer, attorney, kundalini yoga teacher and former executive director and elected official.She graduated from U.C.L.A. with a degree in Sociology and Specialization in Juvenile Justice, Loyola Law School with a Doctorate, and has received numerous state and national awards for her work improving the lives of others, including the John F. Kennedy Jr. Public Service Award, National Womens' Political Caucus Woman of the Year, and Hispanic Woman of the Year L.U.L.A.C. Her journey of recovery from childhood and adult trauma, a near death car accident, chronic pain, public shaming, addiction and mental health is an inspiration to many. She shows readers a way out of darkness into connection with their infinite true selves and our home within. Nadia lives in Southern California happily co-parenting her three sons. For more information, please visit her website. 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

Political 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 forces, civilian and police institutions, and “law and order” approaches in both these countries. The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a comparative analysis of the criminal markets in these two countries—Brazil and Argentina—as well as differentiating between how these markets work in larger, urban centers, and in smaller cities. This effectively teases out distinctions between how police work with or against these criminal markets, and how the local and national politicians often articulate distinct approaches to how to manage criminal enterprises.The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America examines patterns in the relationships between police, politicians, drug cartels, and criminal actors. These patterns are not necessarily new, but as Flom makes clear, they operate in different ways in different venues and with regard to different types of informal arrangements. In doing a cross national comparison as well as internal comparisons within country, Flom has been able to get at some distinctions that come from the colonial past that has also led to different racial configurations in these comparative urban environments. The research also measures different levels of both police and criminal violence, to gage the kinds of relationships that may be in place between these often-opposing entities. The relationship between the police, as subnational units, and politicians also figures into the various levels of police violence. The Informal Regulations of Criminal Markets in Latin America gets at the key variables that come into play in regard to police conduct and the kinds of policies that politicians are both articulating and trying to implement—often through the police.This is a multi-dimensional analysis that explores criminal markets from important and unique perspectives. Flom worked at the National Ministry of Security in Argentina during the course of this research, and he is able to bring his scholarly expertise as well as his own experience to the research and analysis, making this a particularly rich comparison across countries and urban centers within those countries.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. 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

Clare 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 drugs. The extensive and detailed records kept by the Moscow court show how ingredients produced elsewhere and passed through the massive, long-distance trade network of the early modern world were finally consumed. Looking at medicine as materia medica gives us a different perspective than when looking at practitioners, texts, and ideas.Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow 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

Mark 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 receiving treatment from government-certified opioid treatment programs (OTPs). Their findings, based on responses from over 1,500 OTPs nationwide, show the breadth and distribution of addiction treatment in America, and are the product of almost fifty years of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in the United States.I spoke with Mark about his census results, as well as the history of MAT, and specifically methadone, treatment in America. You can see the full report here.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

Cheryl 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 tentacles of trauma explored in her first book Replacement Child have grabbed hold of her niece too. She struggles with being powerless to help Cheryl, and she discovers that transgenerational trauma and epigenetics may have started this avalanche of pain. She wonders why some people can recover from addiction, and others cannot. Why some are able to raise their white flag of surrender. 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

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, 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 nor addiction was linked to crime, due to the dearth of restrictive laws. After the Civil War, American presses published extensively about domestic addiction. Later in the nineteenth century, many people used cocaine and heroin as medicine.As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK. 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