Shows / New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis with Stephanie Wittels Wachs (Gallery/Lemonada Books, 2026)
Based on the groundbreaking podcast of the same name, Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis (Gallery/Lemonada Books, 2026) is borne…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World with Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Princeton UP, 2026)
Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
The Warm Hug: Substance Use and How to Fix the Failure of Treatment and Recovery in America with Keith Keller (Infinite Recovery, 2026)
Drawing on decades of experience in recovery advocacy, Keith Keller's new book, The Warm Hug: Substance Use and How to Fix the Failure of Treatment and…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival with Sarah Brothers (U California Press, 2026)
As overdose deaths continue to mount and debates rage over harm reduction, drug policy, and homelessness, Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival (U…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
What happens when a democratic state—still in the process of formation—commits to banning a substance, especially one as controversial as alcohol? Sober State…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Ben Westhoff ed.,"Lives Interrupted: The Fentanyl Tragedy" (Arsenault Family Foundation, 2026)
An account of the North American fentanyl crisis told through stories and photographs of its victims Lives Interrupted: The Fentanyl Tragedy (Arsenault Family…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India" (U California Press, 2026)
Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this…
- 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)
Author and experienced harm reductionist Kenneth Anderson is back on the New Books Network to discuss the three new titles in his series exploring the history…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Kaitlin P. Reed, "Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California" (U Washington Press, 2023)
Despite it's centrality to a hippie counterculture which claimed an environmentalist ethos, California's "green rush" of cannabis growing from the…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis
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…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Kim Embrey, "Coca and the Victorians: From Botanical Curiosity to Regulated Drug, 1835–1912" (Transcript Publishing, 2025)
The South American coca plant was established in 19th-century Britain as a medical product before it became a globally restricted drug. Drawing on botanical…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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 on…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
167* Addiction with Gina Turrigiano (EF, JP)
In Recall This Book's second episode (January 2019) John and Elizabeth spoke with their brilliant Brandeis colleague, the MacArthur-winning neuroscientist Gina…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Helen Redmond, "Liquid Handcuffs: Policing and Punishment in Methadone Clinics and the Future of Opioid Addiction Treatment" (North Atlantic Books, 2026)
A hard-hitting exposé of how methadone clinics fail people in recovery—and an urgent, unapologetic case for their abolition. Methadone is a life-saving…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
John Beyer, "Live a Little Better: One Man's Journey of Survival, Sobriety, and Success" (Worth, 2025)
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 journey to the…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Hanna Pickard, "What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Dr. Hanna Pickard has written a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction. Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? Why don’t…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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 patients…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Chris Washburn and Ron Chepesiuk, "Out of Bounds: From Broken NBA Dreams to Redemption" (WildBlue Press, 2025)
Highly promising basketball player Chris Washburn was selected third overall in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Golden State Warriors. But a chance encounter with…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Jonathan Gleason, "Field Guide to Falling Ill" (Yale UP, 2026)
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 together…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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 Myths of…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
How Do We Treat Opioid Addiction?
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…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Jamie Rowen, "Worthy of Justice: The Politics of Veterans Treatment Courts in Practice" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Over the past three decades, jurisdictions across the United States have developed alternatives to traditional criminal procedures and punishments for adults…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)
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…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
David Nasaw, "The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II" (Penguin, 2025)
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…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Mark Deuze, "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick" (Intellect Books, 2025)
The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, music…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Bradley J. Borougerdi, "Cannabis: A Global History" (Reaktion, 2025)
Bradley Borougerdi joins Jana Byars to talk about Cannabis: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025). An international cultural history of the multifunctional plant…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025)
During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Meg Bernhard, "Wine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Shoshana Walter, "Rehab: An American Scandal" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Katie Herzog, "Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
After 20 years of fighting and failing to get sober using abstinence-based methods, journalist Katie Herzog found a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Susan D. Stewart. "On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined careers…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022)
Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics related to…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)
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. While…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019)
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 the…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018)
How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
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)
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019)
Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Owen Flanagan, "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse" (Oxford UP, 2025)
A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
John Lee Hooker Jr., "From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)
From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) is powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Jonathan D. Cohen, "Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)
In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics
In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The…
New Books in Drugs, Addiction and RecoveryAlcohol
In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)
Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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 Lessons…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
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 Rutgers…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Michael Ray Richardson, "Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption" (Sports Publishing, 2024)
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 Sky…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Benjamin T. Smith, "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade" (W. W. Norton, 2021)
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 the Mexican…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)
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 reveals in…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Holly M. Karibo, "Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West" (U Texas Press, 2024)
In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Aisha M Beliso-de Jesús, "Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease" (Duke UP, 2024)
In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, "Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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 Travel, Trade…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)
The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah, "Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States" (NYU Press, 2024)
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 the…
- New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)
The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standards for…