Dear Readers,
In Episode #3 I talk to Nancy Campbell about her life and long career in drug history. From growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, to Seattle and northern California in the 1980s during the height of the War on Drugs, to a historic 1990s summit of young drug scholars organized by the legendary David Musto, to a quarter century of researching and publishing on drugs, gender, addiction, and overdose.
As always, the episode is available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, and the Substack app.
Episode Outline (with approximate time stamps)
0:00-4:30: Episode introduction.
4:30-13:00: Growing up in Berwick, Pennsylvania; hanging around doctors’ offices; being the only girl on the high school cross-country team; working for the newspaper; learning about letter-press printing.
13:00-22:00: Beginning to notice drug users and the prejudice against them; becoming a rebellious thinker; the transformation of Nancy’s childhood region into a MAGA stronghold; deaths of despair; first intellectual ideas about drug policy and history; not interested in being “normal.”
22:00-29:00: Driving across the country with her college boyfriend to Seattle; letter-press printing shops; first taste of graduate school; studying science as culture; Donna Haraway; learning that all knowledge is bound up with power; Seattle in the late 1980s.
29:00-39:00: Moving to Mendocino County, California; letter-press printing at Yolla Bolly Press; seeing the War on Drugs up close in the Emerald Triangle; the back-to-the-land movement; the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP); the War on Drugs on TV; getting inspired to study drug policy and its history.
39:00-43:30: Applying to “history of consciousness” at UC Santa Cruz; graduate school; reading Bruno Latour; working with Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, Barbara Epstein; Angela Davis; dissertation on drug policy in the 1950s; drug users; first academic job (at Ohio State).
43:30-49:00: The Daniel Hearings of the 1950s; employees of the Lexington “narcotics farm”; the crucial 1950s; feeling like a lone voice until David Musto convenes a big summit of young drug scholars.
49:00-57:00: David Musto’s scholarship and influence; the 1996 drug-history summit in New Haven; David Courtwright.
57:00-1:10:00: From Ohio State to science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic; the history of the “narcotic farms” and research on human subjects there; life on the “farm”; trying to make addicts “normal”; 1970s controversies about human-subjects research; Discovering Addiction; doing history of the present.
1:10-1:25:00: The initially overlooked opioid epidemic; buprenorphine; naloxone; harm reduction; overlooked overdose deaths; ODs have been ticking up since 1979; responding too late to the “chronic slow disaster” of OD deaths; fentanyl; questioning the numbers; polydrug overdose.
1:25-end: Are these deaths of despair?; uncounted overdose deaths; set and setting and overdose; fentanyl; the problems of data; drug-policy amnesia; Amitav Ghosh; hidden histories of overdose; balancing desire to stop overdose with the need for pain relief; limbic capitalism and the need for guardrails.
Episode #3: Addiction, Overdose, and Gender, with Nancy Campbell