About History on Drugs
Drugs are really complicated. They are both great and terrible, naughty and nice, life savers and killers. They always reside, like all of history, in shades of grey. They can be tragic. They can be hilarious. They can be used responsibly or recklessly. For one sibling they can be an inspiration. For another they can be the road to ruin.
Our failure to acknowledge that grey is literally killing us. Fueling hatred instead of love; stupid instead of smart. We watch as our families, our society, even our world are under threat mainly because people refuse to accept that it’s all grey out there. So drugs are a lot like real life. And history is of course nothing but real life.
This newsletter (published weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) is about those shades of grey—drugs written about from a historical perspective by a professor of history. Here you’ll engage with voices from the past and present while hopefully having an occasional laugh or two. But mainly this should be a respite from the outrage economy, a place to enjoy the fruits of an open mind and an evidence-based, tolerant approach to our neighbors, reality, and ourselves.
Why subscribe?
Do you ever get asked to tip for something that doesn’t really merit a tip? Well this is nothing like that!
This is offering a very modest “tip” to a guy—a subject-matter expert no less—who is sharing knowledge grounded in a quarter century of research and scholarship, and he’s offering that knowledge almost entirely for free! Yet for your very modest tip, just $5 a month, or $50 a year—so significantly less than what you are paying for that one streaming service you don’t need and that you forgot you’ve even been paying for over the last five years—you get some very valuable bonuses. You can comment on posts, participate in regular chat and discussion threads, and access the full archive, which is quite handy because many posts refer back to earlier ones you may have missed. In the famous words of someone somewhere: “What a bargain!!!”
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About the Author
Isaac Campos is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He’s the son of immigrants from Mexico who’d previously fled the fascists in Spain. When he got his PhD from Harvard his father said, “If only your grandmother could’ve seen this. . . .” But Isaac also smoked a lot of weed in high school in the 1980s, so he has a lot of funny stories about that too.
