1 hr 42 min
Episode #3: Addiction, Overdose, and Gender, with Nancy Campbell History on Drugs Podcast
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- History
In this episode I talk to Nancy Campbell about a life 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.
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 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.
History on Drugs newsletter: https://isaaccampos.substack.com/
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit isaaccampos.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode I talk to Nancy Campbell about a life 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.
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 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.
History on Drugs newsletter: https://isaaccampos.substack.com/
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit isaaccampos.substack.com/subscribe
1 hr 42 min