History on Drugs Podcast Isaac Campos

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/


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In this episode, my colleague Jeff Zalar joins me. This is a wide-ranging conversation that takes us from the post-industrial, working-class Rust Belt, to Panama and the first Gulf War (via the Marines), through graduate school at Georgetown, and finally to the University of Cincinnati. It’s a story of grit and determination with a heavy Midwestern accent. It also includes about the finest explanation of the value of a humanities education that you will ever hear. Plus thoughts on the culture of drinking in the military.
Episode outline:
0:00-4:00—Episode introduction.
4:00-18:15—Growing up in working-class, greater Milwaukee; Slavic immigrant roots; schoolboy days and learning to love learning.
18:15-27:00—Deciding to join the Marines; military intelligence; Panama; the Gulf War, and developing a deep thirst for education.
27:00-33:30—The culture of drinking in the Marines.
33:30-47:00—Off to college; from struggles to excellence; the huge difference a professor can make; deciding to pursue a career in academia.
47:00-56:30—Off to graduate school; Washington, D.C. and Georgetown.
56:30-1:04:00—Finishing graduate school; humility and learning the value of teaching.
1:04:00-1:12:00—First academic job in California; life struggles; early teaching struggles; the critical role of grit.
1:12:00-1:23:00—Dumb luck and finding the right job posting; coming to Cincinnati and the challenges of pulling up stakes with a family.
1:23:00-1:28:30—Current project on Catholics and natural science in the nineteenth century; I interject a story about the discovery of intoxicant cannabis in Mexico by an eighteenth-century Catholic man of science.
1:28:30-1:41:00—The value of history and the humanities; cultivating excellence, virtue, integrity, humility, and charity.
1:41:00-end—The story of Saint Boniface, which is the name of the church near my house. You can hear the church bells at the start of the podcast, though that was totally unintentional.
History on Drugs Newsletter: https://isaaccampos.substack.com/








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My guest this week is James Bradford of the Berklee College of Music. It’s a great conversation. James is a really interesting guy with a really fascinating story, and he generously shares a lot of it. We talk about his growing up in Maine, youthful drug use, families and addiction, becoming a historian, researching Afghanistan, opium, cannabis, and much much more.
As I note in the introduction to the interview, there are a bunch of people and organizations that we talk about and don’t really explain, so I’m going to list them here in roughly their order of appearance:
The Drug Page is a website that I created. It brings my research on marijuana in the United States to a broader public.
SeepeopleS is James’s brother’s band.
The Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS) is our professional association.
Emily Dufton is a historian who has written about marijuana in the United States.
Haggai Ram is a historian who has written about hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel.
Erika Dyck is a historian and current president of the ADHS. She’s writes a lot about psychedelics.
David Herzberg is a historian who has written a lot about drugs and the pharmaceutical industry in the United States.
David Courtwright is the dean of American drug historians. He coined the terms “limbic capitalism,” “psychoactive revolution,” and more.
Paul Gootenberg is the dean of Latin American drug historians. He has written a lot about cocaine. He was also on my doctoral committee many moons ago.
Oliver Dinius is a historian of Brazil and was a colleague of mine in graduate school.
Matthew Connelly is a historian of international and global history and my first mentor in this business.
James Mills is a historian who has worked on cannabis in the British empire and cocaine in Asia.
Patricia Barton is a historian of pharmacy and drugs in the British empire.
AHA: American Historical Association.
MESA: Middle East Studies Association.
Stephen Snelders is a historian who writes about drugs in the Netherlands and beyond.
Lucas Richert is a historian of pharmacy and psychedelics.
David Guba is a historian who has written about cannabis in France.
Ethan Nadelmann is a drug-policy-reform legend. He’s also got a very interesting podcast of his own.


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