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: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of alcohol prohibition in India, drawing on extensive archival research and rich vernacular sources to explain its surprising resilience over time. Since its inception, prohibition has served both as an ideal and a tool of state power—a dual role that has worked to shape its shifting trajectories. Each phase of enforcement has served to reaffirm prohibition's founding logic, thereby further embedding it in the machinery of governance—even as it has constrained its future implementation. Foregrounding intersections with caste and gender, the book illuminates how diverse social responses have made prohibition a deeply contested—sobering—yet enduring project. While prohibition may be a thing of the past in the West, history helps to keep it alive in India.

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An account of the North American fentanyl crisis told through stories and photographs of its victims

Lives Interrupted: The Fentanyl Tragedy (Arsenault Family Foundation, 2026), edited by Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl, Inc., is a different kind of drug book. Part biography, part coffee-table photo collection, it seeks to put a human face on a public health crisis too often discussed in statistics and numbers. Westhoff's book profiles 80 people, 76 victims of fentanyl overdose and 4 survivors, and shows the fullness of their personalities, as well as their legacy in the work their mourning families carry on. Its purpose is to move public officials and health departments to emphasize recovery and treatment for those battling with this drug.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, was released in 2026.

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Ganja

Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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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 and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."

Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics.

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.
Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford UP, 2026) traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.
Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health.

Markets of Pain offers an account of the global drug trade in the twentieth century, focusing on the transformation of opium from a colonial commodity into a modern resource for the American and European pharmaceutical industries. Challenging simplistic ideas of licit and illicit drugs in the twentieth century, it reveals how the modern global drug regime was formed by India and Turkey's navigation of the international anti-opium movement, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and the complex relationship between agriculture, medicine, and global capitalism.

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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 of America's addiction treatment industry. We discussed the first two books of his series, Strychnine and Gold, in 2022. Today, Emily and Ken discuss the books he's published since: 

Anderson has produced this series of encyclopedia-like compilations of America's vast network of treatment facilities to satisfy his own curiosity, but his work benefits the reader, too. Serious scholars of American drug and alcohol history will benefit from his thorough mining (and many useful reproductions) of primary sources, as well as the charts and graphs he's compiled. These are both damning and illuminating. 

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Despite it's centrality to a hippie counterculture which claimed an environmentalist ethos, California's "green rush" of cannabis growing from the mid-twentieth century onwards has been anything but. In Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California, Cal Poly Humboldt Native American Studies professor Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) argues that the state's booming cannabis industry can be situated squarely within other extractive settler colonial enterprises such as gold mining and overfishing. From illegal land use practices to toxic pollutants in rivers, cannabis growing in northern California has been disruptive to Indigenous relations to the land and nonhuman life, and has been for decades - a problem only worsening as the industry grows from an underground enterprise into an economic engine worth billions. Yet, as Reed argues, cannabis-as-colonialism is only part of the story, as the Yurok and other California Native people engage in acts of survivance from the court room to the cannabis field here, fighting and insisting that northern California is still Native land.

Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is assistant professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann has been hosting New Books Network podcasts since 2017. Currently, he is a an assistant professor of American environmental history at Appalachian State University. He can be reached at [email protected]

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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, selling, and using cannabis for religious and medicinal purposes and as an intoxicant. The opening of YIVO’s latest exhibit, Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis, will feature a panel discussion moderated by Eddy Portnoy, who will provide a brief overview of the relationship between Jews and cannabis. He’ll then moderate a discussion with Ed Rosenthal, Adriana Kertzer, Rabbi/Dr. Yosef Glassman, and Madison Margolin. Their discussion will consider the many connections of the Jews to cannabis – religious and spiritual, historical, scientific, and more.

Find more information about the exhibit here: https://yivo.org/Cannabis

This panel discussion originally took place on May 5, 2022.

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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, economic, pharmaceutical, social, and political perspectives, in Coca and the Victorians: From Botanical Curiosity to Regulated Drug, 1835–1912 (Transcript Publishing, 2025), Dr. Kim Embrey analyses how the use and perception of coca changed as it was transferred to Europe. In a process of cultural dissimilation, coca was not simply adopted, but embedded into new medical, social, and scientific contexts. The study shows how a plant from the Andes was repositioned in British modernity.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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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 small-scale farming, even as a newly constructed hydroelectric dam threatens traditional livelihoods. Yet after decades where Briceño suffered from a bloody conflict, the village has more recently become central to the nation’s hopes for peace. In Governing the Excluded, sociologist Alex Diamond shares a closer look at Briceño and offers unique insight not only into the contemporary Colombian state but to how people across the Global South are struggling to maintain rural livelihoods amid economic dispossession.
Governing the Excluded describes a landmark peace process between the Colombian government and the radical FARC guerrillas from the perspective of Colombian farmers, drawing links between economic transformation, drug economies, and armed conflict. Exclusion from global markets for traditional crops like coffee first pushed farmers to grow coca, the raw material for cocaine. This ushered in an era of violent conflict for control of the illicit economy, while farmers continued to be priced out of legal markets. In exchange for peace and state protection, farmers ultimately agreed to sacrifice profitable coca. But with its disappearance, they now find themselves dependent on the state: for machinery to maintain the roads they need to get legal harvests to market, municipal jobs that are the only decent work available, and for public resources to subsidize food crops with razor-thin profit margins. Ongoing economic struggles in the legal sector make the state’s newfound authority tenuous, as some villagers replant coca, abandon the village for uncertain urban futures, or join a rearmed guerrilla group.
Informed by deep ethnographic research and firsthand stories from Briceño residents, Governing the Excluded shows that when it comes to the forces driving dispossession—be they international corporate megaprojects, global food prices, or national initiatives to replace coca cultivation—state authority goes only so far as its ability to sustain local livelihoods.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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