New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goebbels’s propaganda machine, Ohler shows Germany was a hub of drug production and abuse during the 1920s. Manufacturers like Merck and Bayer openly marketed their wares to the public, building the basis of so-called big pharma on intoxicants. Produced by Temmler, the Nazi elite embraced methamphetamine as a wonder drug, free of the connotations of disease and degeneracy associated with the drug culture of the Weimar years. Stimulants became a valuable tool in Germany’s wartime arsenal. The German military acknowledged the value of amphetamines and distributed Pervitin en masse. Ohler argues amphetamines powered the Wehrmacht’s armored Blitzkrieg of 1939-1941, defeating the Allies in France and elsewhere. These gains were short-lived, however. Nazi Germany’s Faustian bargain with drugs evaporated during the Battle of Stalingrad and in the distant steppes of the Soviet Union. Ever more powerful drug combinations were desperately sought by the Nazi state to save the Reich from annihilation, exposing horrors of the regime from experiments on concentration camp prisoners and drugged child soldiers.

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On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies. From an Alzheimers disease study that relied on the process of sexing flies, to the pharamceuticalized prostate, to the medical experiences of transgender children, Part 1 uses the body as subject to disrupt the binaries of male/female, human/non-human and healthy/unhealthy. In Part 2, titled Creating Subjectivities for Patients in Advertising, the book expands its analysis to the commercial images and discourses used in marketing and prescribing relational subjectivities. Observing the way pharmaceuticals insert themselves into familial and romantic relationships, the HPV vaccine is used as an example of drugs as non-human participants in the parent-child partnership. Through an international lens, Part 3 provides three comparative case studies of the way that knowledge about HPV is produced in Columbia, the U.K. and Austria.

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Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a product of local, imperial, and commercial networks in [the] eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Science and empire were deeply intertwined in the Spanish Atlantic, and Crawford offers a window into the epistemic culture produced by Spanish colonial governance and resulting encounters across and within the Andean and Atlantic contexts. Part One of the book looks carefully at what it meant to know nature in the early modern Atlantic World. It traces the transformations of quina from a local Andean remedy into a botanical commodity and an imperial natural resource from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, showing how these transformations resulted from the bark’s integration into Andean, Atlantic, and imperial networks of circulation of people, texts, objects, and images. Part Two of the book explores several key conflicts in the late eighteenth century that emerged as the Spanish Crown tried to assert greater control over the tree and its bark. It’s a story that will be of interest to the histories of science, medicine, natural history, and early modernity!

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In Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015) Professor George T. Diaz examines a subject that has received scant attention by historians, but one that is at the heart of contemporary debates over U.S.-Mexico immigration and border enforcement. Focusing on trans-border communities, like Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Diaz details the interplay between state efforts to regulate cross-border trade and the border people that subverted state and federal laws through acts of petty smuggling and trafficking. Using folk songs (corridos), memoirs, court documents, and newspapers, Diaz uncovers the social history of a transnational contrabandista community that responded to the hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border and the enforcement of trade regulations through the formation of a moral economy. Holding nuanced views of newly erected legal and physical barriers to the mobility of people and consumer goods across the border, contrabandistas established a cultural world of smuggling that regulated trade on its own terms and frustrated state efforts to define and police notions of legality/illegality.

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In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was, but I was pretty sure there must be something remarkable about it if ordinary drug fiends were risking jail time and worse by robbing mom-and-pop drug stores to get it.

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Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that international drug control efforts are actually decades older, and much more imbricated with the history of U.S. access to international markets, than we have previously thought. Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014) uncovers this history by tracing the transnational geography and political economy of coca commodities–stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States, and back again. The book examines how economic controls put in place during WWII transformed the power of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry in Latin America and beyond, and gave rise to new definitions of legality and illegality–definitions that were largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed drugs, and not on the qualities of the drugs themselves. Drug control, she shows, is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society’s habits and daily lives.

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Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the “structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood.” It is a timely and fascinating study.

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Drugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In explaining the drugs to their patients, should those doctors use the medical terminology they themselves use – which might not be immediately understandable to their patients – or should they translate the description into terms more comfortable and familiar to the patient? And what are the practical and ethical consequences of each decision? Stefan Ecks‘ new book carefully considers these problems in the context of health-related practices in modern Calcutta. Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (NYU Press, 2013) looks successively at the different and overlapping medical and healing contexts that together make up a significant part of the medical marketplace in Calcutta. Ch. 1 treats popular notions that include the importance of the belly as the “somatic center of good health,” the power of the mind to regulate good health, and the connection between modernity and pollution as causes of illness. Ch. 2 looks at Ayurvedic practices in Calcutta. It reflects on some of the most important ways that Ayurveda is changing in India – especially at the levels of practitioner training, language, and the patient-physician relationship – despite the fact that the centrality of food and digestion has remained constant. Ch. 3 looks closely at homeopathy, the second most popular type of medicine in Bengal, and focuses on the principles, histories, and pluralities of homeopathic practices in Calcutta. Ch. 4 looks at the ways that Calcutta psychiatrists position themselves with respect to popular beliefs about psychopharmaceuticals, general physicians, practitioners of non-biomedical treatments, and the pharmaceutical industry. This chapter pays special attention to how Bengali doctors use metaphors to help patients understand and respond to psychiatric diagnoses, with comparisons to nature, the Ganges river, fairytales, everyday over-the-counter drugs, diabetes, and food. The conclusion explores a key argument of the book, proposing that “patients’ suspicions of psychopharmaceuticals are based on suspicions of biomedicine’s ‘magic bullet’ model of drug effects,” looking at the implications of this conclusion, and considering the possible broader impacts of this study beyond Calcutta. It’s a fascinating study of potential interest to historians and anthropologists of medicine and healing, as well as readers interested in learning more about the medical marketplace of modern India and anyone interested in modern psychopharmaceuticals.

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Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai, Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo (Lexington Books, 2014) explores the ways that admitting to and living with alcoholism in Japan challenges prevailing norms of masculinity and sociability, and looks carefully at its profound consequences for the individual sufferer. After a brief history of alcohol and drunkenness in Japan, Christensen considers the ubiquitous coding of alcohol as fun and leisurely in mass media, and directs our attention to the difficulties that this framing creates for male alcoholics. The book then moves to a discussion of historical shifts in notions of addiction in Japan, as well as contemporary debates over treatment methodologies and the ways that methodologies transplanted into Japan from the US map – or not – onto local cultural and religious realities. Christensen follows this with detailed accounts of the major support groups available to sufferers in Tokyo, the languages and bodies of alcoholic experience, and much else. Throughout the study, Christensen offers an extraordinarily sensitive treatment of the struggle of individual men to build a new selfhood while their sense of masculinity, and of a place in society, have been dismantled.

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Todd Meyers‘ The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013) is many things, all of them compelling and fully realized. Most directly, the book is an ethnography of drug dependence and treatment among adolescents in Baltimore between 2005-2008. Meyers traces twelve people through their treatment in the clinic and beyond, into what he calls “the afterlife of therapy.” The group of adolescents was diverse–their economic and family circumstances, their demographics, and arc of their narratives from addiction to treatment varied widely. Yet they shared at least one important experience: “each had either been enrolled in a clinical trial or were currently being treated with a relatively new drug for opiate withdrawal and replacement therapy: buprenorphine” (4). In this way, the book is also the story of a pharmaceutical making its way and its mark in the worlds of therapeutics, law, public opinion and, especially, in the lives of its users. Meyers shows how the lives and experiences of these adolescents (as well as others in their lives) were often shaped and constrained by their roles as subjects in pharmaceutical trials evaluating the effectiveness of buprenorphine. Moreover, Meyers looks beyond the questions and answers asked and answered under the constraints of randomized controlled trials. Rather, as he puts it, “my ethnographic gaze is fixed upon the intersection of clinical medicine and social life, at the place where medical and pharmacological subjects are constituted under the sign of therapeutics” (17). As a result, The Clinic as Elsewhere locates palpable places where medicine and the social intersect in the material world and lived experience; as readers, we see the relationship between the medical and the social as much as understand it as a conceptual given. Ultimately, Meyers shows how therapeutics is not only a form of intervention, but a “sign”: under which people are constituted as subjects, and with which people “assign value, meaning, and worth assign value to pharmaceutical intervention” (116).

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