New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single party rule in 2000, and enhanced US border security measures post-9/11. These explanations are compelling, but they overlook state actions beginning in the 1970s that set the foundation for drug violence over the longer term. In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade. Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations. Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

After 20 years of fighting and failing to get sober using abstinence-based methods, journalist Katie Herzog found a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to take control over alcohol. Part memoir, part guidebook, Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol (Simon and Schuster, 2025) shares Herzog’s recovery journey as well her keen observations of drinking and life. She dives into the science and history of addiction treatment to discover why we treat alcohol use disorder the way we do—and why abstinence-based programs like Alcohol Anonymous don’t always work. Through candid first-person reporting, Herzog outlines a simple guide for others to: use an evidence-based protocol to take control of their drinking and break free from cravings, explore alternatives to AA and other abstinence-based programs, gain support from family and friends, and reap the benefits of a low-alcohol or sober lifestyle, including improved health, relationships, and mental well-being. Blending humor, heartbreak, and refreshing honesty, Drink Your Way Sober offers a relatable and exhaustively researched account of a transformative approach to recovery with tips on how you can drink yourself sober too. Find Katie's podcast at Blocked and Reported, and more on her new book here. 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, will be released next year.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Existing portrayals of women who drink typically fall into two categories: disturbing stories of women hitting “rock bottom,” resulting in ruined careers, families, and futures, or amusing stories of fun and harmless “girls’ nights out,” with women drinking and overindulging as a temporary escape from a never-ending list of work and family demands. Drawing on original research and extensive interviews with a diverse group of women, author Susan Stewart challenges these stereotypes, revealing women’s complex relationships with alcohol and factors associated with its use. In On the Rocks: Straight Talk about Women and Drinking (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Susan Stewart asks a question others might prefer stay buried: what about women's lives have changed such that they drink more alcohol? Stewart’s participants share stories of the many social forces that encourage women to drink: increased marketing of alcohol to women, the growing presence of alcohol in the workplace, pressure to drink from friends and family, and that drinking provides an easy “time-out” from children and housework. Stewarts' unvarnished examination of women and drinking challenges readers to think through its implications to individuals, families, and society. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics related to the history of drug prohibition and resistance to it, drug law and policy, including maternal drug use, maternal/state conflicts, film and culture, radio and print media, heroin assisted-treatment, community-based research and qualitative research methodology. Her latest book, Heroin: An Illustrated History (Fernwood, 2022), is an illustrated history of two centuries of Canadian heroin regulation that reveals the deep roots of our current failure to address the overdose death epidemic caused by criminalizing and pathologizing drug users and resisting harm-reduction policies. From its discovery in 1898, heroin was prescribed for therapeutic use in Canada. With little evidence of the harm of heroin, its prohibition has been tied up with colonization and systemic racism as well as class and gender injustice. Using documentary evidence and the experiences of people who use/used heroin, drug user unions and harm-reduction advocates, Boyd argues that in order to create a more just future, prohibition and punitive policies that drive the illegal overdose crisis must end. Today’s host is Jay Shifman. Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, stigma-destroying speaker, podcaster, and event host. The survivor of two suicide attempts and an overdose, Jay holds a BA in Psychology from Northern Kentucky University and has put in numerous hours of independent learning acquiring certifications in mental health, substance misuse and addiction, and drug policy. Jay founded his company, Choose Your Struggle, in 2015 with two distinct goals: ending stigma and promoting honest and fact-based education around the topics of Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. For more information, visit: https://jay.campsite.bio/ or find him on social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren’t used more broadly. That’s when she found Dr. Marie Nyswander.In the 1960s, Nyswander defied the DEA and medical establishment to co-develop methadone maintenance as a treatment for heroin addiction. According to some addiction specialists, its discovery could be considered as monumental as the discovery of penicillin. Yet, it still carries a stigma today.Deftly weaving together interviews, media coverage, and historical documents, Glenn recovers Nyswander’s important legacy and reveals how the forces of racism, fearmongering politicians, and misinformation colluded to set us back decades in our understandings of opioids.With Nyswander as her guide, Glenn also shares her journey through addiction medicine as she confronts her own personal and philosophical quandaries around bias, ambition, and saviorism in the medical field.As the US continues to struggle with opioid and fentanyl use in communities, Mother of Methadone is a powerful reminder of the ways biases have prevented doctors from saving countless lives. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her second book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which the brain, in collusion with social and biological factors, makes addiction possible. In our discussion, Grisel outlines the effects of different drugs, explains the “three laws of psychopharmacology,” and wonders if we’ll ever find medicine’s “holy grail” – a cure for addiction. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Starks illustrates how tobacco influenced facets of life, politics, morality, and culture in the 19th century from the perspectives of tobacco users, producers, and objectors. The book includes full-color ads for tobacco and papirosy cigarettes that add to the book’s rich prose. From Tolstoy’s anti-tobacco screed to the “Tobacco Queens” of St. Petersburg, Starks uses primary sources to craft an edifying narrative of the history of tobacco and tobacco consumption in the imperial period. Tricia Starks is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet history, public health and the history of medicine, as well as culture and gender. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentanyl crisis, and continuing to follow the story on his Substack account. The author of two previous nonfiction books and numerous articles in outlets like the Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, Westhoff’s fourth book, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search for the Truth comes out this spring. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an addict, from an acclaimed philosopher and former addict.What is addiction? Theories about what kind of thing addiction is are sharply divided between those who see it purely as a brain disorder, and those who conceive of it in psychological and social terms. Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.Flanagan has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience, along with his wide-ranging knowledge of the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the ethics and politics of addiction, informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system. Some addictions are fun and experimentation gone awry. Flanagan reveals addiction to be a heterogeneous set of disorders, which are picked out by multifarious cultural, social, psychological, and neural features.Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) is powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues legend John Lee Hooker. Born in Detroit and exposed to the music world from an early age, John Lee Hooker Jr. began singing as a featured attraction in his father's shows as a teenager. His father was a sharecropper's son who became known for hit songs like "Boogie Chillin," "I'm in the Mood," and "Boom Boom," and in 1972, he and his father performed live and recorded an album in Soledad Prison. Junior seemed to have a golden ticket to a successful music career as a child, but trouble brewed as his father's marriage was in trouble and ripped apart the family.Drug addiction and a series of related crimes, including as a con player, landed Junior in and out of jails & prisons for several decades. An early brush with the law led to a sentence at Synanon, the infamous drug rehabilitation program turned religious cult. Later arrests resulted in time served in prisons including at Soledad, San Quentin, and Avenal.Shot, stabbed, and convicted multiple times, Junior was at his lowest point doing time at a Santa Rita jail, but it was at that moment that he found the Lord. He emerged clean and sober and began a successful career as a blues singer, earning two Grammy nominations as well as the Bobby "Blue" Bland Lifetime Achievement Award. He eventually devoted himself fully to his faith. Reverend John Lee Hooker Jr. testifies, preaches, and performs gospel music in churches and prisons in both Germany and America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined. The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players. In Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump’s border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal a great deal about a given society in a particular historical moment. Nina uses alcohol as a lens to analyze the history of French colonization in North Africa. Who consumed alcohol, in what places, how much, and what kinds, what was viewed as healthy and what was viewed as dangerous, even criminal, can help us approach larger questions of gender, class, and nation. If you want to learn more, check out her new book, Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). The book explores how the mythologizing of one distilled alcohol led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit’s relationship with empire. Some claim that French soldiers were given daily absinthe rations during France’s military conquest of Algeria to protect them against heat, diseases, and contaminated water. In fact, the overenthusiastic adoption of the drink by these soldiers, and subsequently by French settlers, was perceived as a threat to France’s colonial ambitions - an anxiety that migrated into French medicine. At the height of its popularity in the late nineteenth century, absinthe reigned in the bars, cafés, and restaurants of France and its colonial empire. Yet by the time it was banned in 1915, the famous green fairy had become the green peril, feared for its connection with declining birth rates and its apparent capacity to induce degeneration, madness, and murderous rage in its consumers. Dr. Nina Studer is a historian working on the 19th and 20th century history of French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. Her work focuses on the history of drinks, in particular tea, coffee, Fanta/Coca-Cola, Orangina, wine and absinthe. Her doctorate, published as  The Hidden Patients: North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry (Böhlau, 2015) is available via Open Access. Currently she works as an associate researcher at the Institut Éthique Histoire Humanités at the University of Geneva, part of Dr. Francesca Arena’s team looking into the medical history of wet dreams between the 18th and the 20th century. The SNSF-project has the title: “Nuits polluantes: masculinité et médecine en Suisse et en France (XVIII – XX siècles)”. The image for this episode is an advertisement for the Algerian wine "Sénéclauze" from 1933, from the personal collection of Nina S. Studer. Many thanks to Nina for sharing it with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates. Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for a more compassionate and effective approach to addiction treatment. Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex describes how people become addicted. She highlights the toll that addiction took on Alex and all members of a family. Drawing from interviews with Alex’s friends, family members, therapists, teachers, and police officers—as well as files from his stays in hospitals, rehab facilities, and jails—Roos paints a compelling portrait of a young man whose life veered between happiness, anxiety, success, and despair. The book is part memoir, part sociological case study, and part policy proposal because it provides a strong challenge to extant treatment and policy options. As she explores how a punitive system failed her son, Dr. Roos calls for a community of action that would improve care for substance users and reduce addiction, realigning public health policy to address the overdose crisis. Dr. PATRICIA ROOS is a Professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University. Among her many publications are the books Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations (coauthored with Barbara Reskin) from Temple University Press and Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies from University of Albany Press. After her son's death, Dr. Roos realigned her research and advocacy interests to explore mental health and substance use disorders, turning her grief into activism. Mentioned: David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America from University of Chicago Press. Pat Roos on Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden addiction: Joe, Jill continue to show compassion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Michael Ray Richardson was a star in the making. After a stellar collegiate career at the University of Montana, where he was voted first team All-Big Sky Conference as a sophomore, junior, and senior, the future seemed bright. Taken fourth overall in the 1978 NBA Draft by the New York Knicks, Richardson was billed as “the next Walt Frazier.” In just his second professional season, he became the third player in NBA history to lead the league in both assists and steals—both Knicks team records. Richardson would also notch four All-Star appearances and twice being named to the All-Defensive team over eight seasons between the Knicks, Golden State Warriors, and New Jersey Nets. But during that time, his time off the court was having a bigger impact on his career than what he was doing on the court. On February 25, 1986, after three violations of the league’s drug policy, NBA commissioner David Stern would ban Richardson from continuing his professional career. His struggles with drugs and alcohol were well documented, and someone considered the next big thing became the first player in league history to be receive a lifetime ban. For most people, this would be the end to their story—one in which their substance abuse would take over and their downfall inevitable. However, that was not in the cards for Michael Ray Richardson. In Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption (Sports Publishing, 2024), Richardson opens up about his life both on and off the basketball court, discussing all the highs and lows that made him both a hero and a villain. Though being reinstated to the NBA in 1988, he would instead have stints in the United States Basketball League and CBA before taking his talents to Europe. With stints in Italy, Croatia, and France, he would lead his teams to numerous championships in his decade-plus overseas. Now back in the states and running youth basketball clinics, Banned is Richardson’s first opportunity to open up about his life, showing that though you may get knocked down—even from self-inflicted actions—the only person that can count you out is yourself. With forewords from Hall of Famers George “The Iceman” Gervin and Nancy Lieberman, this is the story of the Michael Ray Richardson as only he can tell it. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dayne Riley is an engaging and original study that explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Dr. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country’s Chinese population. Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country’s relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery