Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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 ...
16 Sep 57min
Ben Westhoff ed.,"Lives Interrupted: The Fentanyl Tragedy" (Arsenault Family Foundation, 2026)
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 Westhof...
9 Sep 27min
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India" (U California Press, 2026)
Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, ...
19 Aug 55min
David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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 th...
31 Mai 1h
Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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...
12 Mai 34min
Kenneth Anderson, "Sanitariums, Hospitals, and the Belladonna Cure: Volume Three of the Untold History of Addiction Treatment in the United States" (The HAMS Harm Reduction Network, Inc., 2022)
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...
29 Apr 1h 4min
Kaitlin P. Reed, "Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California" (U Washington Press, 2023)
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. ...
27 Apr 1h 20min
Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis
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 me...
20 Apr 1h 8min
