Friday, September 5 at 5:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls present
A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
5:00pm | Mingling
5:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
For good reason, “drug wars” dominate memory and debates about U.S. drug policy. Yet the U.S. has also been home to many other approaches to drugs, addiction, and drug policy. This talk explores one of those histories, that of addicted physicians—“respectable” white men suffering from a condition long associated with the poor and racialized. Physicians’ apparent susceptibility to addiction (they had among America’s highest rates), and the desire to protect white male professionals, led medical authorities to develop more humane approaches to their care. These evolved over the 20th century from informal practices to statewide programs with extensive facilities. Remembering such non-warlike precedents equips us with an expanded historical toolbox of options for today’s rare moment of plasticity in domestic and global drug policy.
David Herzberg is a historian of drugs and drug policy in U.S. racial capitalism, with a primary focus on pharmaceutical sedatives, stimulants, and opioids. Among other places, you can find his work in American Quarterly, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, the Washington Post, and in three books, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (University of Chicago, 2020), Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (University of California, 2023), and Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Johns Hopkins, 2009). He is also Director of the Drugs, Health, and Society program at UB and serves as co-Editor of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, the peer-reviewed journal of the Alcohol and Drug History Society.