New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

About New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

Publisher

Marshall Poe

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Aug 2009

Latest episode

16 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 273 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   16 Oct 2026

   The Warm Hug: Substance Use and How to Fix the Failure of Treatment and Recovery in America with Keith Keller (Infinite Recovery, 2026)

   Drawing on decades of experience in recovery advocacy, Keith Keller's new book, The Warm Hug: Substance Use and How to Fix the Failure of Treatment and Recovery in America (Infinite Recovery, 2026), takes a candid look at the challenges facing substance use treatment and recovery systems in America. More importantly, Keith offers practical insights and solutions aimed at improving outcomes for individuals, families, communities, and professionals alike. Recovery, Keith emphasizes, is a skill that anyone can learn. The book will resonate with those directly affected by substance use disorder, but its message extends beyond recovery circles. The Warm Hug is written for anyone interested in understanding the realities of addiction, the shortcomings of current treatment approaches, and the opportunities for meaningful change. Keith explores these topics with host Emily Dufton. Emily 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.

2. 

   14 Oct 2026

   Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival with Sarah Brothers (U California Press, 2026)

   As overdose deaths continue to mount and debates rage over harm reduction, drug policy, and homelessness, Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival (U California Press, 2026) offers a crucial on-the-ground perspective pointing to a humane future. Finding a vein is difficult. As veins collapse and scar over, it becomes almost impossible. For millions of Americans who inject drugs and can’t do it alone, the solution is to find someone who can. Enter the “hit doctor.” Though uncredentialed, hit doctors develop expertise through necessity, providing injection assistance and addressing needs that dominant medical systems exclude or criminalize. They share the same conditions as the people they serve: sleeping in encampments and alleys, living in cramped single-room-occupancy hotels, suffering from untreated illness and trauma, and grieving friends who keep dying. Sarah Brothers spent more than seven years observing and interviewing hit doctors and their clients across San Francisco. Hit Doctors is an intimate portrait of the daily lives, relationships, and ethical worlds of people managing extraordinary hardship at a pivotal moment, when fentanyl arrived and thousands began dying annually. Brothers’s long-term ethnography yields critical insights. People seeking help strongly prefer women hit doctors, perceived as more careful and less likely to turn violent. But even as their expertise is valued, hit doctors are targets for abuse, and they suffer as the people they care for decline and die. That is the cost of trying to keep each other alive when formal systems of support have failed. Brothers joins host Emily Dufton to discuss the years of work behind her new book, the people she studied and the relationships she built with them. 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.

3. 

   16 Sept 2026

   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 (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.

Inside a recent episode

Scott Cunningham, "Causal Inference: The Mixtape" (Yale UP, 2021)

Published 19 Nov 2021 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Well, That's great, and that's always true. But the problem is that in a lot of the social sciences, political science, economics in particular, epidemiology, and even in some of the physical sciences, astronomy, you can't really run a lot of physically randomized experiments. We don't randomly assign people into college itself. We don't randomly assign countries to into different kinds of political regimes. They tend to be happening, but they happen, but we're not randomly doing it. And yet they're very, very important. They're extremely, extremely important questions to know what is the effect of college on earnings and what is the effect of some sort of political regime or some sort of public policy. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.1 / 5

11 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 43 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

48

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

92

Contact New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery