History on Drugs Podcast

My latest guest is Emily Dufton. Emily is an independent scholar and historian who has written a lot about drugs over the years. Her first book, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017), told the roller-coaster story of the marijuana-legalization movement since the 1960s. Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten...

My latest guest is John O’Connor, author of A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon, which was published today (April 14, 2026). This is the story of Terence McKenna, arguably the single most important figure in popularizing psilocybin mushrooms in the late twentieth century United States. In the early 1970s, McKenna tr...

My latest conversation is with Graham Harding , author of Champagne in Britain, 1800-1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury (Bloomsbury, 2023). Graham and I met last spring in London, where we talked about the history of champagne during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the fascinating history of “branding,” which came of age during the same period. Graham has no...

My latest guest is Stephen Snelders of Utrecht University. Stephen and I met up in Amsterdam last March to talk about drugs, history, and the Netherlands. A native of Amsterdam, Stephen watched up close as the various drug scenes in that great city evolved during the 1980s. This helped turn him into a drug historian, initially studying the history of LSD in his country, and eventually publishing D...

This week’s guest is Matthew Connelly , professor of international and global history at Columbia University. This interview was especially fun for me because it was Matt who, back at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, turned me into a historian. My whole way of doing things has been indelibly shaped by him. Matt is of course better known as a great and prolific scholar. His publications inc...

This week’s guest is drug-policy-reform legend Ethan Nadelmann. Ethan led the charge against the War on Drugs beginning in the 1980s, first as a professor at Princeton and then as the head of the Lindesmith Center (which became the Drug Policy Alliance). He’s published various influential works, including the books Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement and...

Maia Szalavitz is my latest podcast guest. Maia is the author of Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction , Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction , and Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, along with several other books . We met up at her office in New York City last November to talk about...

My latest podcast is with Paul Gootenberg, one of the towering figures in drug history. Paul just retired from his longtime position as the SUNY Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University, and I was there in November to both fete and roast him at a symposium in his honor. It’s a very fun conversation. There are lots of great stories about 1960s radicals and the drug...

My latest guest is historian Erika Dyck . Erika is one of the world’s leading authorities on psychedelics both past and present. She hails from Saskatchewan, Canada, which back in the 1950s was ground zero for new scientific research into psychedelic therapy, an era she wrote about in her first book, and which we talk about at some length in our conversation. We also discuss her youth in Saskatoon...

This week’s guest is Davarian Baldwin , Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity University. He’s the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC Press, 2007), and co-editor of the essay collection Escape From New York! T...

Today on the podcast I talk to Dale Gieringer , the longtime head of California NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). Dale came in last spring to talk about what it was like to be there for some of the most important shifts in twentieth-century drug history, from the explosion of drug-taking in the 1960s, to California’s historic Prop. 215, which legalized medical marijua...

My guest in Episode #6 is historian Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara . Bri is a specialist in colonial Central America, especially the history of women and religiosity. She’s also my friend and colleague here at the University of Cincinnati. We have a great, wide-ranging conversation that explores her childhood in California, the kinds of struggles that most young people have as they try to figure out wh...

In the fifth installment of the History on Drugs podcast, John O’Connor joins Isaac to discuss his recently published book— The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster (Sourcebooks, 2024) —along with his new project on psychedelic guru Terence McKenna. They talk about the psychedelic renaissance, John’s trip to Colombia’s Putomayo region, how to successfully combine your...

This week’s guest is my colleague Willard Sunderland. Willard is the Henry R. Winkler Professor of Modern History at the University of Cincinnati and an expert on the history of the Russian Empire. Our conversation centers around a great adventure from which Willard had just returned—sailing a 32-foot sailboat from Lake Erie to Finland. Though there’s a lot of history involved in this too, as the...

In this episode I talk to Nancy Campbell about a life in drug history. From growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, to Seattle and northern California in the 1980s during the height of the War on Drugs, to a historic 1990s summit of young drug scholars organized by the legendary David Musto , to a quarter century of researching and publishing on drugs, gender, addiction, and overdose. Episode Outli...

In this episode, my colleague Jeff Zalar joins me. This is a wide-ranging conversation that takes us from the post-industrial, working-class Rust Belt, to Panama and the first Gulf War (via the Marines), through graduate school at Georgetown, and finally to the University of Cincinnati. It’s a story of grit and determination with a heavy Midwestern accent. It also includes about the finest explana...

My guest this week is James Bradford of the Berklee College of Music. It’s a great conversation. James is a really interesting guy with a really fascinating story, and he generously shares a lot of it. We talk about his growing up in Maine, youthful drug use, families and addiction, becoming a historian, researching Afghanistan, opium, cannabis, and much much more. As I note in the introduction to...