David Herzberg
I am a historian of drugs whose research focuses on the legal kind—psychoactive pharmaceuticals. I explore the nature and trajectory of drug commerce, drug use, and drug policy in American racial capitalism.
My work has appeared in numerous scholarly and medical journals, in popular media, and in two books: White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). I am also co-editor of Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the official organ of the Alcohol and Drug History Society.
Research Projects
I am finishing work on two projects: a book co-authored with Helena Hansen and Jules Netherland on how the politics of whiteness has shaped the history of opioids, opioid addiction, and drug policy in the U.S.; and a volume co-edited with Nils Kessel and Joseph Gabriel exploring alternatives to the drug-medicine divide as a frame for the history of psychoactive substances. I am also beginning research for a new project on the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which broadened international controls to cover synthetic drugs such as amphetamine, barbiturates, tranquilizers, and LSD.
The Convention offers an opportunity to explore how the quest for drug control has also, of necessity, been a quest to define medicine and therapy, framed and influenced but never entirely defined by powerful corporations and the political hierarchies of race, gender, class, and nation.
Education
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005
MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997
BA, Wesleyan University, 1993
Source: University of Buffalo
Books by Author
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