Maurice Seevers, the stimulants and the political economy of addiction in American biomedicine

Rasmussen, Nicolas

doi:10.1057/biosoc.2009.7

Cited by 13 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The result was what historians call the “classic era of narcotic control” characterized by punitive policies justified by a steady drumbeat of antinarcotic propaganda. 30 …”

Section: Building the Drug-medicine Divide: A New Drug-war Origin Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

Entitled to Addiction?: Pharmaceuticals, Race, and America's First Drug War

Herzberg¹

2017

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

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Summary This article rethinks the formative decades of American drug wars through a social history of addiction to pharmaceutical narcotics, sedatives, and stimulants in the first half of the twentieth century. It argues, first, that addiction to pharmaceutical drugs is no recent aberration; it has historically been more extensive than “street” or illicit drug use. Second, it argues that access to psychoactive pharmaceuticals was a problematic social entitlement constructed as distinctively medical amid the racialized reforms of the Progressive Era. The resulting drug control regime provided inadequate consumer protection for some (through the FDA), and overly punitive policing for others (through the FBN). Instead of seeing these as two separate stories—one a liberal triumph and the other a repressive scourge—both should be understood as part of the broader establishment of a consumer market for drugs segregated by class and race like other consumer markets developed in the era of Progressivism and Jim Crow.

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“…The result was what historians call the “classic era of narcotic control” characterized by punitive policies justified by a steady drumbeat of antinarcotic propaganda. 30 …”

Section: Building the Drug-medicine Divide: A New Drug-war Origin Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

Entitled to Addiction?: Pharmaceuticals, Race, and America's First Drug War

Herzberg¹

2017

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

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“…Such an approach would examine the linkages across levels of description using various methodologies and would include recording the cultural phenomenology of addictive behaviors. It would additionally attend to the political economy of addiction and the effects of industry on concepts of addiction (Rasmussen, 2010). Taken together, this integrative approach will yield an explanandum much richer than any of the single construals developed exclusively from a single scientific or medical perspective.…”

Section: Assemblage: the Thickening Of Brain-based Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience

Slaby

Choudhury

2018

The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society

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The label "critical neuroscience" captures an important-and, we believe, productive-tension. This tension represents the need to respond to the impressive and at times troublesome surge of the neurosciences, without either celebrating it uncritically or condemning it wholesale. "Critical" alludes, on the one hand, to the notion of "crisis," understood-in the classical Greek, predominantly medical sense of the term-as an important juncture and point of intervention, and, relatedly, to a task similar to that proposed by Kant (1992) in The Conflict of the Faculties (rather than in his more famous "Critiques"), where he defends a space of unconstrained inquiry into the continual pressures put on scientific knowing by the vagaries of the political sphere. This opens up a space for inquiry that is itself inherently and self-consciously political. On the other hand, the concept of "critique" raises important associations with Frankfurt School critical theory. While critical neuroscience does not directly follow a Frankfurt School program, nor the reduction of science to positivism espoused by early critical theory, it does share with it a spirit of historico-political mission; that is, the persuasion that scientific inquiry into human reality tends to mobilize specific values and often works in the service of interests that can easily shape construals of nature or naturalness. These notions of nature or of what counts as natural, whether referring to constructs of gender, mental disorder, or normal brain development, require unpacking. Without critical reflection, they appear as inevitable givens, universal and below history, and are often seen as a form of "normative facticity," making specific claims upon us in everyday life (see Hartmann, this volume). In this chapter, we will spell out how our proposal for a critical neuroscience is not motivated by the aim to undermine the epistemological validity of neuroscience or debunk its motives, nor is it simply an opportunity to establish yet another neuroprefixed discipline. Situated between neuroscience and the human sciences, our notion of critical neuroscience uses a historical sensibility to analyze the claim that we

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“…Numerous historians have noted that during the early 20th century drug addiction, originally a commonplace if mildly discrediting sign of unmanly resistance to pain, underwent a transformation in both popular and expert opinion into a deeply immoral character defect, signalling escapism from mature responsibilities [13][14][15]. Such moralistic reactions against addiction were particularly strong in the United States, where drug addiction was associated with dangerous social elements such as Chinese minorities [14,16].…”

Section: From Endocrinology To Psychiatrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such moralistic reactions against addiction were particularly strong in the United States, where drug addiction was associated with dangerous social elements such as Chinese minorities [14,16]. The development of a neurophysiological understanding of opiate addiction in the mid-20th century did little to reduce this stigma; rather, the theory that the addict's nervous system becomes permanently adapted to the drugs sometimes served as a rationale for the incarceration of addicts whose character, already blemished by their imputed predisposition to seek escape, was now also understood as biologically corrupted [15,17]. Indeed, the American drug addict c. 1960 became a paradigmatic example for sociologists defining the modern concept of stigma [18], and despite dramatic advances in addiction science drug addiction has remained a highly stigmatized condition, presenting continuing obstacles to harm reduction efforts today [19].…”

Section: From Endocrinology To Psychiatrymentioning

confidence: 99%