If we wanted to design a culture from the ground up to maximize both the potential and severity of addiction, we would build it exactly like the United States today. 

Once upon a time, humans received contentment and fulfilment from their work, and they often went home feeling connected to their communities and identified with the service or goods they offered for sale. But for the last hundred years we've steadily changed that. Today, 1 in 8 of us in the United States has worked at McDonalds, a job that might pay the bills, but certainly isn't showing anyone how much they are truly capable of doing or connecting them to a sense of identity related to their work. We just do it to get a paycheck.

In this episode I will cover the various ways our medical, educational, employment, legal and political systems are all built to maximize addiction potential and severity, and to hide their tracks by blaming drugs and drug users for problems caused by the environment in which we life.

Cocaine and heroin costs around $1 per gram to produce from coca leaves and opium poppies, respectively. Yet these substances will cost a consumer upwards of 50x that much on the streets.

Find out more about behavioralist B.F. Skinner here. Read about his use of Operant Conditioning here.

In Bruce Alexander's experiments, rats that were put in a toyless, friendless cages used 19 times more morphine than those placed in comfortable, familiar homes with other rats.

For more about maximizing button-pressing by rewarding the button-presser randomly, in unexpected and unpredictable patters, check out this article.

This week I dive into neoliberalism and oligarchy, 2 systems the USA has repeatedly rejected despite their current resurgence of late. The war on drugs is part of a larger move to privatize public systems like medicine, post office services or policing, and to allow profiteering by rich folks who can step in to provide gear and services for these new markets once managed and paid for by the government.

For more about Clarence Thomas 's grifts, see The Nation article here.
Read more about the call for Clarence Thomas to excuse himself in Trump ballet case here.
For more about 6 corporations controlling 90% of our media, see the short article here.
More about Newt Gringrich's (and Frank Luntz's), "Language: A Mechanism of Control" here.
For stats on wealth/income gains between 1944-2014, check out this article by Thom Hartmann. 

Why do humans have such an odd fascination with criminals and outlaws? What happened to all the kings and queens who used to be in charge of everything...where did they go? Why? And what does any of this have to do with drugs?

In this episode I pick up where I left off last time by introducing Michel Foucault's concept of panoptic power, which explains why now days we all self-discipline to conform to social regulations. The war on drugs thrives in spaces where most citizens are thoroughly convinced of the stereotypes that surround drug use: immorality, contagion, degradation, the "disease" of addiction. Today I explain how that cultural knowledge comes to exist, and perhaps how we might be able to disrupt and rewrite those scripts.   

Have you ever thought, "dang, I just got out of work and I already dread going back tomorrow!"? Most of us have, and in response we did something to make ourselves feel better, something to take the edge off: we treated ourselves to an ice cream cone or binge watched our favorite Netflix series. That's the norm of 21st Century capitalism. Today's episode is about America's drug problem, but I take a route through a number of related topics including capitalism, leisure time, the "culture industry" (a term coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer), and Marx's alienation.

I also cover some theory from Friedrich Nietzsche, Theo Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Karl Marx. Intro from Office Space

This episode is all about America's unhealthily relationships with work and drugs. We live in a world where we are increasingly distracted and secluded, and our daily schedules often consist of punching a clock and returning home. It's no wonder we feel so compelled to use drugs. We are torturing ourselves with capitalism.

Benjamin Fong's book, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, is available now. His other work is linked below on most pod-catchers.

"The Psychedelic Renaissance Is on the Verge of an Uneasy Enlightenment" in Jacobin.  

"Monsters of the Brain, Images of the Deity: Psychology and Religion in the Eighteenth Century" in The Journal of Religion.

"Hans Loewald and the Death Drive" is in Psychoanalytic Psychology.

"On Critics and What's Real: Russell McCutcheon on Religious Experience" is in the Journal of American Academy of Religion.
 
For more about eugeroics/nootropics like modafinil, check out the Vice article, "Taking the 'Smart Drug' Modafinil Made Me Love Work but Hate People"

Colorado's state prison budget has grown by almost 1300% in the last 35 years; it's now more than a billion dollars-per-year.

This week I talk to Christie Donner, founder of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. We discuss the current state of prisons in Colorado and across the US, and we spend some time digging into a few specific bills currently being debated by Colorado Legislators, including Good Samaritan Laws, fentanyls, safe use sites, and  education in prison. We also discuss Pell Grants, the school-to-prison pipeline, negative press coverage, and the ongoing staff crisis in departments of corrections across the country, specifically in Colorado.

You can watch the negative news coverage of La Vista Women's Prison Honor House on YouTube.

You can hear Dean Williams entire interview on the With(in) podcast, season 1, episode 1.

The DOC in crisis article Christie mentioned is available at ccjrc.org. 

This week my partner Dr. Erin Boyce joins me to talk about one of her areas of study, attachment theory. We discuss childhood development, identity formation, the important of strong attachments to parental figures, authenticity, depression, repression, and lots more.

For more on Attachment Theory, check out Mary Ainsworth's work.
For more on attachment, authenticity and addiction, check out Dr. Gabor Maté's work.

This week I share a summary of my new book, The Spectacle of Punishment: Lessons from a Century of Prison Films. I discuss cinematic outlaws and lawmen, and I cover the three main prisons used in every movie: prison as a playground, prison as a paradox or prison as penance. 

For more on Bill Yousman's work, check out his book Prime Time Prisons on US TV.
Check out Ear Hustle and DU-PAI's With(In) Podcast for voices from inside US prisons. 

This week I follow the trail of the US War on Drugs from 1970-2020. I cover Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, the CIA's importation of cocaine into low income communities, Freeway Ricky, crack-versus-powder sentencing disparities, fentanyl, xylazine, and the role of media in all of it.

You can find links to citations in the episode descriptions of sampled audio. 

This week I share part 2 of The War on Drugs: 1920-1970. If you prefer the video format with lots of images and videos, you can find it on YouTube at The Dr. Junkie Show channel.

I cover Harry Anslinger, the origins of the war on drugs in the early 1900s, alcohol prohibition, stigmatization, and the recipe used by every politicians since to ramp the war up a bit more.