I am Professor of History and Director of the Drugs, Health, and Society program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). My research explores the nature and trajectory of drug commerce, drug use, and drug policy in America, with a primary focus on psychoactive pharmaceuticals. Among other places, you can find my work in American Quarterly, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, the New York Times, and in four books, White Market Drugs (University of Chicago press, 2020), Whiteout (University of California Press, 2023), Happy Pills in America (Johns Hopkins, 2009); and Dealing with Drugs (University of Rochester Press, 2026).
Winner, Rorabaugh Book Prize from the Alcohol and Drug History Society (2022)
White Market Drugs tells the story of how the drug industry, regulators, journalists, and consumers together built mass, segregated markets for potentially addictive pharmaceuticals amidst the 20th century's racialized anti-"drug" campaigns. It analyzes why these white markets faced three major periods of crisis over the past 150 years: a crisis of morphine addiction in the late 19th/early 20th century; of barbiturate, amphetamine, and Quaalude addiction in the mid 20th century; and of all three classes of drugs in the 21st century.
In response to these crises reformers sought to protect rather than punish socially favored white market consumers by robustly regulating rather than prohibiting drugs. These successful but largely forgotten reforms were the closest the U.S. has come to effective drug policy, and could serve as a model for addressing current crises if applied to all consumers rather than just the ones we call "patients."
by Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David herzberg
Winner, Rachel Carson Prize, Social Studies of Science (2024)
Winner, New Millennium Book Award, Society for Medical Anthropology (2023)
The first critical analysis of how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis.
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.
Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans.
Happy Pills in America is a cultural history of modern psychiatric drugs framed around the stories of Miltown, Valium, and Prozac--three of the best known and most widely used medicines in the postwar era.
Beginning with the emergence of a medical marketplace for psychoactive drugs in the postwar consumer culture, Happy Pills traces how "happy pills" became embroiled in Cold War gender battles and the explosive politics of the "war against drugs"--and how feminists brought the two issues together in a dramatic campaign against Valium addiction in the 1970s.
A final chapter examines how Prozac's boosters revived faith in wonder drugs by successfully joining consumerism and biological psychiatry to conjure visions of unbounded psychological free choice.
Edited by Nils Kessel, Joseph Gabriel, and David Herzberg
Scholars, like most people, tend to assume that 'pharmaceuticals' and 'illicit drugs' operate as distinct categories that should be analyzed separately from one another, as if drugs such as penicillin and cocaine are different types of objects that entail different scholarly questions, literatures, and communities of inquiry. Numerous experts have challenged this assumption by demonstrating that some 'medicines' have moved across categories as a result of criminalization; yet after decades of work, simply deconstructing the boundary is no longer fresh and compelling. It also risks continuing to center the licit/illicit divide instead of offering categories that could replace or supplement it.
Dealing with Drugs: New Histories of Risk and Benefit, takes the next step: by foregrounding the rich analytic concepts 'risk' and 'benefit', chapters in this volume tell new stories about a broad group of substances that we regularly put in our bodies. Taken together, these deeply researched and innovative essays cut across inherited categories and offer a new approach to the past. In doing so, they reshape our understanding of these powerful and often dangerous chemicals. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe and North America, this volume explores the utility of risk and benefit as concepts that can bridge the worlds of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs.