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Lucas Richert--Book Launch

Thursday Jul 11 2019 7:00 pm, Saskatoon, Travel Alcove
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

Join Lucas Richert for the Saskatoon launch of Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs (McGill-Queen's University Press).

Drugs take strange journeys from the black market to the doctor's black bag. Changing marijuana laws in the United States and Canada, the opioid crisis, and the rising costs of pharmaceuticals have sharpened the public's awareness of drugs and their regulation. Government, industry, and the medical profession, however, have a mixed record when it comes to framing policies and generating knowledge to address drug use and misuse.

In Strange Trips Lucas Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace. Through close examination of archival materials, accounts, and records, he brings substances into conversation with each other and demonstrates the contentious relationship between scientific knowledge, cultural assumptions, and social concerns.

Lucas Richert is George Urdang Chair in the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Besides studying at the University of Saskatchewan, Lucas attended the University of Edinburgh and the University of London. He is the author of Conservatism, Consumer Choice, and the FDA during the Reagan Era: A Prescription for Scandal, which won the 2015 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize. He's also the coeditor-in-chief of The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

See:

Strange Trips

- Lucas Richert

Hardcover $40.95
Reader Reward Price: $36.86

Drugs take strange journeys from the black market to the doctor's black bag. Changing marijuana laws in the United States and Canada, the opioid crisis, and the rising costs of pharmaceuticals have sharpened the public's awareness of drugs and their regulation. Government, industry, and the medical profession, however, have a mixed record when it comes to framing policies and generating knowledge to address drug use and misuse. In Strange Trips Lucas Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace. Scrutinizing how we have conceptualized and regulated drugs amid the pressing and competing interests of state regulatory bodies, pharmaceutical and for-profit companies, scientific researchers, and medical professionals, Richert asks how perceptions of a product shift - from dangerous substance to medical breakthrough, or vice versa. Through close examination of archival materials, accounts, and records, he brings substances into conversation with each other and demonstrates the contentious relationship between scientific knowledge, cultural assumptions, and social concerns. Weaving together stories of consumer resistance and government control, Strange Trips offers timely recommendations for the future of drug regulation.