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Contact: Joseph Spillane, Managing Editor, [email protected], (352) 273-3355

The Alcohol and Drugs History Society Launches Points
 

January 18, 2010 - The Alcohol and Drugs History Society today unveiled Points, an interdisciplinary blog that examines present-day cultural developments and policy debates through various historical lenses. Led by Managing Editors Drs. Joseph Spillane and Trysh Travis, Points brings historical considerations to bear on contemporary drug and alcohol-related issues. Spillane and Travis hope the blog will act as a resource and virtual meeting space for  scholars, advocates, activists, and others interested in unraveling the complex relationship between past and present controversies surrounding mind-altering substances both legal and illicit.

Contributing Editors Caroline Jean Acker (Carnegie Mellon University), Charles Ambler (University of Texas-El Paso), Joseph Gabriel (Florida State University), Brian Herrera (University of New Mexico), David Herzberg (University of Buffalo), Amy Long (drug policy reform and free speech advocate), Michelle McClellan (University of Michigan), and Ron Roizen (independent scholar) will join Spillane and Travis in posting short, thoughtful reflections on topics as varied as addiction and treatment methodologies, the global drug war, media representations of substance use and abuse, the pharmaceutical industry, and alcohol and drug-related pedagogy. Points will also feature periodic interviews with authors of recent books on relevant topics and contributions from guest bloggers outside the university. "We hope to distill - no pun intended - some of the most exciting new scholarship on the history of drugs and alcohol into engaging and readable material that will interest a broad audience," says Spillane.

In addition to Points, the Alcohol and Drugs History Society publishes the ADHS Daily Register and The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Joseph Spillane is the author of Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and an Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida (UF). His most recent project is a study of liberal prison reform in twentieth-century New York State. Trysh Travis teaches in UF's Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research and is currently working on an edited collection entitled "Re-Thinking Therapeutic Culture." Her first book, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2009.
 

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