cocaine

Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?

The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.

How documenting the history of the drug war is a “community project” and reflections on 1990s rap music's anti-crack hits.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.

A new book argues that the real history of the league is one of strife between Black labor and white ownership.

It’s easier to blame individuals for the opioid crisis than to attempt to diagnose and cure the ills of a society.

The pandemic doesn’t just threaten our loved ones, but knowledge of our past — so Nelson George went and found his.

A new book takes on a diagnosis invented to cover up police killings: that men of color are “combusting as a result of their aggressiveness.”

A revisionist view of the drug wars.

The impact of Black ball players' fight for higher compensation and labor protections in the ‘70s is felt today.

When President Nixon launched the war on drugs in 1971, it set off a bloody chain reaction in Mexico as new documents reveal.

Efforts to combat narcotics and communism militarized the country's security forces.

Much of the world used to treat drug addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one. And then America got its way.

Politicians are suddenly eager to disown failed policies on American prisons, but they have failed to reckon with the history.