Host Kate Carpenter is joined by drug historian Dr. Emily Dufton to talk about researching and writing Emily's newest book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs.

Emily holds a PhD in American studies and works full-time as a writer. Her first book was Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. Thanks to her expertise in drug history, she regularly serves as a commentator on cannabis history and news, and she also writes essays and op eds for public outlets.

Addiction, Inc. tells the history of medication-assisted treatment for illicit drug addiction, beginning with its emergence during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in the 1970s as a radical approach to public health. From there she traces the controversies, missed opportunities, and privatization that have scrambled access to what is considered the gold standard of addiction treatment, even as America wrestles with an opioid overdose epidemic. Emily is the recipient of multiple awards that supported the book's creation, including a J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award, a Robert B. Silvers Grant, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.

We spoke about the process of applying for those awards and why writers should try for grants, the home disaster that derailed the beginnings of this project, and how she balances feedback with her own vision for her book—even when there is A LOT of feedback. You'll also hear about whether she finds it lonely to write outside of an institution, and why she suggests that more historians pick up the phone and call their sources.

Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.

Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more.

Mentioned in this episode

• Emily Dufton's website
• Emily Dufton, Addiction, Inc: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs
• Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America
• J. Anthony Lukas Prize
• Robert B. Silvers Foundation Works-in-Progress grants
• Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant Pauline Kael's work at the New Yorker

Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a

podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm Kate

Carpenter. I'm delighted to be joined today by Dr Emily Dufton.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy

to be here.

Emily holds a PhD in American Studies and

works full time as a writer. She is the author of two books. Her

first was Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana

in America. Thanks to her expertise in drug history, she

regularly serves as a commentator on cannabis history

and news, and she also writes essays and op eds for public

outlets. Her newly released book is Addiction, Inc.: Medication

Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs. In it,

she tells the history of medication assisted treatment

for illicit drug addiction, beginning with its emergence

during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in the 1970s as a

radical approach to public health. From there, she traces

the controversies, missed opportunities, and privatization

that have scrambled access to what is considered the gold

standard of addiction treatment, even as America wrestles with an

opioid overdose epidemic. As she worked on Addiction, Inc., Emily

won multiple prestigious awards to support its creation,

including a J. Anthony Lukas works-in-progress award, a

Robert B. Silvers grant and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction

grant. We talked about the process of applying for those

awards and why writers should try for grants. We also talked

about the home disaster that derailed the beginnings of this

project, and how Emily balances feedback with her own vision for

her book, even when there is a lot of feedback. First, though,

I asked her to tell me about the trajectory of her career as a

writer.

Oh, the trajectory of my career for what it is.

I've actually been thinking about that myself lately,

because with this book coming out next month, I've been

starting to think, Well, what kind of trajectory have I been

on? Because it has been a hot minute since I published my last

book. That was nine years ago. That was back in 2017 and so

this book took about eight years, all told, kind of from

the beginning when I started thinking about the topic in 2018

to now, when it's finally coming out. Because for a long time, I

kind of felt like everything was conspiring against me to

actually get this book out there. I sold the proposal in

December of 2019, two weeks before my daughter was born. And

so I had this beautiful little baby and a three year old boy

with the agreement with the University of Chicago Press that

I would, you know, have my little baby and then get her

into some kind of care, and I would start writing full time,

maybe when she was three, four or five months old. But of

course, Covid-19 had other plans in March of 2020 so that threw

me off a bit, when I was suddenly home with my baby and

toddler. And then when my daughter finally entered full

time daycare when she was 18 months old, the night after her

first day, when I was awaking to the promise of full time work

and being able to really focus because I had been working in

fits and starts for the past couple of months and getting

nowhere. I thought, This is it. Like, I'm really going to start

on this book. This is going to be great. And that morning, our

neighbor's tree fell in a storm onto our property, destroyed our

car, brought down the power lines and inspired our circuit

breaker in our basement to burst from the explosion of energy

that came through, which would have burned down our entire

basement, but it was so hot, it melted a water main, which burst

and subsequently put out the fire, but then proceeded to

flood our basement, which is where my office is located. And

my office was the most damaged room. I lost a good chunk of my

research from my first book, Grass Roots. I lost all the

research, preliminary research such as it was for this book,

and it set us back for about six months having everything rebuilt

and the mold remediation and all this other stuff. So by

December, January of 2022, over four years ago, I was finally

starting to work on this book, and then it was just simply the

process of actually researching it and writing it, and then

through the process of that darling of academia, peer

review, through the University of Chicago Press. But the

trajectory felt sisyphean, for a long time, but I am very pleased

that the book is coming out. It does exist, and I have a rebuilt

office, and I was able to put everything together, but I have

felt that the trajectory of my career as a writer has been

moderately stunted by what our insurance company called acts of

God. And I sort of wondered karmically, who I upset that

made it so difficult to get this book finished. But lo and

behold, it is here, and perhaps my trajectory will move slightly

more quickly after, after this is over, maybe I burned off that

karma.

Oh, boy, I hope so. I need a minute just after

hearing that.

Tip to your listeners, don't store important

documents on the floor. You never know when your basement

might flood. That's my advice to your listeners. Don't repeat my

mistake.

Most practical writing advice, oh, my goodness.

Well, so did you, did you plan to focus on a career as a writer

after graduate school?

I did. I did because I went to George

Washington University here in DC, and I was very interested in

writing, and I was also very interested in academia. But the

time I graduated, but by the time I graduated, rather, my

husband had really established himself here in DC as a speech

writer. He was actually the chief speech writer for

President Obama's Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx, by

the time I graduated. So it was very clear that we were going to

have to make our life in DC, because as a speech writer,

there's not so many cities you can live in where you're going

to find consistent work. DC is a great one. So he had found his

position in communications, and I really loved the idea of

teaching, but I also saw academia somewhat collapsing in

on itself, especially in the humanities, and this is even 10

years ago, a process that I fear has only accelerated. So I knew

there was probably a lot of options for me to make my way

outside of the traditional academic path and forging a way

forward with writing being more centered here in the city as

well, and that's pretty much what I've been doing. I did a

postdoc that was a lot of fun at an investigative newsroom. I've

worked on podcasts. I have my own little writing shop where I

take on contract jobs. I've done book proposals for people,

speeches, op eds, things like that. So I've kept that going to

sort of, you know, pay the bills while I work on my own writing

on the side. And that was, that was what, that was sort of how

Addiction, Inc., got to to come out into the world. Was me

scratching away at it when I wasn't taking on jobs that

actually paid me real, live American dollars.

Well, I'm going to start with my practical

questions. Now that you have a rebuilt office, when and where

do you like to do your writing?

I like to do it here. I am a standing desk

devotee. I stand all the time. My legs actually get pretty

tired by the end of the day. But I am a pretty, pretty hard core,

like, I just get into it the moment I get home from dropping

off the kids at school. I'm down here, and I'm very focused,

until, pretty much the moment I have to leave and go pick them

up, I take breaks to walk the dog and, like, eat some food.

But I've never been someone who struggles with focus, especially

when it comes to writing. I prefer a quiet room. I prefer to

be surrounded by the materials I need, but I have no problem with

grinding it out. You know, from from nine to five, I feel like

that's one of the things I can offer my potential clients. Is

like, don't worry. I don't get tired or bored. I'm very

masochistic in that way.

How do you like to organize yourself?

In a very chaotic way that I think only I

understand according to the faces of anyone who comes into

my office. It doesn't look entirely organized, but

strangely, I know where everything is. So that is my

non-organization organization is how I like to organize myself.

So do you like then to keep, as evidenced by

the flood, do you like to keep sources in paper form, or do you

organize them digitally somehow?

I'm a very, I'm like very old school. I love, I

love paper. I recognize the value of digital resources. I

love like a control F, and you find exactly the term you're

looking for, or the statistic or the number or whatever. And I

can't over overstate the value of that enough, but I read

better, and I observe, absorb more when I read on paper, and

when I take notes on paper, and when I write on paper, I'll

oftentimes remember exactly like the marginalia on which page, on

which side of the page, and what I wrote and like in what color

ink, and that will help me find it faster than, obviously, not a

control F, but if you're looking at the, you know, a physical

document, I really do prefer that. I have several filing

cabinets throughout my office where I keep things together and

I compile, basically, files on individuals or organizations

slowly over time. And so some of those files, you know, were

useful for my first project, but then I went--which was about

cannabis and, you know, kind of basically grassroots cannabis,

cannabis activism, something relatively different from from

what I'm writing about in Addiction, Inc.--but a lot of

the material was still helpful, and it was good to go back and

kind of have that physical copy, rather than saying, like, well,

which drive did I save that on? Or where is this thing? Because,

like, technology keeps changing. I can't find a lot of the stuff

that I wrote in grad school, but my papers, assuming they don't

get destroyed in floods, my papers live on and so, you know,

shout out. Shout out for the analog. Shout out for the analog

sources.

Where in your research process do you like to

start writing?

So it sort of depends, because it's a bit of a

catch 22 because I don't know what I'm really researching or

what I need to research until I start writing, but I cannot

write until I've started to research. But I do feel like

once I actually get into the process of writing, it becomes

much more clear which research I've done is actually helpful

and will push the narrative forward, and which was probably

a rabbit hole that sucked up a few hours of my life, and I'll

never get that time back. But, but now I know a lot about

Eugene O'Neill, right? Didn't get into the final manuscript,

but I went down a really big rabbit hole on him, so I feel

like the two kind of have to exist neck and neck. But of

course, ideally, the writing process comes into play a bit

more when I have done a sufficient amount of research

where I know what, like the sort of the starting point of the

story is, and I can kind of see the basic narrative thread from

there. But that doesn't always necessarily happen at the

beginning of research. So sometimes you gotta, sometimes

you gotta waste your life on Eugene O'Neill for a while

before you realize you've gone the wrong direction.

Do you ever then end up making an outline and

kind of planning where you're going? Or do you just, do you

just start writing?

I've been more into outlines lately. I really

do love an outline. It can be very basic, maybe just a term or

two, but I like to know which stone I have to jump to next to

get across the river. I didn't always used to do that. I wasn't

always such an outline person, but I now feel like it organizes

my thoughts much better, where I can see where I'm going, and I

can see which paths will lead me there most directly. And I also

like an outline, and it'll usually just be in, like, the

Word doc or the Google Doc that I'm working in, you know, but

I'll, but I'll kind of know the next step. I also like it,

because it can also serve as that messy first draft. And I'm

not so hung up on it, because it's just an outline, like the

sentences don't have to be perfect, they don't have to

sound good. It's just an outline, but I love a messy

first draft, and I so much appreciate and respect and value

a messy first draft these days, especially as I get older,

because it's like for me, it's not until I have a messy first

draft that I can even begin to figure out what it is that I'm

actually saying. For me, writing is so much a process of

revision, but you need to have something to exist to revise

before you can get to that point. And sometimes an outline

plays that role quite beautifully. So, you know,

hooray for analog sources and hooray for outlines. This is, I

guess, these are the conclusions I've come to.

How do you approach tackling that revision?

Oh, I will read a paragraph over and over and over

and over until it is smooth and it feels right. And then I will

do that for every paragraph, and then I will do that for the

chapter as many times as I possibly can. Usually I need to

start when I'm revising something, when I'm reading, and

I really need to start at the beginning always, and go through

and if I'm reading it and it feels smooth, I feel like I can

move on. But if there's anything that trips me up, like just

language wise or sound wise, or if I feel like the meaning is

unclear, I'll go back and I'll work it and I'll work it and

I'll work it, and then I can move on and do the next thing.

Now, I'm not always successful in this revision and

clarification. There's, I just finished reading the audio book

of Addiction, Inc., and there's definitely moments where I'm

like, Ooh, I could have done better on that, but I I'm a non

stop revisor. I do it over and over and over again until I feel

like it's right. Because if I get hung up on something when

I'm reading it through, I can't I cannot comfortably move on

until, until you know it does. It's not the same way with

cleaning up messes, obviously, as my as my office shows, but if

I feel like there's a mess on the page, it just drives me

nuts, and I have to keep working at it until it's finally clean.

I know that really, for all writers, writing

can be a lonely process, but especially when you're not in

the academy and you don't kind of have that institutional

environment, it can be especially isolating. Well, of

course, it has bonuses also, but are there ways that you maintain

a writerly community?

That's a great question. And it can be lonely,

but I feel like it's lonely, you know, writing is lonely no

matter what kind of institutional you support you

have or don't have, right? It's, it's a, it's a journey with

yourself, in your brain, in your soul, in your heart. It's a

journey that one can only take alone, usually, unless you have

a collaborator. But I feel very lucky that I've had a lot of

communities around me. Living in DC is great for people who love

books. We've got so many great bookstores, and they host so

many great events. So I love going to book talks like

Politics and Prose, or Barnes and Noble or East City Books or

Solid State Books or People's Book here in Tacoma Park, like

you can just keep going. There's so many. So I feel like I have a

community there where I can go see like writers I really

respect and adore and listen to them get questions and see how

they answer it. So that's been really great. I have communities

with some of the organizations that I've won awards from. They

actually have really thriving communities. They bring us

together a lot. So I feel really supported in that. And I get to

see other people working on narrative nonfiction, and sort

of see how they're, how they're going, and then I'm just lucky

that I have like, you know, family and friends who are like,

we know you're doing this weird thing, and we support you in it

anyway. And, like, when I'm feeling blue and I'm like, oh,

writing is the worst. This is so terrible. They, they're happy

to, they're happy to support me. And, you know, there's just this

benefit of, like, living in DC, there's so many smart people,

and, like, lots of them have written books. So they all get

it, they're like, Oh yeah, writing. So yeah, it's a great,

it's a wonderful, there's, there's many environments and

many communities around me, and I'm deeply grateful to all of

them. So shout out. Shout out to the people who have supported

me.

I wanted to talk a little bit more about those

prizes. So you won several really prestigious, really

awesome prizes to support writing this book. And I was

wondering, can you talk a little bit more about the process of

applying for those grants, kind of, how, how you, how you

balance applying for grants with doing the work of the book and

and how those experiences shaped the book?

Yeah, the prizes were great. So, I mean, free

money, like it's a wonderful thing. It's great. So I, it's a

couple of years ago now, actually, that I won those. This

was sort of deep in the whole like, pandemic, house fire and

flood, lost everything, and so that's why I had the time to

fill them out, because it was that and working with insurance,

you know. But it also really pushed me to apply for these

because, you know, I wasn't able to kind of do any other work. I

wasn't really able to do anything, but with the promise

that this money would be used exclusively to work on the book.

But I'll get to that in a second. So the awards were, and

I highly recommend anybody listening to this to check them

out, because these are great awards with great organizations

that really want to support important ideas and and the

people who are who are out there to make them real. So these are

great, great organizations. So in 2021 I won the J. Anthony

Lukas Work-in-Progress award. Great award, it was $25,000 for

the completion of a nonfiction work. It's through Columbia and

Harvard universities. Highly recommend checking them out. And

then in 2022 I won a work in progress grant from the Robert

B. Silvers Foundation, which is great. They offer up to $10,000

for people working on nonfiction works. And in 2022 I won the

Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, which is $40,000 like

like no holds barred money to use for your book project. And

that's just incredible that these organizations are willing

to support writers in this way, and I really applaud them for

it. But the applications, and I've led a few like grant

writing workshops and everything, the applications are

demanding in a certain way. You really do kind of need to be

further along in your project, which, of course, I wasn't, but

I was able to lie enough to make it seem like I was further

along. Like, sure they wanted, you know, I think like 25 pages

of of sample chapters, and I hadn't written a word, so I had

to write a sample chapter just for the Whiting Foundation,

which is in, which is, in large part, actually still in the

book. But, you know, they're asking for a lot of things. You

have to have a very clear idea of what your project is and how

you're going to use this money to specifically achieve the

objectives that you lay out for yourself. But, but all the

writers I've ever met are really wonderful, professional,

competent people, and all you have to do in these applications

is be that same competent, professional person, and, you

know, make a case for yourself that I'm going to use this money

to accomplish these things. For example, for me, it was

covering, you know, daycare payments. It was covering office

supplies and subscriptions to research services. And it paid

for a research trip I took to Switzerland for a week in 2023

to analyze other addiction, addiction treatment clinics. But

if you have like, all of this laid out, and here's the budget,

and I'm going to use this money for this, and I think it's um,

you can present yourself in such a way that you make yourself an

appealing candidate, you just have to really know your work

and present yourself in that most kind of compelling and

professional way.

Let's take a closer look at Emily's new book,

Addiction, Inc. She agreed to read a short excerpt from

Chapter Two about methadone. Here's Dr Emily Dufton reading

from Addiction, Inc.

“Methadone had always been controversial. The

synthetic opioid, three times stronger than morphine, was

developed in Germany in 1938 by the Nazi-aligned pharmaceutical

company I. G. Farben Industrie, which also developed the gas

chamber drug Zyklon B. In 1946, methadone was brought to

America, along with Volkswagens and the aerospace engineer

Wernher von Braun, via federal programs designed to transfer

German technologies to American industry as a spoil of war.

Scientists first tested methadone at the Addiction

Research Center (ARC) at the US Public Health Service Hospital

in Lexington, Kentucky. There, doctors were impressed by its

potency, but skeptical that it was any less addictive than

traditional opiates. Dr. Harris Isbell, the ARC’s research

director, said methadone made the volunteers who used it to

detoxify from street drugs talkative and euphoric; they

likened it to heroin and attempted to get more. Because

of this, Isbell dismissed the drug and concluded that it

should not be made widely available. In a 1947 report, he

warned that methadone was an ‘addiction-causing drug’ and

that ‘narcotic drug addicts would abuse and would become

habituated to it if it were freely available and not

controlled.’ Despite Isbell’s warnings, however, in 1947 the

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved methadone’s use

as an analgesic and cough suppressant, and several

pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, were

licensed to manufacture it for pain treatment under the brand

name Dolophine. It was never a big seller, though, either

legally or underground. With its delayed onset of effects,

methadone was unpopular as a painkiller, and Herbert Huncke,

the writer best known for introducing heroin to the Beat

Generation, argued that ‘Dollies’ (Dolophine) were only

useful during a panic, when a sudden shortage made heroin

unavailable in the streets. But methadone was never a proper way

to maintain an addiction, Huncke said. The pills were a last

resort, ‘merely a way to get straight’ so users wouldn’t get

sick. Methadone then languished for nearly twenty years—until

the summer of 1965 when the drug began making headlines again,

this time in a positive way. In two lengthy New Yorker articles

published in June and July, Nat Hentoff profiled Nyswander, the

doctor who was using methadone to treat heroin addiction at the

Rockefeller Institute’s clinical hospital in New York. There,

Nyswander and her partner, Dole, were doing something new. They

weren’t using methadone to detoxify patients like at the

ARC, or periodically, like Huncke, to get through a scare.

Instead, they were giving large doses of methadone to know

heroin users daily, and then watching as the drug transformer

their patients’ lives. ‘From two slugabeds,’ Nyswander said, her

volunteers were now ‘dynamos of activity.’ ‘One began to paint,

and to paint industriously and well. The other started urging

us to let him get his high school-equivalency diploma.”

So I want to talk to you a little bit about

style and voice. I feel like I could have chosen basically any

passage to talk about this, because they all are

representative. But your subject here is, is quite complicated.

It's, it's confusing. Sometimes there are a lot of people and

agencies involved. There's sort of the politics where not

everything actually makes logical sense for why it's

proceeding the way it is, because that's how politics

goes. Your style, though, is really light, it's

straightforward, it's easy to read. You make it look easy,

which I know that it is not. How do you do that? How do you

achieve that? Is that something that you work on as you're

writing?

Oh, well, thank you. That's very kind of you to

say. Oh, yeah, I worked on it. I worked on it. Yeah, it kind of

goes back to what I was saying before when I reread things. You

know, sometimes, like, it's hard to see, right? It's very forest

for the trees. Sometimes I have to come back to a section weeks

later or months later. Sometimes it's really lovely to have,

like, super fresh eyes, and that's where you can see the

faults and the places that are that are working much more

clearly. But it is important to me to to kind of make it as

clear as possible, to make it really clear. Because, as you

said, and which I certainly agree, this is a complicated

story, like, it's really hard to kind of explain. And you know,

like, I have-- my neighbor's like, you need to have a social

media presence, and you need to be able to, like, explain all of

MAT in 60 seconds, and that'll be great for Tiktok. And I'm

like, I don't know how. It took me four hundred and thirty-some

pages--

If I could do that I wouldn't have written a book!

But there are ways to explain, like, sort of little

tidbits. And I feel really, really happy when I come across

a quote from, you know, like that, that great quote from

Nyswander, like, "from two slugabeds they're now dynamos of

activity." Dynamos of activity, like, I find those quotes, and

I'm like, Oh, yeah. Like, I'm building a passage around this.

This is, this is gold, right? But it is like, I, I feel like

my greatest, my greatest sort of responsibility, is to the

reader. And to try to make something that is complicated,

that does involve a lot of people, that involves a lot of

agencies, that involves a lot of political infighting, to make it

understandable and relatable, because otherwise, like we'll

never understand this history, this deeply complicated history

that really has impacted us over the past 50 years, and one might

argue, and indeed I do, has had such negative effects that we

have the world's leading number of overdoses and the world's

largest problem with opioids, right? This has had real,

visible and tangible effects on our society. And so I feel like,

if we understand it better, perhaps we can do a little bit

more to actually counteract the most negative effects. And so

if, like, a, you know, a section about Marie Nyswander where

people are like, Oh, I get it now. Like, if that helps, I feel

like I've done my service.

You interviewed a lot of people for this book,

as I understand it. How did those conversations shape the

book? I am particularly interested because, as I look

through the notes, you're not necessarily directly quoting

from those interviews all that often, but I know they must sort

of form the bedrock of of what you're writing. So how did

those, yeah, how did those interviews shape what you what

you ended up writing?

Oh, I like that term. I like the term bedrock,

and I agree with it very much. I did talk to a lot of people. I

really, like, this project, and actually my first book as well,

it really got me over my fear of just like emailing someone or

calling someone, like, just do it. Just do it. I cannot

encourage your listeners to just like, contact people enough. If

you're writing about someone and they're still alive, get in

touch. They will be so happy to talk to you. They are thrilled.

They're like, Oh my god, someone cares about what I did 50 years

ago. But those conversations were fundamental, and in shaping

the book, a lot of the leading figures who created this field,

the field of medication assisted treatment, they were based in

DC, which made that convenient for me, and they're also still

kind of around here. They are very much getting older. Jerome

Jaffe, Nixon's first drug czar, who's a key figure in the book,

he's turning 93 this year, but he and I became very close, and

I think I felt like I knew this project had legs when I would

call Jerry Jaffe. And I think the first six times I spoke to

him, he was so mean to me that I would cry, like I would hang up

the phone and cry, but I kept trying to convince him that I

was serious, that I was a historian. I had a PhD, I knew

what I was doing, and I was really committed to telling the

story in a way that used primary sources, in a way that relied on

the evidence, in a way that gave like a fairly I mean, obviously

everything is subjective, but I was trying to be as historically

objective as possible. And I feel like I finally won him over

when he, when I went through all of his papers at the Library of

Congress, he's like, Oh, you went through 40 boxes. You're

committed. And that's when the conversations changed, and he

started letting me in on more and more of the background and

the insights. And then he would put me in touch with other

people, and they would talk to me, I became, like, accepted

among this field of, like, former federal officials who, I

mean, there's, and there's really not that many of them who

are instrumental in creating the entire industry that we now live

with. What was also particularly helpful was that once Jaffe had

hazed me sufficiently, and he then brought me into the circle

of trust, he gave me the remaining boxes of material that

were in his basement that he had donated to the Library of

Congress. He didn't give all of them. There are about seven

boxes left over, and he gave those to me, and I was able to

bring them home to my office, where I did not store them on

the floor, because I learned my lesson. But I went through that,

and that's actually where the entire history of LAAM, L alpha

acetyl methadol, which was the fourth medication assisted

treatment that the federal government tried to develop, and

they botched it up so badly, it's it's not available anymore,

but that history was hiding in Jerry Jaffe's basement outside

of Baltimore for 50 years, but he finally gave me those those

boxes, and I was able to go through them and found that

information, and then I donated all of it to the Library of

Congress, and now it's there, and other people can research

it. But it was, it was the conversations, and it was the

human connections that I had made with these people, it

opened up all of the doors that allowed for a lot of that hidden

history to be told. So, like, immense gratitude and

appreciation to them for for letting me in and for trusting

me with all this material, but without without those

conversations and without those people, it just wouldn't have

happened. It wouldn't or it would be a considerably shorter

and crappier book, I guess.

Man, six times. I'm stuck on that. Your

persistence is impressive, I want to talk a little bit about

narrative structure, because this is largely a chronological

story. But of course, no book is as simple as just day one, day

two, day three. How did you think about the structure of

It actually, it did take me a little bit to

this book?

figure out exactly how to dive into the story, you know,

because there's kind of, like, there's sort of, you're right. I

do tell it ultimately chronologically, and I really do

need to do that. I think it's like, my my historian hang up. I

love a chrono, chronological story. It's like, oh, this

context, and everything's building on each other. And

like, this is how time passes, and this is, this is how things

evolve. Like, to me, that's a really great way to tell a

story. And I know some people are like, boring, like, spice it

up. But I love a chronological story. But I knew that like to

get into the chronology, to understand the chronology, like

there had to be that moment that sort of crystallizes what's at

stake and and sort of what happened. And so I felt like

wildly different topic. but that also sort of doesn't end, you

there were two moments, which one do I start with? And

ultimately, I kind of went chronologically with that as

well. So there's the introduction where I sort of

give the reason for why I'm writing this book, which is

about the passing of my friend Dana, who died in 2016 after 15

know, it continues to the present. And

years of steady and escalating opioid use, and I wanted to know

what could have helped him. Doctors and researchers all

is a history, but it's definitely explicitly linked to

said, MAT, medication assisted treatment. And I was like,

what's that? And they were like, oh, and they explained it. And

the present. You started out wanting to know how we got here,

then I was like, Where'd it come from? And they're like, We don't

know. So I wrote a book, but that wasn't really the way to

and there's very much an understanding that a lot of what

get into the history. That was just sort of setting it up. The

history really begins both in the 1920s and then squarely on

June 17, 1971, so I have my introduction, and I'm like, Dana

died, terrible, research problem. This is what I found.

And then I have a prologue, because too much is never enough

when it comes to introductory sections and my prologue takes

place in the 1920s when America had a brief, but rather wild

experiment with morphine clinics, which was the first

time we had medication assisted treatment, where we were giving

known opiate users a steady supply of legal, unadulterated

and inexpensive opiates to keep them out of withdrawal and,

quote, unquote, satisfy their habits. Obviously, they did not

last very long, but they were instrumental. And because they

launched basically the next 50 years of the classic era of

narcotic control, that brought us to my next key moment, which

was June 17, 1971. I was like, well, gotta have it. So there's

the prologue, and then the book really begins. 500 pages into

it. It really begins on June 17, 1971 with Nixon giving the press

conference in the White House, saying that he is going to

launch a new war against public enemy number one, or new, wage a

new all out offensive. I have to get the quotes right, new, wage

a new all out offensive against heroin. Public Enemy Number One.

And that moment is extremely important, because it's probably

the most misremembered date in drug history. Everyone's like,

oh, that's when Nixon started his war on drugs, and that's

when arrests skyrocketed, and it became this very racist

carceral, controlling and punitive battle. But when I

looked at it, I was like, oh no, it wasn't that at all. He

started a nationalized addiction treatment clinic system that day

with Jerry Jaffe, in charge of something called the Special

Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, which was ultimately

responsible for opening hundreds of clinics, getting tens of

thousands of people into treatment, not only with

methadone, which was the new technology and medication at the

time, but in abstinence based programs as well. Arrests

keep that in. So I was really pleased about that,

dropped, persecution for drug use dropped, overdoses dropped,

the spread of blood-borne diseases from needle sharing,

like hepatitis, dropped from 71 to 73. I was like, Oh my God,

we've completely misremembered this period of history. I'll

spend the next eight years writing a book about it, and

then once people finally get to chapter three, basically they

can, they can see that that's what it's been all about. That's

how I approached the narrative. It took me a minute, but I do

get there.

next to you, and they would read it, and then the class would

discuss it. And that was the most interesting thing to me,

but for the most part, like, my copy editor really wanted to

change a lot of my language and stuff like that. And I, you

know, like, I think maybe if I were younger, I would have gone

with all of their suggestions. Like, oh, sure, of course, you

know better than me, but now that I'm older and more

disgruntled, I'm like, no, this is my book, and I like the way I

wrote that, and I'm going to keep it. So I do feel like I

viewed the multi step review process, not so much as like

this is my boss or my supervisor saying this is the way it has to

be, but more as a collaborative process and taking the advice

that I felt was really useful and that that strengthened the

book and made it better. And there was a lot of that, that I

received, and you know, if there was advice that I did not

necessarily agree with, I'd just kind of be like, you know, a lot

of people don't take my advice either on everything. So we're

just going to move on.

Speaking of advice that you may or may not

take. What is the most influential writing advice

you've ever gotten?

It's funny, like when I when I heard that

question, I was like, huh. And it took me back to this creative

writing class I had when I was an undergrad at NYU. The woman

who led it was named Viola Lee. She was a poet, and she was a

great teacher, really, really great person, and we focused on

poetry and short stories. But during the poetry section, I

remember she would have us do this exercise, and I still think

about that exercise a lot where, like, you'd have your poem, and

was like, the person's presentation of their own work,

and then someone else's presentation of the exact same

work, but, you know, they read it differently, and they

emphasize different things. And like, as soon as you hear your

words out of someone else's mouth, it's so enlightening

about sometimes about the quality of the work, you're

like, Oh no, that's what it sounds like? That's what you

think it sounds like? Oh my God. And so I really keep that in

mind when I'm writing, which is that someone else can read this

and they can read it very, very differently. And that's why I

really try to, like, if I have a point that I'm really trying to

make, clearly, that's why it's important to me to work with the

sentences and kind of massage them in such a way where I feel

like, if I read it, it would sound the way I want it to. And

if the person next to me, I just handed them the sheet, they

would read it, and it would still sound the way I kind of

wanted it to. And that's where I'm like, Okay, I always have

Viola Lee's class in my head.

What an amazing experience.

And the other piece of writing is, you know,

Kurt Vonnegut's kill your darlings, right? Just like get

rid of excessive--and boy, reading the audio book, I was

like, oh, I should have listened to Kurt Vonnegut more. I should

kill off a lot of these darlings. But they're, they're

in it now.

What other writers or books do you like to

read or turn to for inspiration?

Man, I I love to read, and I wish I could read

more working from home. I don't have, like, a commute, and

that's where I would do all my reading. Like, I love reading on

the metro. I love reading on a plane, train, car, bus. I will

read on a train. I will read on a plane. Dr Seuss. But I read, I

read as much as possible. I read pretty much like every word of

the New Yorker and the Atlantic as well. But who do I follow for

inspiration? Actually, it's funny. Lately I've been

listening. I've been like hearing my my dissertation

advisor's voice in my head, Leo Ribuffo, who was at George

Washington in the history department for a long, long

time. He passed away in 2018 but he would always tell all of his

students to read books that are over 30 years old. And it's so

true to kind of re familiarize myself with earlier voices. A

lot of times, political writing is really interesting from that

time, and that helps me, sort of, it gives me a lot of

inspiration for how to present something in a way that will

still feel timely no matter how many decades go by, like when

you can read, and it's not just like Ernest Hemingway and F.

Scott Fitzgerald, but if you can read, even like Pauline Kael's

journalism from the 1970s you're like, God, she really knew what

she was doing. I take a lot of inspiration from that. And

because I have small children, I take a lot of inspiration from

from classic children's literature. Because, man,

there's a lot that children's writers can do with such short

sentences and short books and the emotion and the values and

oftentimes, like the gravity of things that they convey in this

in this short way. You know, chef's kiss. Love that stuff.

So, yeah, that's kind of what I've been-- that's, you know, I

can't wait to, like, take a take a flight in June, and I can read

a couple books.

Absolutely. Well, I know that Addiction,

Inc, was a while in coming, and that you're focused, probably

right now, on helping to publicize it and getting excited

for its release. Is there another project that you're

starting to noodle with, or something you are working on

next?

There's a couple things, one of which that really

excites me is, I'm going back to my first love, which is cannabis

history. The 2018 Farm Bill championed by Republican

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell had the unanticipated outcome of

legalizing intoxicating hemp products nationwide. Now this is

why you can buy quote, unquote cannabis gummies and flour and

tincture and drinks everywhere in sometimes gas stations or

smoke shops or online, and these things are completely

unregulated, oftentimes extremely potent, and are

technically kind of going to be criminalized again this

November, because in November of 2025 Congress signed legislation

reopening the government, and Mitch McConnell slipped in this

rider that said, okay, those hemp products that I allowed to

be decriminalized in the 2018 Farm Bill. Oopsie, I'm going to

take that back. But this sort of like eight year period where we

have had the most potent and unregulated cannabis products

available to anyone for, like, really cheap, that seems like it

deserves some analysis. So I've been working on some articles

and potentially a book project about, about the hemp

revolution. And, you know, it's, again, it's gonna involve a lot

of conversations. There's so many people involved with the

field who support it, who don't support it. It's revitalized

Kentucky's agricultural system, right? Like, after the after

tobacco cratered, after the master settlement agreement,

they really needed something, and they're like, Well, how

about weed? You know? Why not? Until Mitch McConnell was like,

no, no more. So there's this massive period of chaos

happening in the legal cannabis market, and I'd love to write

about it. So once I once I stopped writing about opioid

addiction, I'm going back to, I'm going back to weed. It's the

opposite of a gateway drug.

Wow, that's fascinating.

Don't buy things online, by the way. Don't buy

these products. Do not put them in your human body. They're

very, they're very gross.

Is it interesting to think about a

project that's really much more sort of journalism in many ways,

that it's the past eight years?

It is, but it's so inspired by historical

influences, right? Like that 1998 master settlement

agreement, which cratered, you know, a lot of Kentucky's

tobacco farming industry, like that was the impetus behind the

2018 Farm Bill. So we're actually going back to things

that were happening 30, 40 years ago. I still feel like having a

more, like I and like the idea of doing journalism excites me,

but I can't go into it without my historian brain, where I'm

like, well, I could also explain all the context, right? Like,

this could be kind of fun. Could have several more chapters on

history of Kentucky farming or something like that. So I think

even now, it's like, I just can't turn it off, like, I'll

look at anything that's happening in the news, and I'm

like, I could probably write a book about the history of that.

You know?

I love that. I'm here for the journalistic

history hybrids always.

Right? Why not?

Dr. Emily Dufton, thanks so much for

joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing

process with me.

Oh, thank you so much. It's been a joy. Thanks

again.

Thanks again to Emily for joining me and to you

for listening. Check out the show notes for links to her

books and visit draftingthepast.com to find

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