Scholars@Hallwalls: David Herzberg
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
[Initially scheduled for Sept. 26, but changed due to conflict. Click here for Meredith Alberta Palmer's talk.]
Join us for the inaugural Scholars@Hallwalls talk of the 2025-26 season, the 10th season at Hallwalls! Complimentary wine and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
5:00pm | Mingling
5:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q+A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camaraderie and conversation, but you can also livestream the event via the Hallwalls website.
David Herzberg
“The doctor had found just what he wanted”: Addicted physicians and an alternate history of drugs in the US
For good reason, “drug wars” dominate memory and debates about U.S. drug policy. Yet the U.S. has also been home to many other approaches to drugs, addiction, and drug policy. This talk explores one of those histories, that of addicted physicians—“respectable” white men suffering from a condition long associated with the poor and racialized. Physicians’ apparent susceptibility to addiction (they had among America’s highest rates), and the desire to protect white male professionals, led medical authorities to develop more humane approaches to their care. These evolved over the 20th century from informal practices to statewide programs with extensive facilities. Remembering such non-warlike precedents equips us with an expanded historical toolbox of options for today’s rare moment of plasticity in domestic and global drug policy.
David Herzberg is a historian of drugs and drug policy in U.S. racial capitalism, with a primary focus on pharmaceutical sedatives, stimulants, and opioids. Among other places, you can find his work in American Quarterly, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, the Washington Post, and in three books, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (University of Chicago, 2020), Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (University of California, 2023), and Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Johns Hopkins, 2009). He is also Director of the Drugs, Health, and Society program at UB and serves as co-Editor of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, the peer-reviewed journal of the Alcohol and Drug History Society.
