About Points
Points is a collaborative publication bringing together scholars on the histories of drugs, medicines, alcohol, and pharmacy to produce meaningful discussion on the past and present state of health and drug discourse, policy, and culture. Points is not a journal: we are foremost concerned with facilitating informed and accessible conversations surrounding subjects that require intersectional and contextual analysis.
Points is and has always been rooted in historical scholarship; it is our assertion that no present issue can be fully understood without understanding its place in history, and that insightful and necessary historical analysis does not require a history background. Points encourages varied and impassioned discussions that challenge conventional understandings while maintaining a high standard of quality from scholars with diverse backgrounds.
Points was founded in 2011 by by Joe Spillane and Trysh Travis as a joint blog sponsored by, the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, an affiliate organization of the American Historical Association. It has been a key site of historical scholarship and knowledge production since its inception, with a commitment and mission to disseminate information without a paywall or subscription fee.
Points features regular posts from our Editorial Board members and welcomes posts from guest authors. All posts are edited by the Managing Editor prior to publication and revisions may be requested or recommended. However, with a diverse audience in mind, Points is more flexible than an academic journal regarding the content and formatting of posts.
Guidance for contributions:
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Content is welcomed on a wide range of topics but should include critical reflection on historical or contemporary issues related to drugs of intoxication/medicine.
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Written posts/essays should be 750–2000 words. These typically offer cultural criticism and commentary, policy analysis, or archival/museum & book reviews.
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We also welcome creative content in the form of: interviews, source/image discussion, presentation recordings – pitch an idea and we’ll discuss.
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References are to be done in accordance with the 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.
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All content must be submitted with author(s) biography paragraphs & a profile picture to be published with the post.
For further information, contact Managing Editors Claire Clark and Clayton Wells.
Managing Editors:
Claire Clark, PhD, MPH joined Points as a Managing Editor in October 2023. Claire is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She holds appointments in the University of Kentucky's Department of Behavioral Science, Department of History, Program for Bioethics, and Center for Health Engagement Transformation.
Clayton Wells succeeded Claire Davey as Managing Editor of Points in October 2023. He is a PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Kentucky, USA. His research explores the social construction and fundamental causes of mental illness and addiction.
Editorial Board
Bob Beach is a social and cultural historian interested in the daily lives of cannabis users in the period between the two world wars. A long-time contributor to POINTS, Bob has written on cannabis history and folklore, drug war activism, and most recently, adult-use regulations in New York. He is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University at Albany, SUNY. When not doing history, Bob is a standup comedian who performs all over New York State and hopes to develop a podcast or YouTube channel that blends comedy and history in an interesting way for a popular audience.
Steve is an assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). His work has primarily focussed on the history of medicine; how people have understood, treated, experienced, and represented pain. He’ll be contributing posts that share more on this work and recent research projects on historic healthcare costs, and chronic pain.
Isaac Campos is Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. A Latin Americanist by training, he has written extensively on drugs in Mexico and the United States. He also publishes the History on Drugs newsletter and podcast.
David Courtwright is a past president of the ADHS and the author of several studies of U.S. and global drug history: Dark Paradise, Addicts Who Survived, and Forces of Habit. His most recent book, The Age of Addiction, places drug history within the larger story of limbic capitalism. Courtwright is currently writing a book about the origins and evolution of the opioid crisis.
Joseph Gabriel is Associate Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine at Florida State University. He has written extensively about the history of the pharmaceutical industry and related topics. He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of addiction in the early United States.
Maziyar Ghiabi is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and his work explores the politics of drugs through transdisciplinary approaches and southern epistemologies. In 2023, he was receipt of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology. His first book Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was awarded the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) Nikki Keddie Award for best book on 'revolution, society and/or religion.' His second monograph is States without People published by McGill-University Press (co-authored with Billie Jeanne Brownlee, 2025). He is also the author of Power and Illicit Drugs in the Global South (Routledge 2020).
Holly M. Karibo is an associate professor of History at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the history of vice, labor, and sexuality in transnational urban spaces from the late-19th century to the present. Karibo is the author of Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland and Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West. She is also the co-editor of Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America.
James Kneale is a historical geographer at UCL interested in drink and temperance, mostly in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Britain. He is writing a book on life assurance, temperance and medicine and is a co-editor of Journal of Victorian Culture. He can be found on X @JamesKneale, and occasionally blogs at https://jameskneale.com/
Alex Mold is Professor of History at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has published widely on the history of heroin use in the UK, the role of voluntary organisations in dealing with drug use, and the history of addiction concepts. Her current research is part of multi-stranded project which is looking at ‘addictive’ sports sponsorship, focusing especially on alcohol.
Haggai Ram is a professor of history at the Dep. of Middle East Studies in Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His teaching and research deal with the social history of modern Iran and Palestine-Israel and drug history. His latest book is Intoxicating Zion: a Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel (Stanford UP, 2021).
Samuel Kelton Roberts, PhD (@SamuelKRoberts) is Associate Professor of History (School of Arts Sciences) and Sociomedical Sciences (Mailman School of Public Health) at Columbia University, where he also leads the Research Cluster for Historical Study of Race, Inequality, and Health. Roberts is the author of the widely acclaimed, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation, and the co-editor of the Columbia University Press book series on Race, Inequality, and Health. He currently is writing a book tentatively titled “To Enter a Society Which Doesn’t Want Them”: Race, Recovery, and America’s Misadventures in Drug Policy. He also is the host of the public health and justice podcast, PDIS: People Doing Interesting Stuff and the co-host (with Mabel O. Wilson, PhD) of Black Lives in the Era of COVID 19.
Thembisa Waetjen is a professor of history at the University of Johannesburg. Her writing and graduate student supervision focuses on state-making and the cultural politics of substances and drug control in South Africa
Managing Editor Emeritus
Greg Bond was managing editor of Points throughout 2021. He is currently the Archivist for the Joyce Sports Research Collection, one of the most significant sports history manuscript and archival collections in the country. He formerly held positions as the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP)’s Head Archivist and served as Associate Director for AIHP and Senior Editor of AIHP’s journal History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals.
Emily Dufton holds a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University. She is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. She was the managing editor of Points from 2014–2016 and from 2018–2020. She also served as the media officer for the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. She is currently working on her next book, a history of how the federal government has handled, and funded, the development of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder. Email Emily at emily.dufton@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @emily_dufton
Founders of Points
A 20th-century literary and cultural historian, Trysh Travis teaches in the Center for Women’s Studies & Gender Research at the University of Florida. She has published on the gender and power of addiction and recovery, spirituality, and bibliotherapy in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. Her book The Language of the Heart: a Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey appeared in 2009. Her current project, which has incubated across ten years of writing for Points, is entitled “Feminists on Drugs: A History.”
Joe Spillane is Professor of History at the University of Florida. He has authored Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States (Johns Hopkins Press, 2000) and co-edited Federal Drug Control: The Evolution of Policy and Practice (Haworth Press, 2004). More recently, he authored Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform (Johns Hopkins Press, 2014). His current drug-related research agenda includes: the history and development of drug abuse liability assessment; reflections on the nature of drug epidemics; and examinations of drug war “harms” in historical context.