This year was an exciting one for Points. We have enjoyed increasing traffic every year since we started in 2011, and 2017 was no exception with more unique visitors than any year prior! Below are some highlights from the past twelve months.
We began the year by sharing a series of perspectives on public drug discourse through the lens of historians, titled “What Historians Wish People Knew About Drugs.” Posts were written by contributors based largely on their remarks during a roundtable of the same name at the January American Historical Association meeting in Denver. Follow each link to read the four-part series by Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Isaac Campos, William Rorabaugh, and Scott Taylor.
Earlier this year Trump declared a “public health emergency” regarding opioid use.
To explain Donald Trump’s shocking electoral win in 2016 – or in not a few cases, one suspects, to come to terms with it – analysts scrutinized nearly every conceivable angle of the campaign, including high rates of opiate use and overdose in counties that flipped from Barack Obama four years earlier. In a speculative post that applied new research about analgesics’ negative influence on empathy with these findings, Kyle Bridge explored the relationship between pain, pills, and politics.
New contributing editor Kawal Deep Kour provided a two-part overview of opium use, regulation, and addiction treatment in colonial Assam, India.
This year we also published several interviews with recent book authors, four of which featured Points alumni! View their interviews at the following links: Claire Clark, managing editor: The Recovery Revolution; Emily Dufton, managing editor: Grass Roots; Ingrid Walker, contributing editor: High; and William White, contributing editor: Recovery Rising.
We hope you’ll help us make 2018 even better than 2017, for all of us! See you next year!