Last updated December 2018 - please see Resources for further academic scholarship and news media. Though we cannot post selections with copyright restrictions, we have linked to freely accessible content when possible.  

I. Epidemics and the Opioid Crisis in Context
 

Complicating the concept of “epidemic”: Social responses to epidemics, epidemic narratives 
 

• Rosenberg, Charles. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962. (Introduction)
   
• Rosenberg, Charles. “Disease and Social Order in America: Perceptions and Expectations.” Milbank Quarterly 64 (1986): 34-55. 
   
• Rosenberg, Charles. “What Is an Epidemic?” Daedalus 118 (Spring 1989): 1-17.
   
• Fee, Elizabeth and Daniel M. Fox, eds. AIDS: The Burden of History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. (Table of Contents, Introduction)
   
• Brandt, Allan. “AIDS In Historical Perspective: Four Lessons from the History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases.” American Journal of Public Health 78, no. 4 (April 1988): 367-371.

Overview of the Current Opioid Crisis in Historical Context
 

• Courtwright, David. Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. (Introduction and Chapters 1-4)
   
• Katz, Josh. “Short Answers to Hard Questions About the Opioid Crisis.” The New York Times. August 10, 2017.
   
• “An Opioid Crisis Foretold.” The New York Times. April 21, 2018. 
   
• Frakt, Austin. “Painkiller Abuse, A Cyclical Challenge.” The New York Times. December 22, 2014.
   
• Lawson, Clinton. “American’s 150-Year Opioid Epidemic.” The New York Times. May 19, 2018.

Thinking about our Own Language in Class
 

• Botticelli, Michael P., and Howard K. Koh. “Changing the Language of Addiction.” Journal of the American Medical Association 316, no. 13 (Oct 4, 2016): 1361-1362.
   
• Broyles Lauren M. et al. “Confronting inadvertent stigma and pejorative language in addiction scholarship: a recognition and response.” Substance Abuse 35, no. 3 (2014): 217-221.
   
• Wakeman, Sarah. “Words Matter: The Language of Addiction and Life-saving Treatments.” Harvard Health Blog. August 15, 2016.

II. Epidemiology

Historical and Current Demographics  
 

• Courtwright, David. Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. (Chapters 5-6)
   
• Achenbach, Joel and Dan Keating. “Drug crisis is pushing up death rates for almost all groups of Americans.” The Washington Post. June 9, 2017.

Urban versus Rural: The Landscape of Addiction 
 

• Acker, Caroline Jean. Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. (Introduction, Chapter 1: Heroin Addiction and Urban Vice Reform) 
   
• Bourgois, Phillipe and Jeffrey Schonberg. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. (Introduction) 
   
• Garcia, Angela. The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. (Introduction, Chapter 1: Graveyard) 
   
• Del Real, Jose. “Sick River: Can These California Tribes Beat Heroin and History?” The New York Times. September 4, 2018. 
   
• Talbot, Margaret. “The Addicts Next Door.” The New Yorker. June 5, 2017.  

Race and Opioids in U.S. History
 

• Hansen, Helena and Julie Netherland. “Is the Prescription Opioid Epidemic a White Problem?” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 12 (2016): 2127-2129.
   
• Karandinos, George. “Cashing in on Despair.” Dissent. Spring 2018. 
   
• Childress, Sarah. “How the Heroin Epidemic Differs in Communities of Color.” Frontline. February 23, 2016.
   
• Cohen, Andrew. “How White Users Made Heroin a Public-Health Problem.” The Atlantic. August 12, 2015. 
   
• Gabriel, Joseph M. “Opiate Addiction And The History Of Pain And Race In The U.S.” WBUR. June 19, 2018. 

Iatrogenesis and Physician Culpability 
 

• Terry, Charles E. and Mildred Pellens. The Opium Problem: For the Committee on Drug Addiction in Collaboration with the Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc. New York, Bureau of Social Hygiene, Inc: 1928. (Skim Chapter 2: “Development of the Problem, p. 53-93). 
   
• Bebinger, Martha. “As The Opium Trade Boomed in the 1800s, Boston Doctors Raised Addiction Concerns.” WBUR. August 1, 2017. 
   
• Clement, Scott and Lenny Bernstein. “One-third of long-term users say they’re hooked on prescription opioids.” The Washington Post. December 9, 2016. 
   
• Gounder, Celine. “Who is Responsible for the Pain-Pill Epidemic.” The New Yorker. November 8, 2013. 
   
• Campbell, James. “APS 1995 Presidential Address.” The Journal of Pain 5, no. 1 (1996): 85-88. 
   
• Porter, Jane and Hershel Jick. “Addiction is Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.” The New England Journal of Medicine 302, no. 2 (1980): 123.
   
• Leung, Pamela T.M. et al. “A 1980 Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction.” The New England Journal of Medicine 376, no. 22 (June 1, 2017): 1-2. 
   
• Haney, Taylor. “Doctor Who Wrote 1980 Letter On Painkillers Regrets That It Fed The Opioid Crisis.” National Public Radio. June 16, 2017. 
   

III. Pain

Anthropology of Pain
 

• Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. (p. 1-9) 
   
• Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1988. (Chapter 3: The Vulnerability of Pain and the Pain of Vulnerability) 

The History of Pain Science and Pain Medicine
 

• Wailoo, Keith. Pain: A Political History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. (Introduction) 
   
• Meldrum, Marcia. “A Capsule History of Pain Management.” Journal of the American Medical Association 290, no. 18 (November 12, 2003): 2470-2475. 
   
• Noble, Bill et al. “The Measurement of Pain, 1945-2000.” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 29, no. 1 (Jan 2005): 14-21. 
   
• Coffin, Phillip and Caleb Banta-Green. “The Dueling Obligations of Opioid Stewardship.” Annals of Internal Medicine 160, no. 3 (Feb 4, 2014): 207-208. 
   
• Ballantyne, Jane C., and Mark D. Sullivan. “Intensity of Chronic Pain—The Wrong Metric?” The New England Journal of Medicine 373, no. 22: 2098-­2099. 
   
• Baker, David W. “The Joint Commission’s Pain Standards: Origins and Evolution.” The Joint Commission. May 5, 2017. 

Pain in Global Health Contexts
 

• Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. (Chapter 5: Pain and Laughter) 
   
• Knaul, Felicia M. et al. “The Lancet Commission on Palliative Care and Pain Relief - Findings, Recommendations, and Future Directions.” Lancet 6 (March 1, 2018): S5-S6. 
   
• McNeil, David G. “ ‘Opiophobia’ Has Left Africa in Agony.” The New York Times. December 4, 2017. 

The Experience of the Pain Patient, Including Differences by Race and Gender
 

• McCoy, Terrence. “Unintended Consequences: Inside the fallout of America’s crackdown on opioids.” The Washington Post. May 31, 2018. 
   
• Glod, Susan A. “The Other Victims of the Opioid Epidemic.” The New England Journal of Medicine 376, no. 22 (June 1, 2017): 2101-2102. 
   
• Goodnough, Abby. “Finding Good Pain Treatment Is Hard. If You’re Not White, It’s Even Harder.” The New York Times. August 9, 2016. 
   
• Edwards, Laurie. “The Gender Gap in Pain.” The New York Times. March 16, 2013. 
   

IV. Addiction

The History of Addiction Research; Theories of Addiction through History
 

• SHORT FILM: "The Narcotic Farm," freely accessible via Youtube (55 minutes, broadcast on U.S. public television in 2009; Produced and Directed by JP Olsen and Luke Walden) 
   
• Campbell, Nancy. Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. (Chapter 1: "Framing the 'Opium Problem:' Protoscientific Concepts of Addiction, p. 20-25; Chapter 8: “The Hijacked Brain”) 
   
• Hart, Carl L. “Viewing addiction as a brain disease promotes social injustice.” Nature 1, no. 55 (Feb 17, 2017): 1. 

The Lived Experience of Addiction
 

• Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. (Chapter 3: Perversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity - focus on the subsection "Perverse Encounters in the Opium Den") 
   
• Bourgois, Phillipe and Jeffrey Schonberg. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. (Chapter 3: A Community of Addicted Bodies)
   
• Garcia, Angela. The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. (Chapter 2: The Elegiac Addict, Chapter 3: Blood Relative) 
   
• Knight, Kelly Ray. Addicted. Pregnant. Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2015. (Chapter 5: Stratified Reproduction and Kin of Last Resort)
   

V. Markets

History of Opium Markets
 

• Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. (Introduction, Chapter 2: “The Little Three: Opium, Cannabis, and Coca” p. 31-39, Chapter 7: “Opiates of the People”) 

The Role of Pharma in the Current Opioid Crisis
 

• Brandt, Allan. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. New York: Basic Books, 2007. (Introduction) 
   
• “Oxycontin Abuse and Diversion and Efforts to Address the Problem.” United States General Accounting Office. December 2003. (“Purdue Conducted an Extensive Campaign to Market and Promote OxyContin” p. 16-28) 
   
• Zee, Art Van. “The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy.” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 2 (Feb 2009): 221-227. 
   
• Armstrong, David. “Secret trove reveals bold ‘crusade’ to make OxyContin a blockbuster.” STAT. September 22, 2016. 
   
• Keefe, Patrick Radden. “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain.” The New Yorker. October 30, 2017. 
   
• Ryan, Harriet, Lisa Giron, and Scott Glover. “OxyContin goes global — ‘We’re only just getting started.’” Los Angeles Times. December 18, 2016. 

Street Markets
 

• Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. (“Junkie Kingdom in Dreamland” p. 206-219) 
   
• Miron, Jeffrey. "Legalizing Opioids Would Dramatically Reduce Overdose Deaths." Law and Liberty, November 14, 2017. 

Spin Off Markets
 

• Ferguson, Cat. “Addicts For Sale.” Buzzfeed News. March 19, 2016. 
   
• Goodnough, Abby and Kate Zernicke. “Seizing on Opioid Crisis, a Drug Maker Lobbies Hard for Its Product.” The New York Times. June 11, 2017. 
   
• Luthra, Shefali. “Massive Price Hike for Lifesaving Opioid Overdose Antidote.” Scientific American. February 2, 2017. 

Extra Primary Sources, if of Interest:
 

• The State of New Hampshire v. Purdue Pharma, L.P.; Purdue Pharma Inc.; and The Purdue Frederick Company. 1:2017cv00427 (New Hampshire District Court, 2017). 
   
• “Fueling an Epidemic: Report Two: Exposing the Financial Ties Between Opioid Manufacturers and Third Party Advocacy Groups.” U.S. Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, Ranking Member's Office. February 12, 2018. 
   

VI. Stigma

Reporting and Photojournalism
 

• Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988). New York: Anchor Books, 1990. (Illness: Sections 1-3 or approx. p. 1-26; AIDS: Sections 5-6 or approx. p. 132-159) 
   
• Bourgois, Phillipe and Jeffrey Schonberg. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. (Please view photographs.) 
   
• Mnookin, Seth. “Public shaming of overdosed adults by police department’s Facebook post is ‘morally repugnant’.” STAT. September 9, 2016. 
   
• Netherland, Julie and Helena Hansen. “The War on Drugs That Wasn't: Wasted Whiteness, ‘Dirty Doctors,’ and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse.” Cult Med Psychiatry 40, no. 4 (Dec 2016): 664–686. 
   
• Egan, Jennifer. “Children of the Opioid Epidemic.” The New York Times. May 9, 2018.
   
• “The Mail: Letters Respond to Margaret Talbot’s Article About Heroin Addiction in West Virginia.” The New Yorker. June 6, 2017.  
   
• Stoller, Kurt ed. “Six Times Journalists on the Paper’s History of Covering AIDS and Gay Issues.” The New York Times Style Magazine. April 27, 2018. 

Obituaries
 

• Seelye, Katharine Q. “Obituaries Shed Euphemisms to Chronicle Toll of Heroin.” The New York Times. July 11, 2015. 

Judging “Deservingness” of Care
 

• Goodnough, Abby. “Injecting Drugs Can Ruin a Heart. How Many Second Chances Should a User Get?” The New York Times. April 29, 2018. 
   
• Hilgers, Laura. “Treat Addiction Like Cancer.” The New York Times. May 19, 2018.
   
• Seeyle, Katharine Q. “A Public Overdose. An Antidote at Hand. Would Passers-By Use It?” The New York Times. May 9, 2017. 

General Advocacy
 

• Metzl, Jonathan M. and Helena Hansen. “Structural Competency: Theorizing a New Medical Engagement with Stigma and Inequality.” Social Science & Medicine 103 (2014): 126-­133.