Matthew R. Pembleton is a writer and historian of 20th century and modern America. His work revolves around government, U.S. public health and safety, and the United States and the world, with a focus on critical infrastructure and drug policy. His first book, Containing Addiction (2017), won the 2019 Henry Adams Prize and tells the story of the nation's first drug cops and the long history of the war on drugs. Matt currently works full-time as a government consultant and is a lecturer at American University, where he completed his doctorate in 2014. Matt has taught college history for more than a decade, with previous appointments at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and Howard Community College. He has also worked as a Fellow at the DC Policy Center and a history consultant at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. His writing has been featured in many peer-reviewed scholarly journals, popular outlets, and podcast and media interviews.

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The story of America’s “War on Drugs” usually begins with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. In Containing Addiction, Matthew R. Pembleton argues that its origins instead lie in the years following World War II, when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—the country’s first drug control agency, established in 1930—began to depict drug control as a paramilitary conflict and sent agents abroad to disrupt the flow of drugs to American shores.

U.S. policymakers had long viewed addiction and organized crime as profound domestic and trans-national threats. Yet World War II presented new opportunities to implement drug control on a global scale. Skeptical of public health efforts to address demand, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics believed that reducing the global supply of drugs was the only way to contain the spread of addiction. In effect, America applied a foreign policy solution to a domestic social crisis, demonstrating how consistently policymakers have assumed that security at home can only be achieved through hegemony abroad. The result is a drug war that persists into the present day.

Praise for Containing Addiction

**WINNER of the 2019 Henry Adams Prize awarded by the Society for History in the Federal Government**

“Containing Addiction is . . . essential reading for historians concerned with drug policy, state formation, policing, and mass incarceration.”
-Max Mishler, Journal of American History

“Pembleton is a lucid, smart, and engaging writer, who will be read by scholars and general audiences alike. This is one of the essential books in American drug history.”
-Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug

“Containing Addiction reads like a true crime page turner, yet delivers a straight-from-the-archives, lucidly argued history of the narcotics agents who built America’s global drug war.”
-David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac

“A path-breaking scholarly history told as a thriller . . . Containing Addiction is essential reading for policy-makers and scholars alike.”
-Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors and Rethinking Anti-Americanism

“Matthew R. Pembleton uses narrative, fresh biography, and deep research to nail two important truths. What we call the drug war is really a series of wars stretching back nearly a century. And those wars . . . served many ends, national security interests and partisan politics chief among them. What they did not serve, Pembleton shows, was the goal of keeping Americans free from addiction, a plague worse at the end of a century of drug warring than at the beginning.”
-David Courtwright, Dark Paradise and Forces of Habit

“A seminal work of outstanding researched-based social policy history, Containing Addiction is an impressively informed and informative study that is unreservedly recommended for governmental, community and academic library Social Issues collections in general, and Federal Drug Policy supplemental studies lists in particular.”
–Midwest Review of Books

“Matthew R. Pembleton’s new book is a welcome addition to the ‘new drug history’ that draws on interdisciplinary research to understand how our perspective on and response to narcotics have evolved over the past century, and how the global drug war is about much, much more than drugs.”
-Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Diplomatic History

“Containing Addiction provides important historical context about the origins of late twentieth and early twenty-first century US drug-control policy. This book should be of much interest to scholars and historians looking to understand the choices behind the long-term development of the war on drugs and the artificial division of drugs into categories like licit and illicit.”
-Claire Clark, Pharmacy in History