The Book
Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug War (University of Massachusetts Press, Dec 2017) **Winner of the 2019 Henry Adams Prize awarded by Society for Historians in the Federal Government**
Scholarly Publications
W/ Kathryn McLain, “The Drug War Era: From the Crack Epidemic to the Opioid Crisis,” in Understanding and Teaching Contemporary US History since Reagan, eds. Kimber M. Quinney and Amy L. Sayward (University of Wisconsin Press, December 2022)
“The War on Drugs: Nixon, Reagan, Trump,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health, eds. Martin Halliwell and Sophie Jones (Edinburgh University Press, August 2022)
“The Globalization of U.S. Drug Enforcement,” in Oxford Companion to Global Drug History, ed. Paul Gootenberg (Oxford University Press, March 2022)
Editor, w/ Daniel Weimer, “Roundtable: U.S. Foreign Relations and the New Drug History,” Diplomatic History, Vol 45, Issue 5, November 2021
"Revising the Drug War: A Genealogical and Historiographical Sketch,” Diplomatic History, Vol 45, Issue 5, November 2021
Guest Editor, w/ Daniel Weimer, “U.S. Foreign Relations and the New Drug History,” special issue of Social History of Alcohol and Drugs Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2019
“Imagining a Global Sovereignty: U.S. Counternarcotic Operations in Istanbul during the Early Cold War and the Origins of the Foreign ‘War on Drugs’,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 2016, pp. 28-63.
“The Voice of the Bureau: How Frederic Sondern and the Bureau of Narcotics Crafted a Drug War and Shaped Popular Understanding of Drugs, Addiction, and Organized Crime in the 1950s,” The Journal of American Culture Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2015, pp. 113-129.
Op-Eds, Analysis, & Public History
“Distilling the Past at Mt. Vernon,” Points, Dec. 14, 2018.
“George H.W. Bush’s biggest failure? The war on drugs,” Washington Post, December 6, 2018.
“Synthetics: the next chapter in the D.C. region’s drug crisis,” DC Policy Center, October 3, 2018.
“How the D.C. region is responding to the opioid crisis; naloxone saves lives, but it’s only the first step,” with Kathryn Zickhur, DC Policy Center, April 30, 2018.
“Confronting the opioid—and fentanyl—crisis in the District,” DC Policy Center, Feb. 8, 2018.
“While government cracked down on illegal drugs, Big Pharma hooked millions on opioids,” with David Herzberg, Washington Post, October 30, 2017.
“We’ve spent a century fighting the war on drugs. It helped create an opioid crisis,” Washington Post, August 31, 2017.
“There’s One Last Big-Ticket Item on Trump’s Agenda: A War on Drugs,” History News Network, February 26, 2017.
Book & Article Reviews
Review of Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (Basic Books, 2013), History: Review of New Books, Vol. 43, No. 2, April 2015, p. 61-62.
H-Diplo Review of Ryan Gingeras, “Istanbul Confidential: Heroin, Espionage, and Politics in Cold War Turkey, 1945-1960,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 4 (September 2013): 779–806, February 6, 2014.
Review of Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Cornell University Press, 2010), History: Review of New Books, Vol. 40, No. 2, October 2012, p. 109-110.
Review of Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), History News Network, September 15, 2011.