The Dr. Junkie Show

Maddy is back to talk about the film Bodies, Bodies, Bodies from 2022, a cool, thriller-horror film that plays on the generational zeitgeist of Gen Z. We talk about how the film reflects cultural fears, cultural fetishes, and unspeakable taboos, and how it keeps us all engaged by appealing to our preexisting cultural stereotypes, our natural reaction to protect certain groups of people while fearing others, and a generational gap t...

Madeline is back to finish up our conversation from last week, and to jump into some new topics. We talk about how education works in neoliberalism, the returning appreciation of learning for learning's sake, objectification in sex work and how feminist can think about navigating that sexwork landscape ethically, cocaine and why it's so hard to get good blow when you're young, the increasing popularity of completely selling out, th...

This week Maddy Grace returns to talk about all sorts of stuff, mostly focused on Gen Z and the different world they grew up in compared to Gen X oldies like me. We talk cocaine and it's increasing popularity in Gen Z, Cigarettes, sex work, politics, protest, power, and we dive into the current pornscape and its impact on young heterosexual men, who have a very different relationship with their sexuality on the whole than Gen X did...

This week I talk about alcohol prohibition and the birth of the 18th Amendment. Mainstream media, strategically manipulated by a woman named Carrie Nation and her posse of temperance propagandists, talked the United States into responding to problems stemming from rapid industrialization (addiction, homelessness, etc.) by outlawing alcohol in 1919, and they pulled it off by using Christianity and Femininity as tools of social chang...

This week author, academic and previously incarcerated rock star David Carrillo stops back by to talk about his new book, Kiko: From Life without Parole to Life with Purpose, available wherever you buy books. We discuss prison politics, drugs in prison, slow and fast changes in perspective through aging and experience, academics in prison, the concept of redemption, morality, prison media and his continuing role as an in-prison edu...

This week I talk about who owns the media and why that matters. I get into the consolidation of media outlets from local owners a century ago to mostly multinational super-rich corporations today, and I unpack some of the ways that change has shaped the media we consume, which in turn shapes us. I talk about the Fairness Doctrine, the war on drugs, free speech, Buster Brown shoes, monopolies and why they are generally discourages i...

This week I dive into some of the work Freud wrote later in his life, particularly a book called Civilization and its Discontents published in 1930. Freud believed that the evolutionary process we can use to trace the changes humans have gone through over the centuries can also explain why culture itself has evolved as it has. He basically thinks we are all self-deceiving, chronically unfulfilled and unsatisfied bots programmed to ...

This week I talk about Freud's love of cocaine, the historical legacy of Freud's cocaine use, and the cultural changes that have occurred since then in relation to cocaine. The stories we tell about drugs impact the experience we have when we consume them, but Freud wasn't dealing with a century of propaganda. He was, in many ways, creating some of the original stories about cocaine that others would tell later on. But his positive...

This week I share a conversation with one of my students, Madeline Grace/Levin, who is creating a podcast of her own called Dependence. I will update this episode description with a link to her podcast when it's live, but in the mean time I thought I'd share a cool conversation we had last week. We talk about religion, drugs, addiction, Michel de Certeau, neoliberalism, atheism, 12-step programs, chihuahuas, spirituality, Trump Der...

This week I talk about the kratom wars: the argument over whether kratom is a deadly drug or a miracle cure (or somewhere in between). While some states are currently trying to ban kratom, others are working to make it easier and safer to get. Meanwhile, the federal government has been a bit all over the place on it, and with Trump 2.0 gathering early steam by pandering to Project 2025 nationalists, it's hard to say what attempted ...

This week I tackle some of the questions and comments I've been getting over the last couple months. I talk about Trump's neoliberal agenda, his capture of the Evangelical Right, Consistency and Accountability in both criminal justice and religion, and I clean up some of what I may have missed during the last few episodes I've done on these issues.

This episode was mostly unscripted and it's all over the place, but hey, some people ...

This week Dr. Christy Perez (C Dreams) is back to talk about her new projects, and to be dragged back into old theological debates. We talk about trans rights, Christianity, the capture of Evangelical Christianity by MAGA, expectations for the next 4 years, the anti-fact stance of the recent anti-trans executive order, and we spend way too long spinning our tires trying to figure out which parts of the Bible we should read as legit...

This week I get back to the heart of the show: drug policy, drug addiction, and drugs. I talk about free will as it relates to the war on drugs, addiction and intoxication, and I dig into genetics, criminal justice, punishment and prevention. 

The nonsensical notion of free will, which I've yet to hear defined with any sort of coherence, plays no part in addiction, and our insistence that it does has allowed us to const...