Mark your calendars for the annual AIHP Business Meeting webinar scheduled for Thursday, November 15, 2018, at 1:00 PM CST. The meeting webinar will feature a special live lecture by AIHP Board Member David Herzberg, a Professor of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), entitled “The Opioid Crisis in Historical Perspective: What We Can Learn From a Century of Addiction to Pharmaceuticals.”
Today’s opioid epidemic is usually portrayed as a new and extraordinary development. Yet it is only the most recent crisis in more than a century of widespread addiction to pharmaceutical sedatives, stimulants, and narcotics–from Bayer’s Heroin to Rorer’s Quaalude and more. Why has this problem been so prevalent, for so long? And why have we repeatedly “discovered” it as something new and surprising? In this talk, Professor Herzberg recovers the forgotten story of past epidemics of pharmaceutical addiction and draws lessons for today from America’s long history of policy failures and occasional successes.
