Emeriti Faculty Lecture, Fall 2026

Intoxications and Their Meanings

We pay so much attention to the iniquity of addiction that we scarcely notice the ubiquity of intoxication. From the temperance crusade of the 19th century to crack cocaine in the 1980s and now fentanyl and the overdose crisis, the United States has never lacked for drug scares. Yet cannabis has been widely legalized, psychedelics are used to treat mental illness, and there’s Ritalin for ADHD and Prozac for improving one’s outlook. To begin to make sense of this, we need to broaden how we think about intoxication – a concept far too narrow to do justice to the wide variety of altered states found everywhere in American culture.

Register to attend in-person or virtual

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for guests attending in person
Lecture: 7 p.m.
Followed by a reception for in-person guests
Free and open to the public

Presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association

Craig Reinarman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Legal Studies at UCSC. He was a post-doc at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht, a visiting scholar at the Center for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam, and principal investigator on research grants from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Justice. He has also been a consultant to the World Health Organization’s Substance Abuse Program Dr. Reinarman is the author of American States of Mind (Yale 1987) and co-author of Cocaine Changes (Temple 1991) and Crack in America (UC Press 1997). His most recent book is an anthology of critical addiction studies, Expanding Addiction (Routledge 2015).