Drugs, Politics, and Pariahs: Or, How to Think Historically About Race and Harm Reduction in an Opioid Epidemic

Date/Time
Thursday 
28 Feb 2019
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Event Type
Colloquium

Samuel Roberts
Associate Professor of History & Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University

Please join us for a colloquium talk with Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., PhD, who is a Columbia University Associate Professor of History (School of Arts and Sciences) and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Mailman School of Public Health). He is also a former Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). He writes and lectures widely about Black politics and history, especially issues pertaining to public health, drug policy, and harm reduction.

Dr. Roberts is the author of the widely acclaimed Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and is currently is researching and writing a book project on the history of drug addiction policy and politics from the 1950s to the 1990s, a period which encompasses the various heroin epidemics between the 1950s and the 1980s, the development of therapeutic communities, radical recovery movements, methadone maintenance treatment, and harm reduction approaches.

Dr. Roberts has served as a member of the Mailman School of Public Health’s Working Group on Mass Incarceration and Public Health, and as the Policy Coordinator of Columbia University’s Criminal Justice Initiative (now the Columbia University Center for Justice) in which capacity he was the editor of the Center’s first research publication, Aging in Prison: Reducing Elder Incarceration and Promoting Public Safety (2015). His board and advisory council memberships have included the Alliance of Families for Justice, the Centre for Research in Race and Rights (University of Nottingham, UK), of note magazine, and the Legal Action Center. In 2013 he organized the conference “Challenging Punishment: Race, Public Health, and the War on Drugs” (4-5 October 2013, in New York City). He tweets from @SamuelKRoberts.

Dr. Roberts is also the host of the podcast PDIS: People Doing Interesting Stuff, a public health and social justice interview show available on iTunes and SoundCloud. He tweets from @SamuelKRoberts (https://twitter.com/SamuelKRoberts).

This event is co-sponsored by the Haas Institute’s Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster.