Associate Professor Emerita, University of Washington Tacoma

Public Scholar

Harm Reductionist

Threads @bad.academic

I am a Humanities Washington Speaker 2024 & 2025 and am currently scheduling talks. I’d love to come have a conversation with your community.

The stories we tell ourselves as a society affect the way we perceive each other and the world. I study the cultural politics of contemporary life in the U.S. by considering the sources of these stories and whether they are accurate. In particular, our stories about drugs and drug users influence our social systems of law, public health, education, and media. In my writing and advocacy, I make these stories and their often damaging effects visible.

My research looks at how these stories are manifest in drug policy—through the history of criminalization of some drugs and the medical embrace of other drugs. In my book, High: Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users, I examine how drug prohibition and health care have resulted in these vastly different practices of drug use in American life. My TEDx talk, “Drugs and Desire,” explores the stigmas and cultural norms we assign to the use of psychoactive drugs.

As a publicly-engaged scholar and harm reductionist, I am focused on cultivating more thoughtful, evidence-based drug policy. I collaborate with researchers, policy experts, community organizations, and drug users.

I am a member of the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau and am available to visit your community.

My writing has been published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, Contemporary Drug Problems, the Journal of Popular Culture, and the edited volumes The Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Cannabis Research, The Impact of Global Drug Policy on Women: Shifting the Needle, Conspiracy Nation, as well as other journals and collections.

When I’m not working, I enjoy wandering the trails of the Pacific Northwest. I live with my husband and cat in the impressive shadow of Mount Tahoma in the Salish Coastal Territories, with gratitude to the Puyallup people in particular for stewarding this place I call home.