Rensselaer is America’s oldest technological research university, offering bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering, the sciences, information technology and web science, architecture, management, and the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

The university offers degrees from five schools: Engineering; Science; Architecture; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; and the Lally School of Management; as well as an interdisciplinary degree in Information Technology and Web Science.

Rensselaer offers more than 145 programs at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels. Students are encouraged to work in interdisciplinary programs that allow them to combine scholarly work from several departments or schools. The university provides rigorous, engaging, interactive learning environments and campus-wide opportunities for leadership, collaboration, and creativity.

Driven by talented, dedicated, and forward-thinking faculty, Rensselaer has dramatically expanded the research enterprise by leveraging our existing strengths and focusing on five signature research areas: biotechnology and the life sciences; energy and the environment; computational science and engineering; nanotechnology and advanced materials; and media, arts, science, and technology.

The Institute is especially well-known for its success in the transfer of technology from the laboratory to the marketplace so that new discoveries and inventions benefit human life, protect the environment, and strengthen economic development.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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Star-Nelkin Prize, American Sociological Association Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology

BioSocieties Reviewer of the Year Award

Media Award, College on Problems of Drug Dependence

Contemporary Drug Problems : Associate Editor

The history of the development of buprenorphine as an addiction therapeutic

Toward a critical neuroscience of ‘addiction’

Incitements to discourse: Illicit drugs, harm reduction, and the production of ethnographic subjects

OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (Inside Technology)

This study, by two leading scholars in the field, draws on feminist theory and science and technology studies to uncover a basic injustice for the human rights of drug-using women: most women who need drug treatment in the US and UK do not get it. Why not?

Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World

From 1935 until 1975, just about every junkie busted for dope went to the Narcotic Farm. Equal parts federal prison, treatment center, farm, and research laboratory, the Farm was designed to rehabilitate addicts and help researchers discover a cure for drug addiction. Although it began as a bold and ambitious public works project, and became famous as a rehabilitation center frequented by great jazz musicians among others, the Farm was shut down forty years after it opened amid scandal over its drug-testing program, which involved experiments where inmates were being used as human guinea pigs and rewarded with heroin and cocaine for their efforts. Published to coincide with a documentary to be aired on PBS, The Narcotic Farm includes rare and unpublished photographs, film stills, newspaper and magazine clippings, government documents, as well as interviews, writings, and anecdotes from the prisoners, doctors, and guards that trace the Farm’s noble rise and tumultuous fall, revealing the compelling story of what really happened inside the prison walls. The Narcotic Farm is a beautiful, fascinating book that takes readers deep into a forgotten American institution. The pictures are remarkable and the story brings an important moment in history vividly to life. It’s a stunning work.Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps The story of America’s long and deep affair with addictive drugs is incomplete without mention of the legendary federal narcotic hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. The Narcotic Farm tells this story well, and in addition provides a wealth of revealing photographs and documents that speak volumes on what it was like to be a junkie in the mid-twentieth century.Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Evidence The Narcotic Farm works its magic by recapturing, in images and words, the lost world of Narco,” the sprawling federal prison-hospital for drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s the details that get you, from the disheveled misery of withdrawal to the uninhibited joy of performing in the house jazz band.David Courtwright, author of Dark Paradise, Addicts Who Survived, and Forces of HabitEveryone who cares about addiction and recovery in this country should look at these pictures and read this text.Susan Cheever, author of My Name is Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous and Desire: Where Sex Meets AddictionThe 'Narco,' with its combination of prison and hospital, drug experimentation and drug cure, total institution and farm, exemplified the contradictions of American drug policy.  The authors are to be commended for their accessible text and high-quality images that vividly convey the history of the Narcotics Farm from the high hopes of its birth to its evolution into a "fraternity for drug addicts."Eric Schneider - "Smack: Heroin and the American City," University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008

The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America's First Prison for Drug Addicts

Discovering Addiction brings the history of human and animal experimentation in addiction science into the present with a wealth of archival research and dozens of oral-history interviews with addiction researchers. Professor Campbell examines the birth of addiction science---the National Academy of Sciences's project to find a pharmacological fix for narcotics addiction in the late 1930s---and then explores the human and primate experimentation involved in the succeeding studies of the "opium problem," revealing how addiction science became "brain science" by the 1990s. Psychoactive drugs have always had multiple personalities---some cause social problems; others solve them---and the study of these drugs involves similar contradictions. Discovering Addiction enriches discussions of bioethics by exploring controversial topics, including the federal prison research that took place in the 1970s---a still unresolved debate that continues to divide the research community---and the effect of new rules regarding informed consent and the calculus of risk and benefit. This fascinating volume is both an informative history and a thought-provoking guide that asks whether it is possible to differentiate between ethical and unethical research by looking closely at how science is made.Nancy D. Campbell is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice."Compelling and original, lively and engaging---Discovering Addiction opens up new ways of thinking about drug policy as well as the historical discourses of addiction."---Carol Stabile, University of Wisconsin--MilwaukeeAlso available:Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine, by Heather Munro PrescottIllness and the Limits of Expression, by Kathlyn ConwayWhite Coat, Clenched Fist: The Political Education of an American Physician, by Fitzhugh Mullan

Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research

Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.

Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice by Nancy Campbell (2000-06-10)

Professor Nancy Campbell is a Professor and the Department Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Her research focuses on science, technology, and medicine as it relates to drugs, drug policy, and the social significance of legal and illegal drugs, with a recent focus on opioid overdose. She studies those who govern and use drugs, produce scientific knowledge about them, and seek to treat drug problems.

“How have ideas about drugs and drug addiction changed over time? What do we know about drug addiction, and how do we know it? Why do we have the drug policies that we do?” said Campbell.  “We consider some drugs to cause social problems, and others to solve them. Often we are talking about the same molecules—the differences lie in who uses them and how they do so. My research centers on scientific communities who make knowledge about drugs, and interactions between scientists, treatment providers, policymakers, and patient advocates.”

Campbell is currently working on the history of overdose prevention, the ethics of LSD research in the US Public Health Service, and the fruitful convergence between neuroscience and addiction research.

She is the author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose and Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2000), which was about how drug-using women figured in drug policy discourse from the 1910s to the 1990s. She has also co-authored Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World with Elizabeth Ettorre. 

Campbell and co-authors JP Olsen and Luke Walden published a visual history of the federal drug treatment hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, titled The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts. Campbell also appeared in Olsen and Walden’s 2007 documentary, The Narcotic Farm, and she often speaks about the relevance of this project to current drug treatment.

Campbell’s scholarly history of the formative science conducted by the laboratory at The Narcotic Farm, which was called the Addiction Research Center and is now the intramural research program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is titled Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (University of Michigan Press, 2007).

Opioid Crisis

Harm Reduction

Opioid Overdose

History of Science & Medicine

Gender & Addiction

Legal and Illegal Drugs

Drug Treatment

Opioid Addiction & Recovery

Substance Abuse Disorder & Addiction

COVID-19

Faculty Profile Page

The ‘good criminals’ who help treat opioid addicts

Why are we still vilifying women for their drug use?

Naloxone

Why Drug Overdoses Have Gone Up During the Pandemic

Local professor addresses the pandemic’s impact on the opioid epidemic

One woman’s mission to make sure everyone carries Narcan — including drug dealers

Why Everyone Should Learn How To Administer Naloxone

Medical Monday

Denaturalizing Excess Overdose Deaths

Science Historian Examines How an Anti-Overdose Medication Helped Revolutionize America's View of Drug Addiction

America's Opioid Epidemic

Treating America’s Opioid Addiction

America On Opioids: The Many Faces Of The Country’s Addiction Crisis

Americans Have Been Addicted to Prescription Opiates Forever

Fellow, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS)

FRIAS Senior Fellowship and Marie Curie Co-Fund Fellow of the European Union, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS)

Protecting Children Online: The Construction of Deviance in Youth Internet Safety Discourses

Career Campaign Award

The Social Organization of a Public Science: Mapping the Changing Topography of Substance Abuse Research

why-history-matters-otc-naloxone-and-the-politics-of-overdose

Professor and Graduate Program Director, Science and Technology Studies (STS)

Overdose reversal drug to be sold over-the-counter following recent FDA approval Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved NARCAN® to be sold over the counter. NARCAN® is used to prevent opioid overdose deaths. Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor and graduate program director in Science and Technology Studies, comments on the significance of this development below. Campbell’s research focuses on science, technology, and medicine as it relates to drugs, drug policy, and the social significance of legal and illegal drugs, with a recent focus on opioid overdose. She studies those who govern and use drugs, produce scientific knowledge about them, and seek to treat drug problems. In March 2023, the FDA approved NARCAN® (naloxone nasal spray made by Emergent BioSolutions Inc.) to be sold over-the-counter (OTC). Why would a drug synthesized in 1960, approved by the FDA for opioid overdose reversal in 1971, and still used every day in operating rooms and emergency medicine become the center of a projected billion dollar consumer market by 2027? 

For the past 40 years, there has been an exponential rise in U.S. opioid overdose deaths of 9% every year. We are still on that trajectory. Twenty years into this ongoing increase in overdose deaths, the naloxone activists, researchers, and advocates who are the protagonists of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT 2020) by Rensselaer historian Nancy D. Campbell, noticed their friends dying and decided to do something about it. They created overdose prevention education and struggled to liberate naloxone and get it into the hands of those who need it most. In the late 1990s, a harm reduction social movement formed to liberate naloxone from the exclusive control of medicine and distribute it through community-based programs that saw naloxone as a public good.

   Harm reduction advocates worked with local sheriffs’ departments and other first responders to get them to start carrying naloxone. They got the CDC to start tracking ODs. They worked to get state legislatures to change naloxone access laws and Good Samaritan laws to allow bystanders to intervene. To prevent opioid overdose deaths, they got friends and family involved in harm reduction efforts. Public Health Departments got onboard in areas where public funds are spent on harm reduction and overdose prevention. 

Naloxone started its career as an injectable solution. EMTs innovated an intranasal method in the early 2000s and a nasal spray product was FDA-approved in 2015. Two years later, FDA took the unusual step of calling on pharmaceutical companies for proposals for OTC naloxone and conducting some of the necessary studies at FDA expense. This process led to the March 2023 approval of nasal spray NARCAN®. What will be the fate of street distribution in the public interest when OTC naloxone appears on drugstore shelves? We haven’t heard what its shelf price will be. Will those who need it most be able to afford it? Will the broader public become more educated about overdose prevention?  

Naloxone is not enough to reverse the opioid overdose death curve. I am hoping that OTC naloxone — in conjunction with other public health overdose prevention measures — is enough to crest the wave. But it will take all of us together to address 40 years of social, political, and economic forces that have driven opioid overdose death rates to socially unacceptable levels. 

Campbell is available to speak with media - simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today. 

Why History Matters: OTC Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose

what-can-a-forgotten-piece-of-our-opioid-addiction-and-treatment-history-teach-us

As the nation struggles with the third wave of a continuing opioid epidemic, a newly republished book co-authored by Nancy Campbell, the head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, offers insight into present-day drug addiction and treatment by exploring a complex chapter from the nation’s past.

Written with JP Olsen and Luke Walden, The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts details the history of the United States Narcotic Farm, a federal institution that opened in 1935 outside of Lexington, Kentucky. Jointly operated from 1935 to 1975 by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Narcotic Farm was a combination prison, hospital, working farm, rehabilitation center, and research laboratory.

“All of our scientific knowledge about human opioid addiction comes from that time, comes from that place,” said Campbell, a leading figure in the social history of drugs, drug policy, and harm reduction, on an episode of the Landmark Recovery Radio podcast.

The facility, which was also the subject of a 2009 documentary featuring Campbell, has a complicated legacy. It revolutionized treatment methods commonly accepted today, such as using methadone to medically manage heroin detox and the development of drugs like naloxone and buprenorphine. But it fell under a cloud of suspicion in 1975, when Congress learned that researchers had recruited patients as test subjects for CIA-funded LSD experiments as part of the notorious MK-Ultra project.

“With the ongoing opioid epidemic worsening this past year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lessons learned in this book continue to be relevant today,” Campbell said.

Campbell is also the author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice and Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research, as well as the co-author of Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World. Her most recent book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, was published in 2020.

“Nobody should die of overdose. A high overdose death rate signals that we have not cared for the people who have been hurt most by the war on drugs, first pursued by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954,” Campbell said in a recent “Academic Minute” segment.

Campbell is available to discuss a wide range of topics relating to drug policy and history, including the Narcotic Farm.



What Can A Forgotten Piece of Our Opioid Addiction and Treatment History Teach Us?

can-understanding-the-history-of-drug-addiction-help-address-the-opioid-epidemic-

 According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than 130 people die every day after overdosing on opioids. Lives have been lost, families shattered, and billions spent as experts, elected leaders, health care professionals, and law enforcement officials try to address the country's opioid epidemic.  A professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute can help shed light on the forces at work in this crisis and its history.

Professor Nancy Campbell is an expert is in the history of science, technology, and medicine as it relates to drug policy and the social significance of drugs. She is a professor and head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  "We found her to be one of the most knowledgeable people on the history of opioids and how that history fits into the context of today’s problem," reporters for CBS 6 News in Albany wrote of Campbell. In a recent interview with the station, Campbell discussed her extensive research on the history of drug addiction, as well as her approach to educating students about it. “I actually want my students to go out of the class, knowing more about where our current opioid epidemic came from, the endemic that it built upon and also knowing more about drug markets and the social aspects,” Campbell said.   August 15 – CBS 6 News Are you a reporter covering the opioid crisis and need to know what’s being done and what more needs to be done? Let our experts help with your questions. Campbell is available to speak to media regarding the opioid crisis and the history of drug addiction – simply click on her icon to arrange an interview.


   

Can Understanding the History of Drug Addiction Help Address the Opioid Epidemic? 

Use of naloxone to combat the opioid overdose epidemic explored in new book by professor and head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose by Nancy Campbell

The Narcotic Farm

Why are low urban and low income communities of color the focus of so much law enforcement activity when blacks and whites in the U.S. use drugs at exactly the same rate?  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Nancy Campbell asks whether there is a better way to deal with drug use than criminalization.

Drug Policy: Unanswered Questions

Professor Nancy Campbell is a Professor and the Department Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Her research focuses on technology as related to healthcare, with recent work on the social significance of legal and illegal drugs to those who govern and use them, produce scientific knowledge about them, and seek to treat drug problems.

Making addiction a brain disease: A social history of addiction neuroscience with Nancy Campbell

Challenging Punishment: Drug Ethonographies & Social Science during the War on Drugs: Promise & Perils 
Location: Low Library, Columbia University
October 4, 2013 11 AM Panel

Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences

Ric Curtis, Anthropology, John Jay College

Angela Garcia, Anthropology, Stanford University

Keesha Middlemass, Political Science, Trinity University

Carla Shedd, Sociology and African American Studies, Columbia University (moderator)

Challenging Punishment: Drug Ethonographies &amp; Social Science

Opioid overdoses have been steadily climbing since the 1990s, and it's only getting worse during the pandemic with addiction sufferers further isolated from their social networks, and legal supply chains interrupted. Dr. Nancy Campbell, Professor and Head of Science and Technology Services at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, speaks about the history of the opioid epidemic, the effects of the "War on Drugs" on opioid use and overdoses, harm reduction efforts such as the drug Naloxone, and efforts to create non-addictive painkiller drugs.

Learn more about Nancy Campbell's expertise and media appearances here:
https://expertfile.com/experts/nancy.campbell

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Dr. Nancy Campbell on the Pandemic and the Opioid Crisis in the United States

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