The Age of Intervention: Addiction, Culture, and Narrative During the War on Drugs

While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a compelling heuristic for analyzing popular and literary texts as reflective of the changing shape of addiction and recovery narratives over the last half century. Johnson, by defining addiction, not intoxication, as a break with reality, argued that confronting addicts with narratives of the potential crises could convince them to seek treatment before they hit bottom. Johnson’s version of “reality therapy” thus presented threatened or simulated crises, rather than real ones. Examining presidential rhetoric and popular culture representations of addiction—in horror movies, “very special episodes,” and reality television—this dissertation identifies features of the postmodern Intervention and recovery narrative in fiction by William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, David Foster Wallace, and Jess Walter. I demonstrate how the Intervention is key to understanding the cultural products of the War on Drugs and its continued salience in American culture

Social evolution theory for microorganisms.

Microorganisms communicate and cooperate to perform a wide range of multicellular behaviours, such as dispersal, nutrient acquisition, biofilm formation and quorum sensing. Microbiologists are rapidly gaining a greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in these behaviours, and the underlying genetic regulation. Such behaviours are also interesting from the perspective of social evolution - why do microorganisms engage in these behaviours given that cooperative individuals can be exploited by selfish cheaters, who gain the benefit of cooperation without paying their share of the cost? There is great potential for interdisciplinary research in this fledgling field of sociomicrobiology, but a limiting factor is the lack of effective communication of social evolution theory to microbiologists. Here, we provide a conceptual overview of the different mechanisms through which cooperative behaviours can be stabilized, emphasizing the aspects most relevant to microorganisms, the novel problems that microorganisms pose and the new insights that can be gained from applying evolutionary theory to microorganisms