And not a story that would be about do the drugs work, for example, to cure depression are ease anxiety. There were people who knew more than i and a lively debate. I was more interested in how people use these drugs to tell stories about what it means to be human. New things were available that seems to provide new insight into over like. And how did that change the way that we talked about what we were like, what humans need about what humans owe each other, the best way to take care of ourselves, what the goals of life are to be and all these other major philosophical social political questions. I started with the prozac phenomenon. And although was described a very abstract terms as being a treatment for depression in practical terms of American Culture this was the kind of illness that have been associated with white middleclass or one people who had access to doctors who are encouraged to think that supposed to be happy and i was illness. And specifically for women who have been prescribed these types of medications at twice the rate of men throughout the whole time, not just prozac. And so this is both majority of people who used it and also it became linked in these popular imaginations, the controversies about the drug were about why middleclass life in the way that a different set of drugs, socalled street drugs, they were associated, even though they use was not necessarily concentrated in central cities and racialized minorities that is where if you agree to popular debate about the drugs are what they say about our society they would be linked to those populations cant drugs like prozac and others were associated with the middleclass life, suburban, households and the kind of dramas the people talked about were also a of talking about what was going on with that particular group of people in america. Since world war ii and to try to understand both the origins of this phenomenon and what its earlier chapters it look like and what that might tell us about what we are experiencing now. And i discovered for the one thing as i said before, that it is not new, theyre have been generations of new drugs that are claims to be these technological wonders that teach us about our consciousness and ourselves, that they had been massively, widely used well before the prozac error or the modern era use of psychoactive medications, talkingmedications, talking about sedatives, stimulants, narcotics that have been very widely used since the mid19th century at least. Least. Why did so many people want to take these drugs . And this, i mean,this, i mean, i think there is a couple of different ways to add to that question. All the people who try to answer that question over time why so many how want to take tranquilizers and they go back and forth over this question, what was causing all of these problems among american housewives and you would find one set of people like doctors at this time, medical textbooks, advertisers of the drugs, there was a range between thinking it was just funny, theyre kind of annoying, board, andannoying, board, and so they went and talked to the dr. You gave him this drug to just kind of get them out of your hair. From that to a general deeply sexist belief that women were just inherently ill and every stage of their life was a new risk for them that they were vulnerable and that most of the problems came from being sick in the head, they might come in complain about a wide range of things and the dr. Would think its just females in their had troubles. When it becomes clear that tranquilizers can become addictive, women and allies who are who see mass tranquilizers use as a way to advertise the problems of women who are constrained into the home, they say addiction has got legs. People like to talk about addiction. I like to think about addiction,addiction, and stories about addicted women are especially sexy for the media. If we tell the story is here are these women who are unhappy in their roles and doctors addicted to drugs, that is a story that will get why play and happens in the 70s. Here is a panic overvalue him addiction. Not the kind of places that are usually reporting on feminist critiques of household arrangements, but they reported on the story. When prozac comes one of the reasons it is so successful is that all of the various things they say prozac can do are designed to answer one of the feminist criticisms of the tranquilizers. Tranquilizers are supposed to sedate you and make it okay. Prozac will lift you up, give you more spunk, allow spock, allow you to push back. Valium is addictive. Prozac is not addictive. Valium leaves you not doing much. Prozac will give you the energy to go and work in the office and then come home and do the things that you need to do at home. That debate about prozac looks different because there were some people who are saying, well, prozac shows that women have made all of these advances and that they are no longer being handed the sedatives whereas others were saying you know you still cant fix biases in the workplace. This was a time when after decades of depression more there was a push a lot of different corners to try to restore men talk was considered to be the proper rank traditional role an important people at work. No one comes as tranquilizer there are a lot of men. And when it gets noticed that a lot of men attract different checking a tranquilizer. There was a minor panic over it. Americans are getting soft. And then develop athey develop a whole new explanation for why men are taking the drug. One layer of skin away with the big club that is always ready. But in modernbut in modern society you dont have a club, there is no jaguar. The things that make you anxious are more abstract, nuclear missiles. That will never go away. Away. Away. These men you are so strong, primitive, vital, the fact that they need to take a tranquilizer to bring them down to Something Like normal shows they are strong, not week. And soand so that in itself is an argument about what it means to be human. Itit means that they are cavemen sitting right in front brains, that is a theory about the mayans that came out of this complex interactions between the cultural pressures on men, the economic pressures on advertisers command this attempts to address this phenomenon of men taking more tranquilizers. Medical advertisingtranquilizers. Medical advertising ironically was less regulated in some ways an advertising of other goods because medical advertising was restricted to physicians,physicians, and physicians are supposed to know more than federal regulators. Was a federal regulator trying to tell somebody . You cant fool a dr. There was widely way and constraints on what you could say in a medical advertisement, even the requirement they tell the truth does not become a requirement untila requirement until 1962. It is clear and always has been that to some degree having a set ofa set of drugs that are understood as relatively safe, that make people feel good, that is just something that has been in the doctors tool bag since the late 19th century and especially for the relatively affluent white patients, giving them these types of drugs has been an enormous part of medical practice for 120 years. He have gone back and reconstructed the percentages of what is in prescriptions, late 19th century 25 of all prescriptions of morphine in it. Moved up to 30 . Codeine. Somewhere between 30 to. Codeine. Somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of prescriptions had either a sedative like barbiturate or stimulant like amphetamine, and it goes on and on like this. That part ofthat part of medical practice, we tend to discover it every few years as new. Doctors are prescribing these drugs as if it were knew, but it has been pretty consistent. A lot of these medications are almost literally the same substance in the classic example is amphetamine, which is the ingredient in the hype attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, those medications are amphetamine at the same time that there is a war against to use phentermine, they are channeling a lot of amphetamine to College Students which you can imagine 20 years we might say, wonder if that was a good idea, but at the moment it makes sense because of the different ways we think about pharmaceutical drug use. And thats where prozac comes in. And the whole slew of new drugs come out that are claimed to be content to overcome those problems to the magic of technology. A drug that have been around for very long time, hydrocodone,time, hydrocodone, but new Technology Made it so that it can release medication slowly over time which made it resistant to being abused of course, everyone knows now he just crush up the pill and snort or find ways to inject. In a lot of cases what you see is another chapter in that, oh, we invented a drug that takes addict your past problems, and this one really is magic. What is interesting about that is it claims the transformation. Thats a consumer culture promise. It is less something that in the long span of medicine has been associated with from doctor promises you. And so it made the medical enterprise fit in knew ways with the consumer culture to now make these promises. If you can cure tuberculosis with the pill maybe you can take a pill and it will make you a brighter, funnier, smarter person and it will be a cost with the weather was with cocaine. So that in some ways distinctively american desire for magic is this thing going. We are now living in the aftermath of one of those moments with the epidemic of Prescription Drug abuse. That came along with what was in some ways a really beneficial decision there is a kind of human suffering that we have been so scared of narcotics and you take teeseven to become something very different than it started out as. Now, a literarynow, a literary tour of buffalo, new york call with the help of our local cable partner. We start our trip with the collectionthat collection of letters written by African American women to the 1st lady. Please no that you are not alone. You are thoughti thought of and pray for daily by the millions you inspire. Think of your sister, your sistersister, your sister friend, your favorite cousin, your mother, me. We are the same. Well, the book is a compilation of a hundred letters that were written to Michelle Obama from africanamerican and african , caribbean women and 2,009, and the letters were written to express encouragement and support for michelle at the time. It was after the election. It had been a grueling grueling election, as you may no, very difficult for misses obama and the pres. , but also very, very exciting and that we had our 1st africanamerican president and the 1st africanamerican first lady. So we wanted women to express there feelings about this historic event, wanted them to express their encouragement we reach out to people that no one had reached out to the floor. For the most part we have got responses from and who didnt. And the conversations that we had the signs we got from people, pecan pie. It was very attractive. A place in the caribbean or whether it was some place in new york city or california. And we thought that was quite extraordinary. Heartfelt letters that would say to the 1st lady we had an advantage. Many people didnt know about it and we dug into the history of buffalo and other places and developed a major regional webbased historical document we utilize up 1st. We were at an advantage. People were in europe saying i called, some ethiopian, is this true. So we really had quite a fantastic time. Because of the significance, again, the historic significance of having the 1st africanamerican woman and the 1st africanamerican man become president. And based on that we wanted to really document what africanamerican women felt, given during the campaign michelle was attacked a number of times. One ofone of the things that set us off was the cover of the new yorker magazine. She was, you know, just in an afro and had a weapon on her and looked very militant , hostile, angry, many of the stereotypes that are used to characterize africanamerican women. And at the same time there was a wonderful woman whose name escapes me now to put together a Major International group of black women who were expatriates and they lived all over europe and it was a daily process of speaking with her , talking with her, and there was a lot of going back and forth we knew was that these women, no matter where they live, they were rooting for Michelle Obama and do it and supported us. So it was a daily conversation. We are are ourselves as individuals and understanding what peoples concerns were, no matter where they were, from the president s hometown or someplace in malawi command really was quite extraordinary to see that and to know how important it was with these women and the choice to decide whether someone would be in or not had a lot to do with how was written, you know, it really gave a different flavor somewhere so powerful that it left us speechless. It was a letter like that from a faculty member at rochester, new york who wrote this poem, historic palm which just reduced us to tears, and that was a letter, the publisher did not believe us. But then they said, well, do you have any at all that you can share . You know, we have 100 that we can share. They could not believe it. He had to take a look at this one take a look at this one letter here. And the response was wild. And not only was it a wide range, when you looked beneath the surface, we were able to discover the kind of cultural capitol that we have available to us that we do not think about and it is a cultural capitol that is the ordinary man on the street that no one talks about. In the certainly belonging to the association for the city of africanamerican life and history and a lot of other allblack associations and what have you in the ivy league or academic level, that is one thing, but this was different, the ordinary person who really struck a notea note with us. You know, the whole issue of racial solidarity, the whole issue of, you know, the non resolution of issues of repatriation or reconciliation in the south. We both of letters as well. Again, you know, my letter is based upon an issue of family history, association with my father who was a photographer, a biracial man born in 1910. I speak a bit about that. I would just like to read a little bit about this time because it is about the time of my dads birthday. What i think ofi think of my father on this day the 90th anniversary of his birth i am Certain Church functions and organizational programs and has contributed to the creation of a visual historic montage of western new yorks africanamerican community. I know that he would be looking at the images of you , barack melia, and sasha and composing in his minds eye is toward picture that he was going to stop if he had the opportunity. So we got in touch with her. So when the pres. Gives his 1st speech before the congress who is on the 2nd row, ms. Miss mary. You know, we never got anywhere close. The president greets her, how are you. Any michelle decided. So why didnt we get that close . They said send me the book. Finally got down to the line. The 1st lady can promote this. Im quite disappointed that we were not able to get any knowledge the unique nature of this volume of letters and the early timing this coming out on a very heels of the election it was very disappointing. I dont know why we would not have received some attention from the white house. Somebody decided that it was just commit you to have recognized as showing too much appreciation for the work of africanamerican women and at just wasnt going to go over too well. It appears that we were. Whatwere. What would you like for people to take away after reading your book . I would like for people to look at this letter, and extraordinary document, a document that represents a period of extreme historic importance and response i africanamerican women to that historic event. Not only signaling support and encouragement for the 1st lady but also signals for africanamerican women an issue that we are still dealing with to this day, how we are seeing the image of africanamerican women, how we are portrayed and how we respond to that portrayal was stereotypes that are still out there in the media , you know, an individuals minds, etc. You are watching book tv on cspan2. The name of the book is against the grain. The correct spelling of my last name. That led me to this neighborhood where my family lived for about a hundred years. And i thought that my family and friends would be interested in kind of learning about what life was like in the community. They have roots in the 1st word and thousands more before he is the love the history. At the peak of 70 irish. 70 percent irish. There were enough germans, polls, italians, and hungarians to make life interesting. 1830s you have people settling in the area right after the opening of the erie canal. 1842, he invents a Steam PoweredGrain Elevator and you have more and more of them that open up into this area. As millions of irish are emigrating and coming to the us, many are settling in buffalo and getting unskilled jobs along the waterfront, skipping grain in the halls of ships, working in the elevators, milling flour on railroads, building ships, so there were numerous jobs. The 1st word history is rich, as i mentioned. You have the Grain Elevator in 1842 which revolutionized that shipment of grain. Then just two years later in 1844 parts of the neighborhood were devastated by what is called the linksys which is basically a lake title wave that came and had the unsuspecting residents of this committee. Seventyeight people unfortunately were drowned. It was not the last devastating dash dash natural event to happen to this neighborhood, but in terms of death it was tht whenever. It would take maybe one relative to find out about these plentiful jobs along the waterfront working in the Grain Elevators were in the mills and word would go back to ireland. You want to come to buffalo. You are not going to become rich but you would have steady employment. They came to the neighborhood called the 1st word. It has its name because when buffalo 1st was created in 1832 is a city it was decided in the five political wards. In this area has always been the 1st word. This was important irish immigrants because where they came from and not have a lot of control over their lives. Now by controlling award they had a say in their City Government and also most importantly were able to bring Civil Service jobs back to the community. This community was a very, very tightknit community, one of the reasons they use the term against the grain, and independent spirit, they take care of themselves. Because they were cut off from the rest of the city, physical geography issues such as canals, railroads, Grain