It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when a family member tells you they’ve written a book.

You know you’re going to have to read it, and give a reaction, regardless of what you actually think, and that’s a harrowing thought when you don’t know what’s actually sitting on those pages. What if it’s terrible? What if you can’t finish it? What if you disagree? Maybe some people are savvy enough to navigate these questions easily, but as an ultra-opinionated person who tends to talk a lot, people tend to notice if I go quiet. So I am never getting out of giving an opinion.

This is all a way of leading in to the fact that my brother has written a second book, and I want to thank him, truly, profoundly, from the bottom of my heart, for not putting me in a bind with this one. Because I think this book is great. I don’t have to have any awkward discussions with ChatGPT about how to phrase this or anything, I just genuinely loved the book. I’d say it if he wasn’t my brother. It was interesting and got me thinking about the world a little differently, and that’s always been the highest compliment I can give a book. Well done, brother of mine.

So with that out of the way, let’s back up and give you the information I probably should have started with.

What are Drugs For? An Exploration of Stolen Fire is a new book (available Tuesday 9/15) by Timothy McMahan King, who yes, is related to me. This is his second book, after 2019s Addiction Nation, which I also discussed here on the blog.

The book itself takes an interesting approach to the discussion of drugs, one that seems obvious once you start reading but I realized I hadn’t seen before: it takes a step back and tries to look at the big picture of why we have drugs at all and what our relationship is with them as a species. When I said it made me think about the world differently, this was what I meant. I realized that most of our discussions around drugs are extremely reactive: what new drug has hit the market, who is dying of what overdose, what drug should be legal, etc, etc, etc. But this book steps back and asks us to look at the big picture, going back thousands of years. What are drugs for? Why do we have these problems at all? Why do humans get addicted to anything? And how have both drugs and addiction been treated throughout time and history? Or to put it more succinctly…what are drugs for?

Along the way it makes a compelling case that our viewpoints on individual drugs are not static: drugs that are seen as awful today were previously seen as benign and vice versa. The statistician in me loved this part, because of course if you don’t have solid definition of something it’s hard to get a handle on it. With drugs it’s clear we’ve had a tremendously difficult time doing just that. We treat it as a given that a drug like opioids has one categorization (bad) but this book repeatedly points out this has actually fluctuated quite a bit over time. I don’t think his goal here is one of moral relativism, but rather pointing out that early anti-alcohol activists literally were just focused on hard liquor rather than beer, or that opium was introduced as an exotic drug and was considered less concerning than other substances that had been around for longer.

As King builds his case, perhaps one of the most interesting side roads he takes is a deep dive (and deeply researched) in to the idea that there are specific and repeated drug references in the Bible. He makes this case in large part to support the points above, that the history of humanity is full of interesting relationships with drugs, and the Bible-as-historical-document captures that. Whether currently religious or not, I think anyone raised with the Bible will find this part interesting, particularly since the conventional wisdom is that the Bible contains no specific drug references. It is extremely hard to get through the “Bible chapters” in King’s book and to continue to believe this is true.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book and while there wasn’t a lot of science in this one for me to proofread, I did listen to a “rough draft” of the audiobook. That format is available on Tuesday as well if you’re so inclined, and makes a fun listen.

Well done brother, I love it. I learned something. What more could I ask for?