Maia Szalavitz, a prominent neuroscience journalist and progressive drug reform champion who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon and other publications, is the author, among other books, of Undoing Drugs (2021), a stirring history of the harm reduction movement.

A former cocaine and heroin addict, Szalavitz is one of the country’s foremost journalistic critics of the war on Drugs era, and she remains a fierce proponent of non-punitive approaches to addressing addiction. We invited her on to this latest BCB episode to make her case that harm reduction remains the right way to handle the spread of fentanyl addiction, homelessness and open air drug markets in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Szalavitz forcefully argues the War on Drugs never really ended, and that efforts to criminalize drug use have always been shaped more by politics, race, and social control than by science. She argues that American drug laws have historically targeted marginalized groups such as Black Americans, immigrants, and the poor, while legal substances like alcohol and tobacco remained socially accepted despite causing greater harm. She further contends that criminalization has failed by virtually every measurable standard, citing America's simultaneously high incarceration rates and overdose rates.

The earlier part of our discussion focuses on the emergence of the harm reduction movement during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Szalavitz recounts how activists in the Netherlands, Britain, and eventually New York pioneered needle exchange programs to prevent HIV transmission among injection drug users. She argues that these efforts demonstrated that treating drug users with dignity and providing clean syringes dramatically reduced disease transmission without increasing drug use.

Later in our conversation, we press Szalavitz on what we see as the limits of the harm reduction ethos in its present, expansive form, questioning policies common in blue cities like handing out foil and pipes to drug users, and suggesting that the current fentanyl crisis may require stronger interventions than previous waves of heroin use. We point to the enormous suffering created by today's open-air drug scenes and the social harm addiction creates in impacted communities, asking whether there is a place for greater "friction" or limited coercion in public policy.

Szalavitz rejects that premise, maintaining that evidence consistently shows voluntary treatment, housing-first policies, medication-assisted treatment (methadone and buprenorphine), supervised consumption sites, syringe exchanges, and social services outperform coercive approaches. She repeatedly emphasizes that there is little evidence that harm reduction increases drug use, while she contends that substantial evidence shows it keeps people alive long enough to eventually seek treatment.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Maia Szalavitz, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, Balance (2021).

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, St. Martin's Press (2016).

Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories form a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook, Basic Books (2007).

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What just happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and why didn't former reality tv star and social media darling Spencer Pratt live up to the incessant, breathless hype (so sorry for your loss, X)? Now that it’s clear that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass is going to face off in the general election with democratic socialist (and alleged political backstabber?) Nithya Raman, how much trouble is Bass in? What are Raman's strengths and vulnerabilities, and what does she need to do to prevail in November? And will Latino swing decide the outcome of the Bass-Raman establishment vs. insurgent showdown?

Mike Madrid, one of California’s premier political strategists and the author of the definitive book on Latino voters, The Latino Century, joins us to help unpack the soap operatic twists and turns of the LA mayoral contest. If you’re unfamiliar, Mike is a high profile Never Trump Republican who has served as public affairs director for the League of California Cities, co-founded the Lincoln Project and currently is a fellow at the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. He’s one of the rare political consultants who has prominently advised both Ds and Rs, having consulted on Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa’s 2018 California gubernatorial bid.

Regarding LA’s particularly juicy mayor’s race, Mike cuts through the noise with us to dish out the hard truths: as a Trumpy Republican, Pratt’s vibe-centered, harshly doom-and-gloom campaign painting Los Angeles as a hellscape may have wowed rich West-side Angelinos wound up about street disorder and made the hearts of social media influencers go pitter patter, but it was never going to get traction with the city’s core of progressive voters. That said, Mike argues, both Pratt’s and Raman’s relative success is a sign that voter dissatisfaction in the city is high. And the general election contest between Bass and Raman will likely turn into a high octane slugfest, where middle class Latino voters will be the swing bloc who will determine the outcome.

“When you’re in a very strongly Democratic city, a one party town… the questions become less about ideology and more about competence,” Madrid says. “LA is broken. LA is a mess. I love Los Angeles, but it’s broken. LA does not work, and can we say that’s about ideology or not? I don’t think that it is, I think it’s just about competence.“

As we go deeper into the episode, we also get Mike's broader download on why and how both parties have missed the boat when it comes to winning over Latino voters, and why Xavier Becerra was able to come out of nowhere to win the California gubernatorial primary, where he will (very likely) face off against Republican Steve Hilton, which will mean he’s all but assured of being the state’s next governor.

OUTSIDE REFERENCES:

Mike Madrid, The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, Simon & Schuster (2024).

Rogé Karma, “Why Democrats Got the Politics of Immigration So Wrong for So Long,” The Atlantic, Dec. 10. 2024.

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness.

So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native American author and writer Sherman Alexie, to rejoin us on the pod to for a walk down memory lane as we remembered the lost world of the white urban working class. We were inspired to take up the topic by Sherman’s poem, “Ode to Tonya Harding,” in which he uses Harding as a symbol of the young white working class women he grew up around and interacted with in his youth, vibrant and talented women he laments were destined to be excluded from elite cultural spaces because of class divides, style differences and cultural codes.

We key off the poem to spark a wide-ranging conversation about class, race and the sharp cultural shifts within urban America since the days of our youth. Sherman reflects on growing up among poor white communities in rural Eastern Washington as a Native American, describing both solidarity and pervasive dysfunction across racial lines. He argues that poverty creates shared experiences across race, while criticizing modern Democratic Party politics for moving away from class-based concerns and decentering working-class interests.

We wax more than a bit nostalgic for 1970s–1990s working-class culture: restaurant and delivery jobs, service work, heavy-metal parking lots, bowling leagues, mall ice rinks, and the informal cross-racial friendships formed through shared labor, music, and youth culture. We don’t shy away from the racism that was prevalent in that era, but we nonetheless lament how deepening political divides, the rise of social media, and an increasingly insular elite culture have weakened those shared spaces and killed the social spontaneity and the capacity for joy that characterized youth culture when we were young.

“When I was delivering pizzas, it was a bunch of poor white kids. I was the only person of color, I was the only person with more melanin than average, and race wasn’t a part of it,” Alexie recalls. “Inside the place we were all working, we all smelled like pepperoni, we all hated the boss, we all had a crush on that one young woman who had no interest in any of us…”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Sherman Alexie, "Ode to Tonya Harding," April 10. 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Knuckle Sandwich," May 19, 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Billy Elliot," Jan. 24. 2024.

And if you haven't seen it, we highly recommend you watch the short (17 mins) documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," a cult classic.

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