Critical Drug Commodities: Research, Pedagogy, Action
The CTCRE Critical Drug Commodities: Research, Pedagogy, Action Speaker Series brings together scholars and advocates to explore how social, political, and historical contexts shape research on opioids, commercial tobacco, psychedelics, and cannabis. Moving beyond clinical measures alone, the series examines how colonialism, racial capitalism, and gender performativity influence what we know about drugs and how that knowledge is produced. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, it highlights research and care practices grounded in place-based knowledge, Indigenous epistemologies, and queer and trans perspectives, with a focus on ethical and anticolonial futures.
The series builds on its inaugural 2025 program, which featured internationally recognized scholars and activists and was sponsored by the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, Smoking Cessation Leadership Center, Library and Special Collections, LGBTQ Resource Center, and San Francisco State University’s Science, Technology, and Society Hub.
2026–2027 Speaker Lineup Coming Soon
2025 Program:
- Kochina Rude (The Narcan Queen), “Queering Naloxone and Overdose Prevention in San Francisco Nightlife”
- Kaitlin Reed (Cal Poly, Humboldt), “Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California”
- Rama Ali Kased (San Francisco State University), “San Francisco as a Laboratory: Insider Researchers and the Production of Drug Policy and Praxis”
- [Field Visit] Angel Island, Opium, and Exclusion: The Entangled Histories of Drug and Immigration Policy