Draft:Richard DeGrandpre

---

Richard DeGrandpre (born 1964) is an American psychologist, writer, ceramicist, and a horticulturalist who lives in New Zealand.

Biography and Education

DeGrandpre was born in Cutbank, Montana, and raised in Helena. He attended the University of Montana for his B.S. in psychology (1987), where he also received a commission as an officer in the US Army Reserves. He earned a M.S. in experimental psychology from Auburn University (1989), then a Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Vermont (1992). His dissertation investigated environmental factors in drug taking and established the first human experimental demonstration of a Giffen good.

After earning his doctorate, he completed a post-doc as a fellow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He went on teach before becoming an independent scholar, authoring papers and books in the social sciences, sciences, and the humanities. He was also a senior editor for three years at Adbusters magazine in Vancouver, BC. While at Adbusters, he wrote extensively there, and elsewhere, on the overreach of the pharmaceutical industry with regards to psychiatric drugs.

Early Career

DeGrandpre was a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology at the College of Charleston from 1995-1996 before teaching as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at St. Michael's College in Vermont (1996-1999). During this period he wrote several essays, magazine pieces, and opinion editorials. One essay was "A science of meaning," which outlined a behavioral mechanism underlying meaning making, published in the American Psychologist. Another essay was "Drugs: In the care of the self," which was published with Ed White in the interdisciplinary journal Common Knowledge.

DeGrandpre wrote the first of three nonfiction books during this time, each of which focused on the foucauldian notion of "technologies of the self," Ritalin Nation. The book, which also appeared in German, presented an early critique of the mass acceptance of using psychiatric drugs for everyday pediatric problems. Tearing down the myth of hyperactivity as a medical disorder, DeGrandpre replaced it with a theory of sensory adaptation and addiction that, culture wide, has led to a transformation of human consciousness. A critic for the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp, applied DeGrandpre's cultural critique to a show at the Museum of Modern Art (Sept. 19, 1999), writing:

If the show were a story, the headline might read, Housing Starts on the Rise in Ritalin Nation. The Un-Private House is a good illustration of what Richard J. DeGrandpre, the author of Ritalin Nation, calls rapid-fire culture, a civilization hooked on constant sensory stimulation.

The two books that followed Ritalin Nation were Digitopia and The Cult of Pharmacology. The first extended DeGrandpre's critique of rapid-fire culture to the emerging digital age. The book was published as part of an experimental and ultimately unsuccessful series of ebooks by Random House.

The final of the three books was The Cult of Pharmacology, exploring "how America became the world's most troubled drug culture" -- the subtitle of the book. The book explores the transformation of America's relationship with psychoactive drugs from a benign one to one of confusion and chaos. The book delves into the widespread belief that drugs are inherently good or bad, which DeGrandpre calls "pharmacologism," and how this belief has influenced drug regulation and perception. He also highlights the double standard in drug policy, where some drugs are heavily regulated while others, like legal drugs, including alcohol, are not.

Challenging the notion that drugs have a fixed, inherent nature by emphasizing the role of social context in shaping drug meaning and effects (pharmacologicalism), DeGrandpre explores the idea that culturally-constructed beliefs about drugs are often as powerful in shaping drug outcomes as the drugs themselves. Applied to addiction, DeGrandpre turns to the work by the American sociologist Alfred R. Lindesmith. Lindesmith showed for example that regular users of opiates often fail to become habitual addicts. "The advantage of attributing the origin of addiction, not to a single event, but to a series of events, [implies] that addiction is established in a learning or "ecological" process extending over a period of time."

For DeGrandpre and Lindesmith both, this process of meaning-making unfolds in a cultural context, the power of which is greatly underestimated, both in the sciences and the wider culture. DeGrandpre writes in The Cult of Pharmacology,

...the opiate user must first experience withdrawal (a physical phenomenon), he or she must develop a concern over the withdrawal experience as such (a cognitive phenomenon), and then he or she must engage in drug use, taking opiates repeatedly to eliminate or avoid opiate withdrawal (a behavioral phenomenon). A breakdown in any part of this bio-psycho-social circuit can keep a pattern of dependent opiate use from emerging.

Notable reviewers of DeGrandpre's books include Herbert Muschamp, David Courtwright, Peter Kramer, and Malcolm Gladwell.

Later Career

After leaving Vancouver, DeGrandpre immigrated to New Zealand, where he now lives.

After taking up glass blowing while living in Vancouver, DeGrandpre shifted to ceramics, working under the tutelage of Renton Murray. His work is sold under the name, MonsterPots. He also began to cultivate and sell bonsai trees and other potted plants, which were sold in a boutique plantshop he designed called Monstera.

During the extended lockdowns in Auckland during Covid, DeGrandpre returned to writing. This began with a blog on growing houseplants, called Dirt Wise. He also returned to creative writing on Substack, crafting short stories and novels, which remain under development.