logo for Points, which features a needle in place of the T

short & insightful writing about a long and complex history

Joint Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy

ttravis | January 20, 2011

Points (n.)

1. marks of punctuation. 2. something that has position but not extension, as the intersection of two lines. 3. salient features of a story, epigram, joke, etc.:  he hit the high points. 4. (slang; U.S.) needles for intravenous drug use.

Navigating Cannabis Use in Legal and Illegal Contexts Across Continents: An Interview

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As part of our Pharmaceutical Inequalities series, Ejura Salihu interviews a 25-year-old Nigerian man, who now lives in the United States and uses cannabis, to understand his experiences of navigating the legal considerations of using cannabis in different geographical contexts.

A Morphia industry in India?: Entwined interests of colonial science, medicine and commerce.

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In 1829, at a meeting of the Westminster Medical Society, a group of physicians wondered why the ‘East India Opium’ was being overlooked in favour of the opium from Turkey, particularly when the efficacy and purity of the former and the quantity of morphia that it yielded had been extremely positive from the results of its analysis by medical institutions and practitioners. Opium from Smyrna (present day Izmir, Western Turkey) and Constantinople (present day Istanbul), dominated the world market for raw opium then, and there was much concern among a section of intellectuals on the need to end Britain’s dependency on Turkish opium.

As European medical botanists and scientists set about conducting various experiments on the East India Opium, in India the manufacture and disposal of opium alkaloids had been engaging the attention of both the Board of Revenue and the Government. Ever since the decline of the opium trade with China, the shortage of supplies of cinchona and the growing demand of alkaloids in the United Kingdom had been much discussed by British officials. Faced with the imminent extinction of the opium trade with China, the British government was also frantically looking for possibilities to expand the government opium monopoly over excise opium and exploring the manufacture of medicinal preparations of opium. The loss of trade with China had made the issue of alkaloids a ‘question of great practical importance.’ Although it appeared that the British Government seemed to accept the prospective loss with admirable calm, and the opium system in India was adapting to the changing conditions, the opium establishment in Ghazipur was gradually being prepped up for the manufacture of high-grade medicinal opium.

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The State of Drug Checking in the United Kingdom

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A reagent drug testing kit

In a context where drug overdose deaths and other drug-related harms are on the rise, epidemiological evidence-backed harm reduction services including drug checking, drug consumption rooms, and needle exchanges are a crucial priority. In this post, Contributing Editor Juliet Flam-Ross describes the state of drug checking services in the UK.

Paging Dr. Google: Does Better Data = Better Health?

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In 2011, information scientist Larry Smarr described his 10-year effort to “increasingly quantify my body.”

Smarr brings serious skills to the task. Based for many years at UC-San Diego, he’s a long-time top-tier performer in deep realms of computer science.  

Smarr has had periodic MRIs, regular blood work, and colonoscopies far more often than the national average. He has tallied what he eats and drinks and the calories he has burned. He has had his DNA sequenced. He has produced, and shown to his colleagues, 3-D images of his innards.

It paid off when he figured out that he had Crohn’s disease, a challenging gastrointestinal condition, before his doctors did.

Smarr clearly has a passion for self-development and access to plenty of tools for the job.

But his story, and the stories of thousands of self-trackers, raise challenging questions.

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Points Interview: the History of Elemental Analysis in Mexico with Mariana Reynoso and Gabriel Gonzalez-Bravo

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Today’s post features an interview with Mariana Reynoso, a Mexico-based pharmaceutical historian and Gabriel Gonzalez-Bravo, a Mexico-based chemistry researcher. These scholars focus on the history of chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences in Mexico. Mariana and Gabriel recently authored ‘Johann Wilhelm Schaffner, Leopoldo Rio de la Loza, and elemental analysis in Mexico’ in the recently-published issue of the History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. Find out more about their backgrounds, article and future research plans in this interview.

Roundtable: Confronting the Drug War: Drug User-Oriented Harm Reduction and Drug Policy

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Yale’s SU x COVID Data Collaborative’s Policy Working Group is hosting activists who use drugs and harm reduction researchers to discuss drug policy reformation, structural inequities in drug treatment and harm reduction systems, deconstruction of the disease model of addiction, and alternate ways to think about drug use in a multi-part series, Confronting the Drug War: Drug-User Oriented Harm Reduction and Drug Policy.

This month, the collaborative invites you to join Nancy Campbell, Sterling Johnson, Anne Kveim Lie, and Nicole Luongo as they deconstruct the brain disease model of addiction utilizing a historical context to discuss the impacts this model has had on the experiences of people who use drugs. This session will include time for a Q&A with our roundtable discussants, moderated by Helena Hansen. To register for the event, held May 23rd at noon Central time, please use the following link: https://bit.ly/_CTDW.  

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From the Streets to the Kitchen: The Changing Face of Cannabis in the Media

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Figure 1: An ad for a film titled “Marihuana.” (National Library of Medicine)

The representation of cannabis (also known as marijuana, marihuana, pot, or weed) in the media has evolved over time. In the past, media coverage of cannabis primarily focused on its potential harms and association with criminal activity, pervasion, and addiction. From 1980 to the early 1990s, news stories about drug busts and the dangers of smoking cannabis dominated headlines, while print media, movies, and TV shows depicted cannabis users as dangerous. In popular culture, smoking cannabis was considered a forbidden ‘rite of passage’ spoken about in whispers. This type of coverage was the norm for several years and contributed to the low prevalence of cannabis use and the stigma and criminalization of cannabis users (as shown in Figure 1).

However, with the rise of medical marijuana legalization in the early 2010s, the media shifted its narrative. Journalists started reporting on the potential benefits of cannabis for treating various medical conditions, such as chronic pain, anxiety, and epilepsy. News stories featuring medical cannabis patients and their stories became common, and documentaries exploring the science behind cannabis and its medicinal properties gained popularity.

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French Connections: London-Paris linkages in interwar drug culture

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In the early hours of the morning of 1st July 1937, Gerald Edward Mary O’Brien was detained by police officers on the ferry returning from Dieppe. He had crossed the channel with six grammes of high-quality heroin concealed about his person. It was the last of what had been a regular series of trips to Paris from his home in London, and he had sourced the heroin from two young Americans living in a hotel in the Pigalle, which was the entertainment and ‘vice’ district of the French capital.[1]  The transaction was a small part of a broader global network overseen by Corsican and Sicilian organised crime groups; the poppies were grown on the Anatolian plains of Turkey, the opium shipped to Marseilles and converted to heroin in illicit French laboratories before arriving in Paris and being taken on to North America and around the world – the early, rudimentary beginnings of the famous ‘French connection’ that would take heroin to the mean streets of North America in the postwar years. The Paris route to London was a minor facet of an increasingly global trade.

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