Month: December 2011

The Points Interview: Barron Lerner

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As Points prepares to ring in the new year, what better way than by discussing the history of drunk driving?  The nineteenth Points Interview is the last for 2011–here’s to a similarly engaging set of interviews for 2012–and features Barron Lerner, author of the recently published One For the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).  Barron Lerner is currently the Angelica Berrie-Gold Foundation associate professor of Medicine and Public Health at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Mailman School of Public Health.  We’re delighted to get his thoughts on his latest work.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

My book is a history of drunk driving in the United States and the efforts to control it.  It Cover of the One for the Roadbegins in the early twentieth century, when the introduction of automobiles led to the first crashes and deaths.  Appropriately, people were appalled and the first laws were
passed.  But with the “failure” of Prohibition after 1933, attention shifted from the perils of alcohol to the disease of alcoholism.  In this climate, drunk driving laws were weak and poorly enforced.  Astoundingly, the legal limit for a DWI conviction in this country was
0.15% for decades, roughly the equivalent of 6-9 drinks on an empty stomach.  All of the benefit of the doubt went to the drunk drivers, not their victims.  Finally, in the 1960s, the U.S. government got involved in drunk driving control, followed by the citizen-activists
of RID (Remove Intoxicated Drivers) and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) in the 1980s.  For the first time, drunk driving was truly stigmatized, rather than being seen as an acceptable rite of passage for young men.  The last portions of the book examine both the
successes of the anti-drunk driving movement and the continued barriers to eliminating intoxicated driving in this country.  These barriers include the lobbying efforts of the alcohol industry, a libertarian backlash and competition from other public health campaigns including, ironically, distracted driving.

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Cross-Posting: Luís León and the “Cannabis Club”

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Editor’s Note: This is the second cross-posting that Points is proud to feature from the Freq.uenci.es project, a “collaborative genealogy of spirituality” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council’s Working Group on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life.  (Our first cross-posting, on Bill W. and the Big Book, appeared earlier this fall).  Today’s offering is by Luís León, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver; the spectacular lead illustration is by Joseph Mastroianni.

Counted among my pantheon of personal heroes while growing up in California’s East Bay area were Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. I was a strange kid. I still sometimes mimic Cheech’s purposefully exaggerated Chicano accent, American English with a Spanish rhythm and Aztec intonation, also known as Calo or Mexican American “Spanglish.” It’s a sound distinct to the borderlands experience; the echo of Aztlan: the Chicana/o mythical homeland; a sanctuary; a pipe dream. When I speak like Cheech to my close friend and academic colleague, who I affectionately call Chong, we deploy a linguistic code decipherable sometimes only by us, and perhaps a few other confidantes. Referring to four twenty, I often say “los santos,” or just santos, which translates loosely as “the saints.” We conspire in our devotion to them. Like the Rastafarians, the practice becomes a sacred ritual. For us, praying to the saints, our muertos, is an attempt to connect to the divine; a gestural offering in hopes of elevating our spirits to Elysium; the mythical land of the triumphantly dead, or physically displaced, the heavenly space where the souls of heroes dwell. Aztlan by another name. This, I believe, is how my Chicano hero, Cheech Marin, understands his devotion to los santos.

It’s appropriate that Cheech, a Mexican American, would open the artistic space for the popularization and promotion of marijuana into the soul of American popular culture.

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Counterprogramming Capra: The Points Holiday Viewing List

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Editor’s Note:  Okay: you’ve read Joe Spillane’s thoughts on Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, but maybe even his Points-inspired re-viewing of the film can’t get you excited about ol’ George Bailey and all that guardian angel stuff.  For all those who simply can’t stand any more cinematic Christmas cheer (Acker, Ambler, McClellan, Roizen, Spillane)– or who need their holidays leavened with some drugs and alcohol (Herrera, Long, Travis)– the Points staff offers the following suggestions.

Not-so-Righteous Dopefiend Carmen Sternwood

Caroline Acker:  In The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), the errant ways of Carmen Sternwood (the younger sister of the Lauren Bacall character) drive the plot.  In one scene, she is apparently high on opium, which she’s been given in exchange for posing for pornographic pictures– which are retailed around town by a known “fairy,” Arthur Geiger.   To cement the image of Geiger as decadent and depraved, the photo shoot takes place in his house, which is decorated with Chinese objects; the dopey Carmen is dressed in Chinese-style garb.  The creepy Orientalist narcotics netherworld is juxtaposed throughout the film to the wholesome and alcohol-drenched realm where Bogey and Bacall do their thing.

Chuck Ambler: I’m not an expert on African cinema, but the recent arrest and eventual exoneration (after a “poop watch”) of Nigerian film actor and comedian, Baba Suwe got me thinking about whether drug use and drug trafficking are common plot lines in the hundreds of video films produced each year by Nigeria’s film industry—Nollywood.  I haven’t come up with any yet, but one could turn to Chris Obi Rapu’s classic 1992 hit, Living in Bondage (the film that pretty much created Nollywood) as a metaphor for addiction.  Like many Nollywood films, this one features lots of drinking in up-scale homes and commercial bars and cocktail lounges, but the plot turns in this movie (as in many Nigerian films) on a young man ensnared by witchcraft– and ultimately saved by Christian faith.  Many Nollywood films are available on line.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Do Some Blow

Brian Herrera:  Less Than Zero (Marek Kanievska, 1987).  A college freshman comes home to Los Angeles for Christmas break and discovers that he can’t fix the coke-broken lives of his friends.
Go (Doug Liman, 1999).  A drug deal gone wrong makes for a mad mad mad Christmas Eve in this comedy-thriller.
Rent (Chris Columbus, 2005).  Christmas Eve marks both the start and finish for the five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes of the year in which everything changes for a group of NYC friends (including star-crossed and drug-addicted lovers Mimi and Roger).

Amy Long: It should be noted that Brian Herrera beat me to the punch and named not one but two (!!) of the movies I’d thought of listing here– Go and Less than Zero— so in his honor I want to recommend How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Chuck Jones, 1966).  No hard feelings, though; I just had to pull a little harder to come up with the titles that follow. 

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Where–and What– Is Pottersville?

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Capra's Journey to the Dark Side

Sixty-five years ago, today, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life premiered at New York City’s Globe Theater. The film’s release had been pushed back from January, in order to try and grab a portion of the holiday box office and secure eligibility for that year’s Academy Awards.  Although the film’s later popularity doesn’t match its initial reception, it was hardly a critical or financial bust–on the contrary, Capra’s first postwar film generated modestly positive reviews and similaraudience response.  On the occasion of this Christmas classic’s anniversary, we thought it only fair to consider it from an alcohol and drugs history perspective.

When viewed through a Points lens,  alcohol and drinking appear everywhere in It’s A Wonderful Life:

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200 Posts–Another Points Milestone

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Not that anyone’s counting, but we’ve just now passed 200 posts for the Points blog.

This is #202, to be Precise

As I noted back in July on the occasion of our 100th post, we’re no match for the production levels of older and more established academic blogs–but we’ll take the excuse to settle back for a bit of self-reflection.  Let’s think a bit about these first 200 posts, and perhaps offer up some New Year’s resolutions to go with them.

If we wander about the tag cloud for a bit, as we did on the occasion of the 100th post, we see that the most popular tags look like this:

  1. Addiction (50 posts)
  2. Alcohol (50 posts)
  3. Policy  (47 posts)
  4. History (45 posts)
  5. Drugs (38 posts)
  6. Popular Culture (35 posts)
  7. Transnational (31 posts)
  8. Research (29 posts)
  9. Drug War (26 posts)
  10. Law (25 posts)

I guess the list isn’t all that surprising–why wouldn’t the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society feature “Alcohol” “Drugs” and “History” in the top five?  Moreover, the “Addiction” and “Policy” tags at the top of the list reflect another basic fact of this blog–that public policy (see also “law” at #10) and the addiction concept (see also “research” at #8) dominate the posts.  And now, two resolutions:

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Mrs. Marty Mann and the Medicalization of Alcoholism

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I’m a big fan of contradictions. Where they occur – in social movements, in ideology, in programs of action – they tend to highlight the underlying compositional character of human enterprises.  Thus contradictions also provide occasions where the contributing strands of such enterprises may be more easily separated out for examination.  (Comedians, of course, love contradictions too – because they highlight our foolishness as a species.)  Below, I examine an intriguing contradiction lodged in one of the deep assumptions of the modern alcoholism movement.

Marty Mann (middle) at Blythewood, July 4, 1938 (photo from Sally Brown and David R. Brown's biography of Mann (permission pending)

The alcoholism movement sought to popularize the notion that alcoholism was a disease or illness phenomenon.  In that sense – and understood at face value — the movement also sought to medicalize alcoholism.  Yet, Alcoholics Anonymous, whose emergence was arguably the deep underlying force in the development of the alcoholism movement, offered an essentially lay and spiritually oriented approach to alcoholism.  Moreover, whereas a fully medicalized view of alcoholism might promote the appropriateness of alcoholism treatment as offered, say, by psychiatrists, other M.D.s, psychologists of various stripes, and hospitals and clinics, A.A. arguably emerged in response to the past failures of these medical efforts respecting alcoholism’s treatment; A.A. offered an alternative to alcoholism’s past medical handling.  Hence, (a) if A.A. was the institution that, deep down, drove the modern alcoholism movement and (b) if the movement’s ideological centerpiece, the disease concept of alcoholism, sought to medicalize alcoholism, then, and therefore, (c) A.A. was fostering (albeit indirectly) an idea that ran counter to its own program and philosophy.  Go figure!

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Holiday Gift Books II: Points Recommeds Alcohol & Drugs Non-Fiction

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Editor’s Note: You liked the suggestions for novels and memoirs, sure, but let’s admit it: everyone has a dad who only wants to read non-fiction.  Here’s your chance to avoid buying him yet another hack trade book about Abraham Lincoln or the financial crisis.  Get something you might actually enjoy talking about.  The Points staff …

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Kerwin Kaye, “Drug Courts and the Treatment of Addiction: Therapeutic Jurisprudence & Neoliberal Governance”

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Editor’s Note:  We’re grateful to Kerwin Kaye, recent graduate of New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Program in American Studies (Advisor: Lisa Duggan), for being willing to be the first recent PhD to “point forward” for the rest of us.

Yeah, This Guy Wants to Hear about Your Dissertation

1) Nothing’s more popular right now than taking potshots at over-specialized, overstuffed, jargon-y academics.  Prove the haters wrong by describing your dissertation in terms that the average man in the street could understand.

I was interested in the way in which the idea of addiction gets operationalized by various people and programs, and wanted to see if there was a discrepancy in the ways that various people in the criminal justice and treatment communities, as well as drug users themselves, defined and understood their drug consumption.  So I hung out at a drug courtin New York City and at one of the treatment centers where the court refers participants.

At the court, I sat in on staff meetings and court sessions, interviewed judges, administrators, prosecuting and defense attorneys, case managers who worked for the court, and participants in the program. I also visited other courts to get a sense of comparison. At the treatment center, I similarly sat in on all aspects of the treatment process, further interviewing staff and administrators, as well as nearly 70 clients (and again, I visited other treatment programs to gain a sense of comparison). My central questions were: How was the “drug” problem defined? How did the court and the treatment program know that people were getting better? And what did treatment look like as a result?

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