What is inspiring the relaxation of social mores regarding marijuana use? Today, theories abound. Perhaps anti-marijuana laws are too expensive to enforce. Or: a growing number of Americans have tried marijuana, and consequently, come to view its health effects as relatively benign. According to Nancy Reagan’s supporters in the mid-1980s, one driving force for pot permissiveness could be easily pinpointed: Cheech and Chong.
Reagan’s anti-drug campaign is welldocumented. Her campaign stops, speeches, and talking points are spread across more than three series in the Reagan Presidential Library (which was where I got the idea for this post). Likewise, manyauthorshavecovered the political debates about depictions of sex and violence in the 1980s, noting that media moguls almost always managed to outmaneuver their critics. Today’s post describes a forgotten episode in this moral epic: in 1985, Reagan’s anti-drug allies urged the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to revise its ratings system and return the silver screen to its substance-free, pre-Sixties glory.
Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie Ad, 1980. Submitted to Congress during 1985 subcommittee hearings (image via Wikipedia)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Points is pleased to welcome our fearless co-founder, Joe Spillane, an Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Student Affairs at the University of Florida. His new book, Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform, is out now from Johns Hopkins University Press (2014).
Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.
Coxsackie is primarily about the rise and fall of a New Deal-era reformatory for young male offenders, built in New York State. Intended to educate and reintegrate prisoners, the Coxsackie experiment quickly deteriorated into an unpleasant mix of stultifying work, violence, and racial conflict. By the immediate postwar years, the reformist vision of reintegration and social inclusion was already giving way to a racialized vision of isolation and exclusion. In this sense, Coxsackie and New York’s other reformatories reveal the deeper origins of our modern systems of mass incarceration.
What do you think a bunch of alcohol and drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?
I’m particularly interested in the role that the postwar heroin epidemic plays in the history of Coxsackie. Modest by contemporary standards, the surge in heroin use among young people in New York City between 1948 and 1951 was an important policy moment. As late as 1937-1938, New York City recorded only a single arrest on narcotics charges among adolescents. In early 1948, however, Coxsackie received its first heroin user—by 1951, the reformatory housed roughly one hundred users at any one time. Liberal reformers were aghast, feeling that heroin addicts were not proper subjects for reformatory efforts, being effectively ungovernable in the rehabilitative context. They urged that young offenders be sent to the Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, where New York City had begun experimental residential treatment efforts. But North Brother Island would accept only “noncriminal” addicts. For those convicted of a criminal offense, then, there was only the revolving door of the criminal justice system. It is a helpful and early reminder that the real story for most young users and addicts at mid-century was not Lexington, North Brother Island, or other treatment ventures, but the banal and ongoing hardship of arrest and imprisonment.
Editor’s Note: Points welcomes guest poster, Bradley J Borougerdi. Borougerdi holds BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Texas at Arlington. His dissertation, “Cord of Empire, Exotic Intoxicant: Hemp and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1600-1900,” presents hemp as a vehicle for intercultural exchange in the modern era.
William Brooke O’Shaughnessy’s legacy looms large in the hemp liberation movement that is gaining momentum in America today. O’Shaughnessy was an Irishman of relatively humble origins who enjoyed some success as an employee of the British East India Company (EIC). He was remembered in the 19th century for successfully engineering the first telegraph system in Colonial India, an accomplishment that earned him a knighthood in 1857. Neither his obituary nor the brief biographies of him mention his career as a chemist, yet today’s hemp activists elevate him to near godlike status for his medical experiments with Indian hemp. He encountered the plant being used all across India, he said, “in various forms by the dissipated and the deprived, as the ready agent of a pleasing intoxication.” He concocted a preparation of the plant’s resin that became popular in the Atlantic world during the second half of the 19th century, but, for a number of reasons, it fell out of favor by the early 20th century. Today’s hemp activists– without acknowledging the complex nature of hemp’s place as a medicine in Anglo-Atlantic culture– describe O’Shaughnessy as an objectively brilliant, ahead-of-the-times genius. Some also see his work as living proof of a conspiracy against hemp for various economic and political reasons. Not only do these arguments demonstrate how readily history can be exploited for contemporary purposes, but the memorialization of O’Shaughnessy illuminates the complicated discourse that has surrounded the hemp plant over the last two centuries.
Foreword from the Editor: William L. White’sSlaying the Dragon: A History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, 2nd edition (Chestnut Health Systems, 2014) chronicles the history of treatment institutions and mutual aid movements in the U.S. from the eighteenth century to the present. White’s sweeping history is both institutional (he explores a variety of treatment providers and approaches) and social (he excavates the stories of silenced and stigmatized recovery groups). The book deserves a place beside David Musto’s The American Disease on the bookshelves and comp lists of every alcohol and drug historian-in-training.
Beyond academe, Slaying the Dragon has had a tremendous impact on the recovery movement since the first edition was published in 1998. Treatment institution records are fragmented and difficult to come by. Mutual aid societies have an elusive oral tradition. To date, most historical work on addiction treatment and recovery in the U.S. has been relatively narrow in scope. Finding diverse material synthesized in a single reference text, White reflects, “helped many people in recovery see themselves as ‘a people’ and contributed to the rise of a new recovery advocacy movement in the U.S.”– a movement evidenced by organizations like Faces and Voices of Recovery, the rise of recovery-oriented systems of care, and the promotion of the U.S.’s first recovering ‘Drug Czar,’ Michael Botticelli.
Bill White, who has been working in the field of alcohol and drug treatment since the 1960s, joined Points for an interview about the history and future of addiction treatment.
Slaying the Dragon, Second Edition (Chestnut Health Systems, 2014)
Slaying the Dragon is a master narrative of the history of addiction treatment and recovery in the US. Can you briefly recap the story it tells for us?
The opening sections of Slaying the Dragon describe Native American and colonial responses to alcohol and other drug problems, review the rise of 19th century recovery mutual aid societies (including the Washingtonians, the Fraternal Temperance Societies, the Ribbon Reform Clubs, the Ollapod Club, the Godwin Association, and various moderation societies), and then recount the rise and fall of 19th century addiction treatment institutions—inebriate homes, inebriate asylums, private addiction cure institutes, and bottled and boxed home cures for the alcohol, tobacco, and drug habits. The middle sections explore the early history of treatment for addiction to drugs other than alcohol, describe the history and program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and recount the rise of the modern alcoholism movement. The final sections detail the birth and evolution of modern addiction treatment, outline historically unprecedented changes within the culture of recovery in the U.S., and attempt to extract lessons from this history that can influence professional and institutional decision-making.
Slaying the Dragon is a big (557 pages), sweeping story presented in bite-size, self-contained stories of key ideas, people, and institutions. It is written in a language and style that is accessible to people in recovery, addiction professionals, and policymakers, but it also provides a link to more than 100 pages of posted research citations for contemporary and future historians. The table of contents and a sample chapter are posted online at www.williamwhitepapers.com.
As historians, we often rely on past journalistic accounts to interpret events, so it makes sense for us to also pay attention to how drugs are depicted in the news today. Not only does charting the life cycle of current drug stories place previous depictions into historical context, but it can also help us understand where we are now and how certain drugs (like marijuana) rise and fall in the media over the years.
Editor’s Note: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration’s coverage of the methamphetamine epidemic didn’t end with Breaking Bad. Here to comment on the history of meth epidemics is Nicholas Parsons, assistant professor of sociology at Eastern Connecticut University and author of Meth Mania (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013).
Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand
The book is about the social and cultural history of methamphetamine in the United States. There are two main themes the book takes up.
One of them is a history of the national media coverage of methamphetamine by major news magazines like Time and Newsweek, major newspapers like the New York Times, and television news broadcast by the three major networks. The second theme concerns changes in drug policy going back to the early 1900s, and how different drug laws have unintentionally and indirectly impacted the methamphetamine problem.
The book focuses on these two themes separately, but also examines the interplay between them. For example, the three major historical waves of national news attention towards methamphetamine (“Methedrine” from 1967-1971, “ice” in 1989, and “crystal meth” from 1995-2006) were all followed by legislative acts designed to deal with synthetic stimulant problems. I argue many of these policy changes have led to more harm than good. For instance, the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 seems to have led to a decrease, albeit temporarily, in domestic “meth labs” where the drug is haphazardly manufactured. However, the black market for meth has evolved to meet the continuing demand, and what we’ve seen is a greater involvement of foreign suppliers, who are capable of producing more potent meth. Also, the relatively recent popularity of “bath salts” (i.e., synthetic cathinones) is likely due in part to the reduction of methamphetamine availability afforded by the 2005 law. When people cannot obtain meth, they will often replace their habit with more readily available stimulants.
I use the ebbs and flows of news attention to ask why meth has come to be defined as a social problem at different points in recent history. I also ask why there were points in our nation’s history when meth has not been in the national news to the extent that some might expect it would be. I find, for example, that in the early 1980s, methamphetamine use was at its highest level in this country, but the drug rarely made national headlines.
Editor’s Note: Today, Points features a guest post by Miriam Kingsberg, an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. (University of California Press, 2013). You can read the Points interview about the book here).
For historians of drugs, user perspectives are often frustratingly difficult to capture. Narcotics consumers generally leave behind few records in their own voice, forcing scholars to rely on the (frequently biased) perceptions of those who come into contact with them: law enforcement, doctors, social scientists, policymakers, etc. In the course of my research on narcotics in Japan and its empire from the 1850s through the 1950s, each of these groups provided critical information. My search for user-authored narratives, however, proved fruitless until virtually the last moment. In 2011, as I was preparing the penultimate draft of my book manuscript, I learned that a collection of documents, formerly inaccessible to scholars due to their poor condition, had been digitized and made available by the National Diet Library in Tokyo. To my delight, I found materials on the Drug Addiction Relief Association [Mayaku Kyūgokai], founded in 1933 as Japan’s first domestic facility for treating narcotics dependence. These sources not only enhanced my understanding of the history of addiction medicine, but also included about twenty life stories by patients, as recorded by doctors at the clinic in the mid-1930s.
Terada Shin (right) with Y. Masa (a fellow patient at the Narcotic Addiction Relief Association)
“How should he handle his alcoholic wife,” asks the lurid cover of the 1960 novel Alcoholic Wife by G.G. Revelle. “Beat her? Cater to her inflamed desires? Overlook her drunken intimacies with other men? Desert her for his seductive mistress?” With a retail price of 35 cents, the volume helpfully included a list of other Beacon Book titles that readers might enjoy, such as Footloose Fraulein and Trailer Tramp. Yet Alcoholic Wife was not just entertainment, but an examination of a growing social crisis, as the back cover promised: “This novel courageously tackles the problem of the drinking wife—today more common than ever before!”
