EDITOR’S NOTE: Need a last-minute gift for your favorite alcohol and drugs historian? Or something to do on your winter break? Have no fear! Points editors have tons of suggestions for books, movies, TV shows, music and digital distractions. Read on for a breakdown of some of the best alcohol-and-drugs-related media we’ve consumed this year.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s post is by Suzanna Reiss, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai’i and author of the recently published book, We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press, 2014). Reiss offers a timely meditation on the legacy of the Harrison Narcotics Act, which turned one hundred yesterday.
As we confront the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the first US federal drug control law, it is difficult not to be haunted by current events. What is happening today in contemporary policing reflects the legacies produced by drug control and its origins in the deep racial animosities and inequities that contributed to the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914. This centennial commemoration should provoke national soul-searching about the drug war’s contribution to racialized policing and its ties to economic inequality in American society. It certainly is not cause for celebration.
Listen to two accounts – separated by a hundred years, sharing too much.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 turns 100 years old tomorrow. The new federal law regulated traffic in opiates and cocaine and produced lasting effects for US and international drug policy (you can read the full text here). Today, four celebrated scholars offer 100-word reflections on first 100 years of the Harrison Act.
For most college students, the consequences of heavy drinking are limited to killer hangovers. In extreme cases, students may find themselves dealing with medical or police personnel from driving under the influence, alcohol poisoning, or sexual or other violent assault. (For more information on the last point, see Michelle McClellan’s astute post from earlier this week.) But some become addicted to alcohol, increasing the likelihood of all these problems and exacerbated by the ubiquity of drinking in much of college life.
I had the chance to undertake ethnographic work for an anthropology course this semester. I began observing conventional community-based AA meetings, but my network of contacts eventually pointed me to an on-campus student chapter. The group was utterly fascinating, not least because of young adults’ relative under-representation in the national organization; just over half (51%) of AA members are between the ages of 41 and 60, while the average age in the student group was no higher than 25 (only 13% of overall members are under 30).
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s post is written by Points contributing editor Michelle McClellan.
Like many others, I read the story in Rolling Stone magazine about a gang rape at the University of Virginia with a sense of mounting horror. Then, when I began to hear hints and then assertions that the victim’s story might not hold up, I felt angry and confused—for a lot of reasons. The fallout from this story and its aftermath has been extensive, and will likely change again before you read these words. The cover page of the December 5, 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education includes the headline “UVa Rocked by Account of Rape” but that is overshadowed on the page by a photo of recycling bins heaped high with Bud Light cans to illustrate a special report called “Alcohol’s Hold on Campus.” How, if at all, do these stories go together?
Editor’s Note: Today we conclude the series with Amund Tallaksen’s piece entitled, “The Transatlantic Heroin Traffic and the City of New Orleans.” The other posts in this series can be found here, here, and here.
In 1968, the recently formed Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Criminal Justice concluded that: “there is no longer an organized narcotics syndicate in New Orleans. During the early 1950’s the Mafia left the narcotics business in this area. Since that time, the heroin business in this city has been almost completely taken over by several Negroes who are working independently and in competition with each other.”
Three interrelated events in the early 1950s transformed the patterns of heroin use and addiction in New Orleans: (1) the passage of a very strict drug law by the state legislature in Baton Rouge in 1951; (2) the conscious decision by the New Orleans Mafia to step back from the drug trade, and instead focus on less risky endeavors; and (3) the rise of a new cohort of African American drug dealers who would create interstate smuggling routes to New Orleans from cities like New York and Chicago.
Editor’s Note: We continue this week’s posts from the recent Transatlantic History Conference. Today, I (Bob Beach) am presenting my own paper “‘From Baghdad to Gotham’: Commodity Fetishism, Knowledge Production, and Cannabis Sativa in New York City, 1925‐1937.” The first two entries in the series are here, and here.
My conference talk, in many ways is a postscript of sorts to Bradley Borougerdi’s talk. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Western society did reform cannabis, removing the plant from its mysterious “Eastern” context and integrating it into modern “Western” society.
This process involved the extensive production of scientific knowledge about the plant in a number of different arenas. My research examines this knowledge production, and my talk introduced two knowledge arenas in which this knowledge was produced. I argued that despite the ostensibly objective knowledge produced in the natural sciences and medicine during this period, the old, orientalist, medico-literary knowledge remained a powerful factor in the ways that knowledge about cannabis was consumed.
Editor’s Note: Points continues its series on the transatlantic history of drugs with Eron Ackerman’s “Altered States: Globalization, Governmentality, and Ganja in the British Caribbean, 1880-1913.” The first post in this series can be found here.
In the mid-nineteenth century, “Indian hemp” (Cannabis Indica) made its way through the Caribbean plantation complex. After abolishing slavery in the 1830s, the British turned to India as a source of cheap labor, recruiting some 430,000 indentured workers to toil on Caribbean plantations between 1838 and 1917. Hindus and Muslims on the Subcontinent had long used cannabis (ganja) for social, religious, and medicinal purposes. When these populations crossed the Atlantic, they brought ganja culture with them.
My research explores how colonial officials and reform advocates in the British Caribbean—mainly the colonies of Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica—responded to the spread of ganja. I argue that, while views of ganja varied considerably, critics shared a tendency to link its deleterious effects to other disreputable “Oriental” practices, especially those that appeared to create problems with labor management, violent crime, and moral conduct among the region’s growing East Indian population. Concerns about ganja were thus entangled in colonial power structures, articulated through orientalist discourse, and acted upon through strategies of governmentality deployed by colonial states, missionaries and moral reformers from distant parts of the British Empire.