Month: April 2015

‘That Funny, Funny Reefer Man:’ Reading Reefer Madness through Jazz Music during the 1930s

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“Man whats the matter with that cat there?/ Must be full of reefer!/ Full of reefer?!” -Cab Calloway “The Reefer Man” (1932)

During the 1920s and 1930s young Americans of all stripes were mesmerized by a new kind of music: jazz. The jazz movement combined various musical styles like ragtime, blues, folk, and classical music with an improvisational, polyrhythmic flair. Its popularity among African-Americans and American youth raised red flags among the older generation. The music (much like it’s 1950s cousin, rock n’ roll) became a scapegoat for delinquency, sexual depravity, and of course, drug use.

Among these charges, jazz was closely associated with the rise of cannabis use in places like New Orleans, Harlem, and Chicago. Some scholarly arguments about the topic suggest that the emphasis on marijuana overlooked the prevalence of heroin and alcohol use within the jazz community. Others stress that the connection between marijuana and jazz is sound– its use is discussed explicitly in several jazz songs of the 1930s– and the jazz discourse was a direct challenge to the anti-drug contentions of Anslinger and others.

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The Points Interview: Mary Neuburger

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Points is delighted to welcome Mary Neuburger, a Professor of History; Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies; and Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Below, Neuburger discusses her recent book, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell, 2012), which chronicles the politics of tobacco production and consumption in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule. 

Screen Shot 2015-04-27 at 9.16.14 AMDescribe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

Balkan Smoke is a cultural and social history of tobacco in Bulgaria, with focus on the modern period, roughly 1863-1989. It traces the long and transformative process of the introduction and then expansion of largely “Oriental” tobacco production and exchange in this region, in tune with the rise of a global addiction to tobacco. Like most commodity histories, it is a story that inevitably crosses borders, elaborating on the roles of the most critical global and regional players like the Ottoman Empire—from which Bulgaria became autonomous in 1878 and independent in 1908—as well as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.  The tracing of this process is coupled with a history of smoking (and anti-smoking) culture in Bulgaria, again in the context of global shifts in smoking practices. The books looks at the rise of and changes in patterns (particularly of public) smoking in Bulgaria, but also at the varied (though largely unsuccessful) sources of resistance to tobacco on health, social, and moral grounds.  All of these processes take quite different forms in late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman Bulgaria, in times of war, particularly World War II when Bulgaria was aligned with Nazi Germany, and then, perhaps most dramatically under communism. It is this part of the story that is perhaps the most revealing, as the Bulgarian communist tobacco monopoly, with its gargantuan Soviet market, became the top exporter of cigarettes in the world by the mid-1960s. It was attuned to consumers, and willing and able to adopt technologies and aesthetics wholesale from the West, all in the name of “building socialism.” Given the central role of this industry in the Bulgarian economy, state-driven anti-tobacco campaigns, which peaked in the mid-1970s, were always half-hearted and doomed for failure.

What do you think a bunch of alcohol and drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

Historians of alcohol and drugs undoubtedly share my fascination with historical changes in the acceptability of intoxicants in various contexts. Bulgaria presents a fascinating case because of its place on the “periphery” of Europe, with a complex set of outside influences that shaped its encounter with tobacco. Tobacco was introduced from the New World into the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, where the plant adapted to the local climatic and soil conditions growing on small mountain plots (as opposed to plantation lowlands as in the US). Its properties altered into various “Turkish” or “Oriental” varieties that were more flavorful, had less nicotine, and eventually became were sought after in Western markets. This was particularly true after the success of the famous Camel brand released by R.J. Reynolds in 1913, and the eventual dominance of the market of American (and European) “blends”. In the Ottoman Empire, smoking was historically a Muslim habit, an accompaniment to coffee, consumed in hookahs and pipes in the largely Muslim coffeehouse—an institution (and beverage) that spread West in the early modern period. By the late nineteenth century, however, Ottoman Christians, including Bulgarians, were becoming smokers and tobacco consumption expanded rapidly in the twentieth century, tied to Bulgaria’s Europeanization following its gaining of autonomy in 1878, to the World Wars and the Cold War.  The local coffeehouse was replaced by the gleaming European-style café, and ties to European, American, and Russian markets played a role in the expanding Bulgarian tobacco economy.  This is just a taste for the kinds of details the books engages, putting the story of the rise of a dominant tobacco economy in Bulgaria into a complicated regional and global context.

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Will I Be A Dope Doctor When I Grow Up?

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Points is delighted to welcome Kim Sue, a previous contributor (check out her earlier posts here and here), medical anthropologist, and dual degree MD/PhD candidate at Harvard University. On the heels of Points’ recent posts about the difficulties of reconciling clinical and scholarly perspectives on addiction treatment and the media frenzy about the recent prescription opioid epidemic, Sue offers a historical and ethical reflection on having the power to dispense prescriptions.

I first met Anita in the Boston jail where she was doing time for passing bad checks related to a prescription opioid addiction. She had first been introduced to opioids after giving birth to her first child several years earlier. “I was prescribed percs [percocets] for pain related to the delivery,” Anita explained. “I just remember taking them and being high and cleaning … I took four or five at a time.” Anita’s drug use spiraled out of control, as her physiological tolerance to the opioids increased and she needed to buy more and more pills to get the same effect. One day, Anita’s dealer offered her heroin, and off she went.

Ethnographers and historians of drug use are all too familiar with stories that resemble Anita’s. As an anthropologist who studies prisons and addiction treatment, I find it relatively easy to point the finger at doctors for their professional complicity in “epidemics” of opioid addiction.

But as a medical student in my final year, destined to start residency in July in an internal medicine-primary care program, I also worry I won’t be able to refuse prescriptions for opioids for patients presenting to me in distress and pain.

Historians of medicine and drug use have detailed how physicians—whether they wanted to or not—became central to the distribution and administration of opioids in the United States. In the wake of the Harrison Narcotics Act, addicts had to obtain prescriptions for their drugs, and so-called “dope doctors” would provide them for cash. The alternative to the dope doctor was the street druggist, the so-called “pusher.”

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Laudanum (image via Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images)

 

Doctors and opiates have a long, complex history. In the era of magical formulations, Dr. Thomas Syndenham compounded laudanum by mixing “two ounces of opium and one ounce of saffron dissolved in a pint of Canary or sherry wine” with a “drachm of cinnamon powder and of cloves powder,” as historian Richard Davenport-Hines noted in his history of the subject. At the time, opiates (plus or minus alcohol) were among the few medicines that were actually effective pain relievers (working at the μ pain receptors in the brain). They were instrumental in bolstering the medical profession’s emerging reputation for dispensing effective interventions rather than simply bearing witness to suffering. Indeed, enterprising pharmacists and doctors alike created their own patented formulations of various narcotics marketed as cure-alls– a mix of magic, profiteering, and chemistry.

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Old Ideas for a New Era: On Reading Sam Quinones

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Sam Quinones and I share an affinity for this startling fact: more Americans now die of drug overdoes than car crashes. I often say this when I am trying to convince someone that it’s important to study the drug wars; Quinones last week used the tidbit in the first paragraph of his New York Times opinion piece titled “Serving All Your Heroin Needs.”

In this article—and probably elaborated in his new book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic—the L.A.-based journalist writes about a new breed of Mexican heroin dealers who deliver drugs “like pizza” in cities across the Midwest. He uses a nickname for the dealers coined by a cop he knows: Xalisco Boys, for the poppy-growing region from whence they come to the United States looking for a fast buck.

Sam Quinones, Dreamland (Bloomsbury Press, 2015)
Sam Quinones, Dreamland (Bloomsbury Press, 2015)

I have no doubt the system of low-violence, customer-service-oriented drug dealing that Quinones has studied for several years is real. But the old chestnuts he hauls out in talking about the public health problems caused by the increased availability of heroin in smaller cities deserve comment. 

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The Silences of Our Work, Part III: Alternate Paths to Recovery

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Today, Points brings you the third in a series of posts on silencing and substance use by Heather Sophia Lee, PhD, LCSW, an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. You can read the first installment here and the second installment here. 

For my dissertation, I conducted a qualitative study of two harm reduction programs. The purpose was to describe the experiences of participants in harm reduction programs given that “outcomes” of such programs were difficult to measure.

At that time evidence existed for the efficacy of harm reduction practices, like needle exchange programs, in reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. Less was known about the impact of harm reduction as a model for addiction treatment. Its broad focus made it unclear which “outcomes” were most important to measure. Coupled with political resistance, many agencies often avoided calling their work “harm reduction” to avoid scrutiny which might interfere with meeting the needs of their clients.

As a novice qualitative researcher, I was intuitively curious about how harm reduction was being integrated into twelve step recovery experiences. I was also interested in the extent to which one might be just as likely to come to abstinence through harm reduction as abstinence-only based treatment. Harm reduction and twelve step models were often cast as mutually exclusive, and I knew there was a deeper story to be known though I wasn’t yet sure what it was.

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A Case For Local Control?

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local control.When a topic like local control comes up, most historians rightly think of modern conservatism. As a convenient device to couch exclusionary policies, a deference to local control often meant preserving the race and class-based homogeneity of white communities. However, local control has not been universally supported in all cases. A deeper look at the politics of local control suggest that supporters of local control only support such measures in specific instances—situations in which local control is vested to the “right” people. When LBJ empowered poor urbanites via the Office of Economic Opportunity, traditional supporters of local control lambasted his administration for bureaucratic waste in the name of “handouts.” Perhaps LBJ had a point. Perhaps local control can be used as an inclusive policy initiative for populations traditionally excluded from the political processes shaping their own communities. This is most obvious with respect to policies addressing local crime and drugs.

perils of fed.In thinking more about this issue, I re-visited Lisa Miller’s work, The Perils of Federalism. Miller powerfully argues that the structure of contemporary federalism in the United States squeezes out the local. Privileging voices less familiar with problems on the ground—policy bureaucrats and moral entrepreneurs eventually make substantial decisions shaping the lives of those previously silenced. Thus, those that feel the daily brunt of criminal violence and aggressive crime control policies have no recourse. Perhaps more troubling, such citizens have little reason for hope, a sense of agency, or a sound rationale for believing they hold a meaningful stake in the life of their community. As issues loom larger and more important on the national stage, more and more opportunities for voices apart from the grassroots emerge. This leaves local voices stage left when issues reach the state or national level. For grassroots activists who toiled tirelessly to get their issues to state or national congress, this is particularly painful.

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The Silences of Our Work, Part II: Trauma

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Editor’s Note: Today, Points brings you the second in a series of posts on silencing and substance use by Heather Sophia Lee, PhD, LCSW, an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. You can read the first installment here.

I chose to focus my time as a guest blogger on Points focusing on the Silences of Our Work because, in the academic spaces in which I exist, I am most frustrated by what goes unsaid. The gold standard of “science” calls for ignoring certain variables, so that other variables may be tightly controlled. Our work is silenced by design.

Trauma figures prominently in the lives of many of our clients and their relationship to substances, but is often silenced in our work. I don’t mean that everyone who struggles with alcohol and other drug use has experienced trauma– but many people I’ve worked with have, yet the existence of trauma is largely unacknowledged in mainstream discourse about substance abuse in the United States. In my qualitative interviews and clinical work with participants of harm reduction programs, trauma frequently plays a role in participants’ narratives about their relationship to alcohol and other drugs. Yet in the discourse about these clients, trauma rarely enters the conversation. The “why behind the what” is absent.

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Exorcising the Demon (Drinks) in “Severance”: Mad Men Roundtable, Part I

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Editor’s Note: Points prides itself on offering historically-informed analyses of modern phenomena, and there is perhaps no better phenomenon for our collective eyes than AMC’s overwhelmingly popular series Mad Men. As the show begins the second half of its last season, Points managing editors Claire Clark and myself, as well as contributing editors Mike Durfee and Kyle Bridge, offer our thoughts on how intoxicants are being used in the series, what they mean to the characters, and what modern viewers can read into their use. 

We bring you the first part of our roundtable on Mad Men today, and look forward to another at the season’s close. – EBD

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