Month: October 2018

Beyond Legalization: Making the Case for Centering Pot in the 2018 Midterms

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Editor’s Note: Ready to vote in next week’s midterm elections? Today’s post comes from contributing editor Bob Beach, in which he explains the status of America’s shifting cannabis laws and shows what new state and federal initiatives might mean for 2018 and beyond.

In many ways 2018 was the Year of Pot. Sales of legal weed are booming in nine states and Washington, D.C. Pot sales are expected to flirt with $11 billion this year and could reach $25 billion annually by 2025, according to some estimates. Last month, on September 21, Governor Ralph Torres of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) signed the first legalization legislation in a US territory. Congressional reform proposals have become more frequent and publicized. Perhaps as many as 15 states were considering voter initiatives (the exclusive route to reform in the United State prior to the CNMI legislation) for 2018 to expand access to marijuana. Six states will vote on, or have voted on ballot measures in 2018, while the remainder failed to register the appropriate signatures. Five states will consider recreational legalization (Michigan; North Dakota) or medical legalization (Missouri and Utah; Oklahoma approved in June) while the sixth (Colorado) will consider redefinition of industrial hemp.

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Representatives from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands after signing legalization legislation in September 2018

Public support for legalization continues to grow (to 62% according to a recent poll) and support for medical marijuana has become overwhelming. But support for increasing access to pot will likely remain a very low priority for voters on election day. Especially this year, when the midterm elections appear to be a referendum on the Trump Administration, it seems a little indulgent for folks to continue to push a legalization agenda in this election season. However, the party that controls legalization will be able to shape the contours of reform, and those contours comprise some of the most important issues surrounding legalization according to activists.

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Many Scholars Think Drug Courts Harm Policy Reform, Not Vice Versa

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Sarah Brady Siff, visiting assistant professor of journalism at Miami University in Ohio. Enjoy!

The current so-called opioid epidemic has placed an urgent frame around drug-related policy debates in Ohio. Here, the current midterm election ballot includes Issue 1, a state constitutional amendment that would convert level 4 and 5 drug felonies—charges for possession and use of drugs—into misdemeanors, somewhat like California’s Proposition 47 in 2014. Ohio would be only the sixth state to take similar measures to reduce drug-related mass incarceration.

So Issue 1 was much on the minds and lips of panelists at “Facing Opioids: Drug Enforcement & Health Policy in Today’s Epidemic,” an Oct. 19 symposium at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. I appreciated the chance to listen to legal experts in criminal justice and public health talk about Issue 1, drug courts, harm reduction, and other topics related to Ohio’s very high rate of overdose deaths.

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Towards a Global History of Intoxicants: The War on Alcohol

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia , professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In it, she brings a global focus to drug and alcohol history and reviews Lisa McGirr’s book on federal Prohibition. Enjoy!

Screenshot 2018-10-18 at 8.23.09 AMLisa McGirr’s stimulating recent book The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (Norton, 2016) links early twentieth-century temperance to the origins of the muscular federal authority we know today. Historians typically trace the enlargement of state power to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to lift the United States out of the Depression in the 1930s. However, McGirr points to earlier growth in the Prohibition era. By creating new categories of legal violations, the ban on brewing and selling alcohol transformed crime into a “national obsession” for the first time in American history. The government responded to public panic by expanding law enforcement—a measure whose effects linger today in such forms as the War on Drugs.

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“Mapping the Muggleheads” – Digital History, GIS, and Marijuana Historiography

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Dr. Adam Rathge, director of enrollment strategies and part-time history professor at the University of Dayton, drug scholar, and longtime friend of Points. In it, he shows how using tools like digital mapping and geocoding can shed new light on historical accounts and reveal previously hidden or misunderstood narratives–particularly useful when trying to understand controversial issues like alcohol and drugs. Enjoy!

Nearly three years ago, on January 6, 2016, I attended a session at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting entitled “Digital Publishing Initiatives: Training Humanities Scholars.” The panel was sponsored by the AHA Graduate and Early Career Committee and featured four excellent papers, one of which ultimately led me on a digital publishing journey that will finally come to fruition later this week with the forthcoming publication of “Mapping the Muggleheads: New Orleans and the Marijuana Menace, 1920–1930.”

Before elaborating on that story, however, I’d be remiss not to mention the other papers I saw that day. Adam Mandelman and Spring Greeney from the University of Wisconsin-Madison discussed the work of Edge Effects, a digital magazine produced by graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) at UW-Madison. Mark Sheaves from the University of Texas at Austin showed off the work of Not Even Past, a monthly publication designed “to bring great history writing to the public” (not unlike our beloved Points blog). Patrick R. Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins from the Ohio State University chronicled the monthly publications from Origins that “provided historical insight on current events that matter to the United States and to the world” (also not unlike our beloved Points blog).

While each of these online publications was impressive, my inspiration that day came from Meredith Doster of Emory University, who presented the work of Southern Spaces – a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal published by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. As Meredith showed, Southern Spaces was dedicated to publishing research “about real and imagined spaces and places in the US South and their global connections.” Almost immediately my mind was churning with excitement. At the time, I was in the throes of writing my dissertation (“Cannabis Cures: American Medicine, Mexican Marijuana, and the Origins of the War on Weed, 1840-1937”) and was in the process of formulating a chapter that drew heavily on early twentieth-century newspaper accounts of marijuana use in New Orleans. The city’s “marijuana menace” seemed like a perfect avenue for exploring real and imaged spaces.

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Mabel Dodge Luhan’s First Peyote Trip

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Today’s post comes from guest poster Dr. Chris Elcock, an adjunct professor at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in Lyon, France, whom you might remember from his previous articles on the early years of cannabis activism and LSD in New York. Today he explores the first recorded peyote trip in Manhattan, which occurred in 1914. Enjoy!

Raymond Harrington had been enamored with Native American culture since he was a child. While he was still in high school, he successfully located an old camp site in Mt. Vernon, New York, and became employed by the American Museum of Natural History thanks to the then curator Frederick Putnam. He went on to study anthropology at Columbia University under the great Franz Boas and conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Indians in Oklahoma. One day, during the spring of 1914, he attended a party in Greenwich Village and regaled the attendees with his stories. But when the subject turned to an obscure cactus that had the power “to pass beyond ordinary consciousness and see things as they are in Reality,” everyone begged him to carry on, including the hostess, the eccentric socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan.

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Bad History, Bad Policy: Maybe Historians Should Be Ostracized from Society

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Brooks Hudson, a history PhD student at Southern Illinois University. Enjoy!

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Historians aren’t the first people national publications go for hot-takes. That may be a good thing. But I’ve always been in the camp that says historians should be more active outside of academia. So, I’ve been encouraged by publications like The New York Times and Washington Post reaching out to historians, asking them to analyze the opioid epidemic in its historical context. On the other hand, it’s been frustrating to see those opportunities squandered. An example that caught my eye was Clinton Lawson’s op-ed for the Times, published in May. It’s well-written and pleasant enough to read, but his interpretation of effective policies, then and now, resembles a DEA spokesperson more than a member of the public. Overall, his argument is aesthetic, encouraging us to avoid bad things, like racism or overhyping stories in the news, while at the same time offering the conventional wisdom: penalties and prison.

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Fraud in Addiction Treatment Centers

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from guest blogger Nicole Allen. Nicole is a freelance writer and educator based in the Michigan and believes that her writing is an extension of her career as a tutor since they both encourage learning and discussing new things. When she isn’t writing, you might find Nicole running, hiking, or swimming. She’s participated in several 10K races and hopes to compete in a marathon one day.

It seems to be these days that whenever there’s money involved, there’s always a sure case of fraud. Although fraud is not new in business transactions, it can be surprising that some people are finding devious ways to trick insurance companies into paying for the rehabilitation process. Much like watching crime and investigation documentaries about insurance fraud, individuals can also “fake” their way into claiming a benefit from a company, without using it for the actual cause.

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As seen in a Roman epigram: A case of fraud?

Surprisingly, insurance fraud is not a new thing–in fact, it may even be as old as the stone statues built by the previous civilization. As seen in an epigram by the Roman poet Martial, there is a clear evidence that insurance fraud dates back to the old ages of the Roman Empire:

“Tongilianus, you paid two hundred for your house;

An accident too common in this city destroyed it.

You collected ten times more. Doesn’t it seem, I pray,

That you set fire to your own house, Tongilianus?”

Source: Book III, No. 52, Martial

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Radical Temperance: “Drunkards’ Raids” & “Boozers’ Days”: The Salvation Army’s “war on drink”

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post rounds up our series from the Radical Temperance conference, which was held in June. It comes from Steven Spencer, Director of The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre and an Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. Enjoy!

Since it was founded in 1865, the Salvation Army has been opposed to the use of alcohol. Its members and clergy totally abstain from alcohol and, from the 1880s onward, its weekly newspaper, The War Cry, regularly carried illustrations of the negative effects of alcohol. In the 1890s the Salvation Army described itself as “a universal Anti-Drink Army” and in this blog I’m going to look at two examples of this war on drink. Both my examples are taken from the first decades of the twentieth century and represent some of the more theatrical approaches taken by the Salvation Army in its rehabilitation of alcoholics.

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“Drunkards’ Raid,” Leyton, east London, early twentieth century

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