Month: March 2019

Points Bookshelf: “Glass and Gavel” by Nancy Maveety

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“Look, I like beer, okay? I like beer.”

If there is no other solace from the painful testimonies we heard from Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh last September (and there is not), at least we have Matt Damon’s portrayal of the justice on Saturday Night Live.

(The Washington Post made this helpful mashup if your memory needs refreshing:)

With Kavanaugh’s declaration of his beverage of choice still fresh in our minds, Nancy Maveety couldn’t have chosen a better time to publish Glass and Gavel: The U.S. Supreme Court and Alcohol (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), which details the two-hundred-year-long relationship between alcohol and our highest court. This swift-moving, thoroughly-researched, and useful (it contains recipes!) analysis of the often-tempestuous relationship between alcohol and constitutional law is a useful addition to the canon, not only because its history is unique–to my knowledge this the first extensive history of the Supreme Court’s alcohol rulings–but its format is unique as well. By combining a summary of the Court’s rulings with insightful drinking biographies of the justices themselves, Maveety has crafted a story that shows how America’s alcohol laws have shifted over time, alongside revealing portraits of how our country’s drinking culture has evolved along with, or in spite of, the legal landscape. 

Screenshot 2019-03-25 14.59.06Each of the fourteen chapters focuses on a single Court era, as defined by its sitting chief justice, and Glass and Gavel moves swiftly from the John Marshall Era (1801-1835) to the John Roberts Era of today (2005-current). We watch as justices debate the question of who should be held responsible if liquor is “taken to excess” (this was during the Fuller era, 1888-1910, and Justice Stephen J. Field argued that it was not the seller’s fault), to more modern questions of regulating out-of-state alcohol sales during the “Rehnquist Era of Neo-Temperance” (1986-2005). Major rulings are outlined, Prohibition dominates the middle part of the book, and, by gaining deeper insight into the justices’ own views on drinking, we watch the history of America’s relationship with alcohol unfold from the lofty position of the judicial bench. Glass and Gavel is the story of alcohol in American life and law, told through the lens of the Court’s chief cocktail.

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Points Interview: Nancy Maveety

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Today’s Points Interview features Nancy Maveety, Professor of Political Science at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and author of the new book Glass and Gavel: The U.S. Supreme Court and Alcohol (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). At Tulane, she teaches courses in constitutional law, judicial decision-making, and her latest special topics class “Booze, Drugs and the Courts.” …

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“Drugs Cause Paranoid Reading and Writing”

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Sean A. Witters, Ph.D., a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Vermont. His current book project, Using Addict, looks at the evolving language of addiction, tracing the images and stories of drug use and dependency that flow through literature, film, medicine, and culture from the 19th century to the present. In this post, he responds to Alex Berenson’s recent book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, about which Points hosted a roundtable in January.

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” 

-Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Address

screenshot 2019-01-21 14.01.00I recently found myself linked to a group of researchers cited in The Guardian in Jamiles Lartey’s article on an open letter that criticizes the controversial claims about cannabis, mental health, and violence in Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. Alex Berenson’s response in the article is marked by the same paranoiac construction of truth that shapes his book and its unfortunate impact on the public discussion on drugs, addiction, mental health, incarceration, and harm reduction. Berenson insists, “Physicians know the truth.” Without regard for his own credentials, he rejects the expertise of the signators, privileging medical degrees over doctorates in epidemiology, biochemistry, criminology, sociology, psychology, history, and neuroscience and ignoring the significant role of MDs and dual degree-holders with specialties in public health. When he chooses to rely on the earned expertise of non-MDs, as he does in his first chapter, he claims interpretive pre-eminence. This is most notable in his dispute with historian Isaac Campos who has criticized Berenson’s cherry-picked use of his findings. In his response, Berenson claims that Campos doesn’t understand findings apparently hidden within his own research.[1]

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Points Interview: Lucas Richert

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Today’s Points Interview features Dr. Lucas Richert, George Urdang Chair in the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of the newly-released Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). Richert is also a co-editor of the ADHS’s official journal, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Describe your book …

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Nuance-Trolls and Bad-Faith Policy Debates

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

How do you make someone reluctant about supporting a policy? One strategy is to suggest people with clear answers do not appreciate just how complicated, complex, multifaceted—and my favorite — “nuanced” the situation really is. No one wants to view themselves as unsophisticated or unrefined and this plays on that insecurity. Unfortunately, major news outlets embraced this strategy, for some reason, and one can only speculate about motive.

What am I talking about? These constant nuance arguments. You’ve probably read them: the ones that muddy the waters but don’t seem to say anything. There’s even a term for it. It’s nuance-trolling; not the best term, but it works. Nuance-trolling is constructing a debate by evading and relying on rhetorical filibustering; it turns complexity into a virtue, a fetish for its own sake. Sociologist Kieran Healy of Duke University summed it up in his article “Fuck Nuance,” arguing that nuance, or rather what he called “actually existing nuance,” a pillar of academia and mainstream discourse, “is what one does when faced with a question for which one does not yet have a compelling or interesting answer. Thinking up compelling or interesting ideas is difficult, so it is often easier to embrace complexity than to cut through it.” In his essay, he writes about “nuance traps.” One is “the nuance of the fine-grain [ed],” an “empirical description… masquerading as increased accuracy.”

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Points Bookshelf: “Never Enough” by Judith Grisel

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Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first installment of the Points Bookshelf, in which we review books about drugs, alcohol, history–and maybe even a combination of all three. We open with a review of Judith Grisel’s new book “Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction,” which was released last month. 

If you’re interested in reviewing a book for Points, get in touch! You can reach editor Emily Dufton at emily.dufton (a) gmail.com

Screenshot 2019-03-07 at 9.02.18 AMSometimes it’s nice to consult an expert.

I first heard Judith Grisel on Fresh Air. Her interview with Terry Gross was fascinating. She has a PhD in behavioral neuroscience and psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and she spent a good part of her early life addicted to numerous substances, including alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and more. Now drug-free for over thirty years, she is a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Her approach to the difficult subject of addiction is thus colored by all of her experiences. Because of her years as someone who had an unhealthy romance with numerous intoxicants (the title comes from a statement a friend made to her in a seedy hotel room in Miami as they snorted up as much cocaine as they physically could; there would “never be enough cocaine” for Grisel, her friend said, and when she realized the truth in this statement, it was a turning point in her life and career), she’s aware of the havoc addiction can wreak in individuals’, families’ and communities’ lives. As a neuroscientist and psychologist who has spent decades studying how the brain reacts to, and adapts to, intoxicant use, she’s also adept at explaining the biological and neurological underpinnings of this issue.

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Could the Supreme Court’s Forfeiture Ruling Help End the Drug Wars?

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Did the Supreme Court unanimously de-escalate the drug wars last month? The optimist in me says “yes,” and the historian in me agrees.

In Timbs v. Indiana, the Court ruled that the state could not seize and forfeit the plaintiff’s Land Rover as a result of his drug conviction. While this decision alone will not end “policing for profit,” it will subject state asset-forfeiture laws to unprecedented scrutiny. Michigan and South Carolina legislators immediately introduced bills to reform asset forfeiture, for example, and district attorneys in Alabama scrambled to show how their forfeitures are already transparent and constitutional.

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