Month: August 2019

Call for Papers: Entangling Histories of International Trafficking

by

Editor’s Note: Today we bring you a special bonus post from Dr. Ned Richardson-Little. He’s putting together a conference at the University of Erfurt in July 2020, and the call for papers is below. Hope to see you in Germany! At the beginning of the 21st century, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime …

Read more

The Eastern Bloc, the Cold War and International Drug Trafficking

by

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is the final in the two-part series from Dr. Ned Richardson-Little on drug use in East Germany during the Communist period. Richardson-Little is a Freigeist Fellow at the University of Erfurt, Germany, where he is currently leading a major research project on the history of “deviant globalization” in modern Germany. Originally from Canada, he studied at McGill University and received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has previously worked at the University of Exeter (UK). If you’re interested in learning more about the sources in this post, contact Richardson-Little at ned.richardson-little@uni-erfurt.de.

Screenshot 2019-08-22 at 8.08.12 AM
Dr. Ned Richardson-Little

One of the staples of Eastern Bloc propaganda was the notion that socialism produced a drug-free society. Under capitalism, young people were driven to narcotics due to the emptiness of consumerism and the despair of exploitation; under socialism there was no such need for escape. To some extent, this propaganda was actually based on reality. In contrast to the post-war West, there was no mass drug culture in Eastern Europe. Cannabis, cocaine, heroin and other restricted substances were also banned or strictly regulated in the East, but there were comparatively few arrests for possession or dealing. The black market could provide many imported products normally unavailable in state stores, but very rarely did that include trafficked narcotics. As one East German put it, hashish was as “hard to get your hands on as explosives.”

Was this, however, really an effect of the enlightened social policies of state socialism? Possibly for some, but the main driver was economics: Eastern Bloc citizens lacked the hard currency needed to purchase narcotics from traffickers. Few international criminal smuggling operations were interested in the socialist market, where – in the absence of Western money – they would need to barter for locally produced goods. As it turns out, not many people in the heroin business are willing to trade their product for a Trabant. And thus, the proliferation of international trafficking routes in the post-war era largely bypassed the Eastern Bloc. While China was once one of the great centres of opium addiction, its consumption dropped off almost completely after the Communist Revolution. Although Cuba was once a hotspot for organized crime, the mafia relocated after the Castro regime took control in 1959. 

Read more

Fiction Points: Susanne Davis

by

SusanneDavisSusanne Davis is the author of The Appointed Hour (Cornerstone Press 2017), a linked short story collection and her first book. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where her thesis won the Hemingway First Novel Award. Davis teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut and via the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT. Her stories and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Carve, Feminist Review, Harvard Law Bulletin, and elsewhere, including as a Special Mention story in Best American Short Stories 1998. She also self released the instructional writing book A Writer’s Voice: Indelible on the Page (Amazon Digital Services 2013).

Two nuns and a penguin approach you at a bar, and you tell them you’re a writer. When they ask you what you write about, how do you answer?

To the nuns I say my characters are people in the pricker bushes so to speak, Farmers, strippers, carpenters, tattoo artists—even a nun, Mother Agnes, who gave up Hollywood fame to marry God. They are all trying to make meaning of their lives. And I would tell them Mother Agnes was the last character created for my linked short story collection The Appointed Hour. With her authentic love for humanity, she tries to make a dramatic save in a corner of rural Connecticut where the wound of violence done in their midst hasn’t fully healed. 

To the penguin, I would say I write about the environment and that my writing has a strong sense of place. The environment means a great deal to me and I would ask the penguin, who lives much closer to the humming tune of the earth than I, what more I can do to help? What stories need to be told that aren’t being told?

Points is a blog primarily for drug and alcohol historians. What do you think this audience would find most interesting about your work?

In my story collection, The Appointed Hour, a handful of stories have rural characters struggling with drugs and alcohol addiction and a sense of despair that brings them to the brink of self-destruction. The stories illuminate the damage done to others as a result. Often, though, in rural America, manual labor jobs and jobs on the land itself are like a redemptive act for those in the midst of struggle with addiction.

Read more

Reefer Madness Behind the Iron Curtain

by

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from guest writer Dr. Ned Richardson-Little, and it begins a two-week special series on drug use in East Germany during the Communist period. Richardson-Little is a Freigeist Fellow at the University of Erfurt, Germany, where he is currently leading a major research project on the history of “deviant globalization” in modern Germany. Originally from Canada, he studied at McGill University and received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has previously worked at the University of Exeter (UK). If you’re interested in learning more about the sources in this post, contact Richardson-Little at ned.richardson-little@uni-erfurt.de.

Screenshot 2019-08-22 at 8.08.12 AM
Dr. Ned Richardson-Little

In Junky, William S. Burrough’s 1953 memoir of his experiences as a heroin user, he captures the paranoia of the early Cold War in America in a conversation about drugs:

“Tell me,” I said, “exactly what is the tie-up between narcotics and Communism?”

“You know the answer to that one a lot better than I do […] The same people are in both narcotics and Communism. Right now, they control most of America.”

The idea that communists were behind narcotics was hardly a fringe notion and it was often advanced publicly by the US Drug Czar Harry Anslinger and other state officials. Anslinger claimed that there was a global communist conspiracy to use drugs as a weapon against capitalism on the path to global domination. He warned of “Red China’s long range dope-and-dialectic assault on America” and claimed that Cuba’s Fidel Castro had “joined the hammer and sickle – and the narcotic needle,” by assisting the People’s Republic of China in trafficking drugs into the US. In 1948, he testified to Congress that “Marijuana leads to pacifism and Communist brainwashing.” In the early Cold War, drug warriors in the West saw the fight against narcotics and communism as a singular conflict.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, however, Communists were equally concerned about the dangerous impact of narcotics and addiction, which they believed were the product of a diseased capitalist society. While many leftists in the West saw recreational drug consumption as part of an anti-capitalist counterculture, the state socialists of the Eastern Bloc were just as vehemently opposed to narcotics as capitalist anti-drug warriors.

Read more

Fiction Points: Tracy Auerbach

by

Tracy Auerbach‘s YA debut, The Sin Soldiers (Parliament House 2019), is the first novel in her Fragments series. She is the author of one novel for adults, The Human Cure (48Fourteen 2011), and her short stories have been published in venues such as Micro-horror, the Writing Disorder and (Dis)ability anthologies. Auerbach previously wrote and taught STEM curricula for the New York Department of Education, …

Read more

The Points Interview: Michelle Drozdick

by

Editor’s Note: Today we interview the playwright and performer Michelle Drozdick, who is a self-described “comedian, improviser, performer, and cat lover moonlighting as a human being.” She is best known for her solo shows Message in a Bottle and The Gimmick and You. She’s performed at countless theaters across NYC, is on too many improv teams to keep track of, and would love for you to follow her on Twitter at @drozphallic. Message in a Bottle will have a three-run show at QED Theater in Astoria, Queens, from 8/18 to 8/20, all at 7pm. In anticipation of these performances, we talked to Drozdick about the mysteries of talking penguins, personifying objects, and what it’s like to love a bottle of vodka.

Screenshot 2019-08-14 09.50.23
Michelle Drozdick

Two nuns and a penguin approach you at a bar, and you tell them you’re a writer and performer. When they ask you what your play is about, how do you answer?

First I’d chat with the penguin, because how often do you meet a talking penguin? I’d love to know how it came to talk, and if it’s the only one of its kind or if there’s more. If it’s the only one of its kind, is it lonely? Does it have trouble interacting with other penguins? If there are more, what kind of society do they have? Why is it hanging out with nuns? Is it because they’re both black and white, or is the penguin religious? Are there Catholic penguins? What is their view of the afterlife?

Once I got past the penguin thing, and apologized to the nuns for overlooking them, I’d tell them Message in a Bottle is a dark comedy/drama about alcoholism, portrayed as a romantic relationship between a woman and a self-aware bottle of vodka with googly eyes, plastic forks for arms, and a necktie. I’d warn the nuns that it can get a little adult at times, but nothing stronger than a PG-13 rating, tell them the show covers the first date all the way to what comes after the “end,” then offer them all comped tickets.

Points is a blog primarily for drug and alcohol historians. What do you think this audience would find most interesting about your work?

I love exploring the personification of objects in art, especially over time. It’s really interesting to see how we portray inanimate things that don’t actually have thoughts or personalities based on attributes of our own culture and society. I recently saw a great engraving by John Warner Barber from the 1820s called “King Alcohol, and his Prime Minister,” and there are lots of wonderful cartoons from the Prohibition-era (and the time leading up to it) that portray alcohol as an actual person wreaking havoc.

My show is a definitely inspired by this sort of art, and I spent a lot of time reading up on these older portrayals of alcohol, while trying to adapt it to a modern-day, personal story.

Read more

Call for Proposals: Drug Policy Research Incubator Pleasure and Self-Regulating Drug Use

by

Editor’s Note: We’re double-posting today for an exciting reason. See below for a call for proposals from the Drug Policy Alliance that may be of interest to readers. Act fast – proposals are due in one month.  The Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of Academic Engagement is committed to improving drug policy research. Through a project …

Read more

Fiction Points: Carla Sameth

by

Carla Sameth is the author of the memoir-in-essays One Day on the Gold Line (Black Rose Writing 2019). She teaches creative writing at the Los Angeles Writing Project at California State University Los Angeles, with Southern New Hampshire University, and to incarcerated teens through WriteGirl. She has attended and received financial support from the Vermont College of …

Read more