Month: September 2019

The Mysterious World of CBD: Part I

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Mike Luce, co-founder of High Yield Insights, one of the cannabis industry’s first marketing and strategy firms. Here he presents the first in his two-part series on the mysterious world–and spurious marketing–of CBD, a product I’m sure you’ve seen advertised and made available nearly everywhere. His follow-up will run on Tuesday next week. Stay tuned!

Americans are consumed by fads in food, drink, and wellness. We swing from one subject of fascination to another: antioxidants, açai, resveratrol, fat free, healthy fats, active cultures, spiked seltzers, organic, biodynamic, anything free range, you name it.

Screenshot 2019-09-26 at 8.42.32 AMYet the latest fad to hit the USA Today-level is unique in post-WWII America. Interest in CBD, the three letters you see everywhere, has reached a fever pitch. This does necessarily set CBD apart from other fads in consumer goods, but hitting the mainstream radar so fast and so hard puts CBD in the upper echelon. The potential of CBD is largely unknown and the future scale of what’s starting to be known as the CBD industry is unpredictable. Consumers, including those using CBD today, poorly grasp the nature of CBD, lack any precise understanding of how CBD works and what it does, and express significant concerns about safety. Yet forecasts place the CBD market at $15-20 billion by 2025. Contrast those figures with the latest numbers by some household products, and CBD’s estimates truly pop: 

Sales of CBD will net out close to $5 billion in 2019, a puny number in comparison. But the last industry on the list above can’t expect more than low single digit annual growth rate. To reach the market size forecasts, CBD will experience compound annual growth rates over 100 percent. That new users will drive that growth should be obvious.

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Ergot and the First Roots of the FDA

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Naomi Rendina. Rendina is a PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University. She is expected to defend her dissertation, Pushing Too Hard: Pharmaceuticals and the Nature of Childbirth, in early March 2020. Here she explores the role a controversy of ergot played in creating the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was first formed in 1906. 

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Naomi Rendina

Pharmacists and historians celebrated the 200th anniversary of the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) at the 44th International Congress for the History of Pharmacy, on September 5- 8, 2019, in Washington, DC. Founded in 1819, the USP remains the non-profit organization responsible for creating the standards for medicines, food ingredients, and supplements. These standards ensure that each compound is appropriately identified, and is of consistent strength, quality, and purity. For three days, historians and pharmacists presented their research on drugs, as well as histories of the profession and institutions that shape pharmacy. 

What most stood out to me was a comment that  FDA historian Dr. John Swann made during his portion of the Opening Ceremony comments. He said that the period between 1906 and 1938 were formative years of what became the Food and Drug Administration. This statement underlined one of my frustrations in researching the history of ergot (a group of fungi that have been used to treat a variety of medical issues, including inducing contractions and controlling bleeding after childbirth). The incident fascinated me, but I stumbled through reasons why anyone else would find this as amazing as I did. Dr. Swann argued that these years were foundational to the institutionalization of science and of the regulation of food and medicine in the United States, but are all too often only given a cursory glance. 

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Maybe Next Year: The Failure to Legalize Adult-Use Cannabis in New York

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Bob Beach, our resident New Yorker who provides insights into the his state’s twisted path to potential cannabis legalization. Beach is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Albany, SUNY.

On August 28, 2019, New York State officially decriminalized marijuana. Most saw decriminalization as an important step toward the even more equitable legalization measure that failed to pass the Democrat-led state legislature this year, but which seems inevitable given recent trends in legalizing (with the recent addition of Illinois this year). Particularly in light of the inevitable comparisons to Illinois, others are making connections to the “eerily similar” debates over decriminalization in New York in 1977 at the height of the state-level decriminalization wave that was then spreading throughout the country. During that year the New York State legislature passed, and then-Governor Hugh Carey signed, what was at the time the ninth state-level decriminalization measure in the country.

(Current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and then-Governor Hugh Carey)

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Workshop Report: Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan

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Editor’s Note: This workshop report is from Dr. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who recently traveled to Switzerland for the event.

A workshop entitled “Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan” was held at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, from Aug. 22-24, 2019. It was organized by Dr. Judith Vitale with the help of Ulrich Brandenburg of the host institution. The workshop was impressively multinational, bringing together speakers representing universities from six countries and three continents. 

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CFP: Beyond the Medicines/Drugs Dichotomy: Historical Perspectives on Good and Evil in Pharmacy

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Editor’s Note: You know you’ve always wanted to visit South Africa. Here’s your chance! Check out this CFP for an exciting conference at the University of Johannesburg this December. Beyond the Medicines/Drugs Dichotomy: Historical Perspectives on Good and Evil in Pharmacy  University of Johannesburg 5-7 December 2019 The dichotomy between pharmacologically-active substances considered legitimate (and …

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Fiction Points: Amy Long

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  Amy Long is the author of Codependence: Essays (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2019) and a founding member of the Points editorial board. She has worked for drug policy reform and free speech advocacy groups in California, D.C., and New York; as a bookseller at Bookpeople in Austin, TX; and as an English instructor at Virginia Tech …

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Points Bookshelf: “Imperial Twilight” by Stephen R. Platt

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Dr. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

Screenshot 2019-09-05 at 8.18.45 AMWithin the field of Chinese history, the Opium War, fought in the southern port city of Canton (Guangzhou) and its environs from 1839-1842, is among the most exhaustively researched of topics. Scholars have long argued for the significance of this nineteenth-century clash between the British and Chinese empires, representing it as the beginning of the latter’s infamous “century of humiliation” at the hands of the great powers. Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of the China’s Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018) does not dispute this view of the conflict as a watershed marking British ascendancy and Chinese decline. However, Stephen Platt’s highly readable and original book does overturn various longstanding assumptions about the events leading up to the war. In particular, he shows how small moments of frustration and miscommunication changed the course of history. 

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Fiction Points: Eva Hagberg

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Eva Hagberg, author of How to be Loved: A Memoir of Life-Saving Friendship (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019), holds degrees in architecture from UC Berkeley and Princeton and a PhD in Visual and Narrative Culture from Berkeley, from which she received fellowships and awards for her research and teaching. She has written and published two books on architecture, Dark …

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