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“The Adventurous Tasters,” a Story for Fat Tuesday

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Editor’s Note: Today’s timely Mardi Gras-themed post comes from contributing editor Sarah Brady Siff, a visiting assistant professor at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, in affiliation with the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC).

The place: Paris. The year: 1850. “It was mardi-gras, and copious libations of flaming punch had prepared the natives for anything or everything.” So began a tale reprinted widely by newspaper editors across the globe. 

(Here in the United States, Mardi Gras 2021 surely will be the soberest on record, New Orleans itself having condemned “superspreader” crowds, called off parades, shuttered bars, and banned most alcohol sales.)

An illustration of Fat Tuesday revelers from the 1859 book Les Rues de Paris [Streets of Paris].

In 1850, though, the local Parisians were the type to spend a lot of time hanging out at a café. So that’s where they were on Mardi Gras, drinking punch (likely made of rum) at a café just up the block from an apartment where a physician lived with his family. 

This physician had received an excellent imported shipment of cannabis extract, and he was keen to share it for recreational use on this most celebratory and hedonistic day. The drunken revelers were willing participants—”adventurous tasters”—living in the same city at the same time as that famous literary circle, the Club des Hashischins. The doctor showed up with 15 grains, or about 1 gram, to distribute at the café. “Not more than a single grain was given to each,” read the article. Some swallowed it like a pill, while others smoked it or smeared it on a cigarette paper to smoke with tobacco. One grain was dissolved in a glass of Curaçao for the “master of the house; [but] his two young and handsome daughters were forbidden to taste of the drug.” 

Of course one of the daughters found a way to sample the cannabis; it would hardly have been a story otherwise. After about 45 minutes, the girl shrieked and “was suddenly struck with delirium and hysterical movements of a very alarming appearance,” according to the article, which went on to describe her ordeal:

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Joe Biden and Drug Control: A More Complete Picture (Part 3—the Late ’80s)

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Sarah Brady Siff, a visiting assistant professor at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, in affiliation with the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC). She continues the series on Joe Biden’s drug policy she started last month.

Now that Joe Biden has been duly elected president, I want to continue exploring his drug control activities where I left off last month. Although it takes me further and further from my chronological comfort zone as a historian, I have really appreciated the opportunity that writing for Points has presented me to learn some basic stuff about the “decade of greed.” To that end, I watched The Last Narc, an Amazon series about the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Mexican-American DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in February 1985. I know very little about this incident, but I had seen so many references to it in primary and secondary sources that I figured it had to be a defining event in the history of the drug wars. 

The new documentary went something like this (spoiler alert … ?). Part 1: The traffickers involved were selfish, brutal, and strung out; but Mexican officials at the highest level also were complicit in the wildly profitable and violent drug trade. Part 2: Cartel commanders definitely beat Camarena to death slowly while he begged for his life. Part 3: Wait, CIA agent Félix Rodríguez also beat and questioned Camarena, who probably knew too much about the U.S.-run Contra training camp in Central America secretly funded by Mexican cartels running South American cocaine into the United States. Part 4: An unidentified DEA agent also assisted in planning the abduction; looks like Camarena was betrayed by his own government. 

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Joe Biden and Drug Control: A More Complete Picture (Part 2—the 1980s)

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Sarah Brady Siff, a visiting assistant professor at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, in affiliation with the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC). She continues the series on Joe Biden’s drug policy she started last week.

It was an election year—1980—but Senator Joe Biden was not up for reelection. His interest and expertise in drug policy were sharper than ever, and his membership on the Foreign Relations and  Judiciary committees (where he chaired subcommittees on European affairs and criminal justice) enabled him to pursue the drugs issue from both the international/supply side and the domestic/demand side. 

Biden had been immersed in international Cold War politics while working on agreements with the Soviet Union and others to curb the nuclear arms race (the SALT treaties). At the same time, he accepted the duty of oversight of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) starting in 1978, as the first experimental decade of massive federal funding for law enforcement was drawing to a close. Though setbacks would occur, the early 1980s presented Biden with a unique opportunity to create more robust federal drug control. 

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Joe Biden and Drug Control: A More Complete Picture (Part 1—the 1970s)

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Sarah Brady Siff, a visiting assistant professor at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, in affiliation with the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC). As we prepare for the election next month, her examination of Joe Biden’s historical views on drug policy will continue next week.

Okay, here’s the deal: Joe Biden is a right-leaning moderate on drug control. Always has been. No surprise there.

However, examples of Biden’s past interest and instrumentality in drug policy are surprisingly copious. Spanning a half-century, these facts somehow seem both historical and ongoing. Progressives and libertarians must face the improbability of true policy reform from someone who has waged so much war on drugs for so very long. 

Biden consistently held three broad positions during the 1970s: (1) the harms of recreational drug use were severe and urgent, especially because drugs caused crime; (2) the United States should spend money on drug control, but wisely; and (3) cannabis was really not so bad. The first decade of Biden’s career in national politics showed him that drug control was popular with voters, but difficult to manage.

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Suspect and Report: Anti-drug Propaganda for ’Sixties Families

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In 1963, Los Angeles County distributed through the public school system 200,000 copies of a stylishly designed, wide-format brochure printed on heavy paper. It featured illustrations by a Walt Disney artist and a dire message: Your kid might be on drugs.

Targeted at parents of teen-agers, “Darkness on Your Doorstep” used thick margins, modern typefaces, and crisp copywriting to present key information about illegal drugs. Illustrations and photographic compositions mostly depicted a young male desperately trying to cope with or escape from drug addiction. While exonerating the youthful drug user on one hand, the text urged parents to suspect and report him on the other. “Taking dope is different from other bad behavior,” it read. “Once a person becomes an addict, he can’t control his habit. His habit controls him.”

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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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The Sociological Approach, Part 2: Judy Garland and Billie Holiday

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Note from Sarah Brady Siff: This post was written by Cecilia Burtis of Tiffin, Ohio, who earned an undergraduate degree in sociology from Miami University in 2018. See also Part 1.

In California, the entertainment industry brought drug use to the forefront of public attention, where the constant press coverage of movie stars exposed drug abuse and trafficking in vivid detail. In the 1940s and 1950s, two female stars in particular were known for their well-publicized struggles with drugs, though they occupied very different spaces in public opinion. Judy Garland and Billie Holiday are two contrasting examples of how the drug policies of the 1940s and 1950s selectively punished forms of drug addiction that were considered more dangerous. Although both women fought long battles with drug addiction, the attention given to each, as demonstrated through the media, shows very different receptions of drug dependency.

Garland and Holiday, though traveling career paths that seldom intersected, shared a surprising number of parallels. Garland was born in 1922, Holiday in 1915. Their careers both began when they were young, and they began using drugs at early ages. They were well-known singers, although Garland was an actress as well, and they both struggled with drug and alcohol dependence. They both were checked into treatment several times, both contracted cirrhosis of the liver due to immense alcohol consumption, and both died in their mid-40s of drug-related causes.

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The Sociological Approach, Part 1

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In an article recently published in the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Joseph Spillane has given me some clues on how to proceed in my own work. “Inside the Fantastic Lodge” is Spillane’s consideration of the networks, identity-making and social limitations revealed in Marilyn Bishop’s narration of her days as a young white heroin …

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