Elaine Carey – Points: short & insightful writing about the long & complex history of drugs & alcohol

Review: “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy”

January 26, 2022May 7, 2019 by emilydufton

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Dr. Elaine Carey, professor of history and Dean of the College of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences at Purdue University Northwest, and a regular contributor to Points. Today she reviews a recent theatrical production that should be of interest to drug scholars. For this dope scholar, a recent trip to Miami …

Gender and Critical Drug Studies: A Woman Formed the First Cartel?

January 31, 2022September 11, 2018 by emilydufton

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Elaine Carey, professor of history and Dean of the College of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences at Purdue University Northwest. In it, she explores more about her article on Delia Patricia Buendía Gutierrez, a contemporary female leader of a Mexican drug trafficking organization, which appeared in a special co-produced edition of SHAD and CDP, Special Issue: Gender and Critical Drug Studies. Enjoy!

Screenshot 2018-09-10 at 12.57.31 PM — Elaine Carey

To analyze contemporary female leaders of Mexican drug trafficking organizations, I focused on Delia Patricia Buendía Gutierrez, also known as “Ma Baker,” because she represents a historical continuity of the women in the drug trade. More significantly, however, her organization represents how the history of drugs responds to various contingent and changing factors and events.

Buendía formed a powerful familial-based drug trafficking organization (DTO) that grew the internal cocaine trade in Mexico. She and her daughters Marcela Gabriela, Nadia Isabel, and Norma Patricia, along with extended family and sons-in-laws, built a “narcomenudeo” network in the working class suburb of Ciudad Neza. There, the Buendía became instrumental to other DTOs by responding to changing demand patterns in the US that shifted from cocaine to heroin. This shift was, in part, due to the over prescription of opioids by medical doctors which triggered a wide spread heroin epidemic.

Booze Collectors, Part I

February 18, 2013February 11, 2013 by lenicarey

As a historian, I want to pause for a moment and thank the collectors. While I enjoy a jaunt through an antique, rare books, or vintage store, I have not developed the eye or the love of the search and acquisition of some desired object, document, book, or even clothing item. As a historian, I also readily admit that I do not have the financial resources of some of the great collectors of Americana. Richard Gilder, Lewis Lehrman, Samuel Tilden, John Jacob Astor, or James Lenox have been instrumental in building historical collections in New York City such as Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History at the New York Historical Society and the New York Public Library-Steve Schwartzman building. Their love of history and their ability to collect it have given many historians the evidence needed to demonstrate the complexity of the past. These important collections grew due, in part, to the focused work of collectors.

These stewards of American history have played an important role in my research and teaching. For the past couple of years, I have worked closely with librarians and archivists in New York City to teach my students to use the great collections resources for their own projects. That ongoing collaboration with historical practitioners has greatly enhanced my knowledge about drug and alcohol collections. As I discussed in a previous blog, “Doing Drugs in the Archive,” there are many unique collections on drugs and alcohol that are worth a trip to New York. Returning to this theme, I plan to highlight a couple of collections this year, and I want to start by introducing a smaller collection:the Liebmann collection of American historical documents relating to spirituous liquors. It is part of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations in the Schwartzman Building.

Days of the Dead

October 29, 2012October 29, 2012 by lenicarey

In The Labyrinth of Solitude, renowned Mexican writer and cultural critic Octavio Paz observed: “The word death is not pronounced in New York, Paris, and London because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death jokes about it, caresses it,

sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast loves” (Paz, 57). On the eve of All Saints and All Souls days, the Mexican drug war has spawned a new genre of death imagery that now threatens Paz’s cultural perceptions.

Lenin Márquez Salazar’s paintings document the impact of narco violence. In one painting of Aparecidos, a young boy wearing a cap with Sylvester chasing Tweety Bird smiles to the viewer before a bound body murdered execution style. The child’s innocence is blighted by the images of death that surround him in a dreamlike state. At first glance, he appears unaware, but on closer inspection he appears years older, as he holds the viewers gaze with an uneasy smirk. Is he the assassin or unwitting victim of a narco drama? In his landscape series Paisajes,the beauty of the countryside is tarnished by the bound and murdered bodies that mar it, but the dead are just as essential as the trees, mountains, and sky.

lenin1 — Paisaje I by Lenin Márquez Salazar

For years, drugs have—borrowing from Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters–haunted Mexico,

A Colombian Queen’s Tale: The End and Beginning of Griselda Blanco

September 30, 2012September 26, 2012 by lenicarey

Griselda Blanco, the Cocaine Godmother, was gunned down in front of a butcher shop in Medellín, Colombia on September 3, 2012. Since her initial indictments in New York City beginning in the early 1970s, Blanco has flitted in and out of the popular imagination. Tales of Blanco emerged first in police and court documents and newspapers. In more recent years, she could be found in nonfiction, docudramas, popular magazines, blogs, YouTube, and other media.

Like other high-level female drug traffickers, Blanco created important alliances with men, but differed from her peers due to her extensive use of violence. She employed it as an offensive tool against male competitors and even men who were employed by her or her clients. Violence served to demonstrate her power and to strike fear in the men that surrounded her. Her ruthlessness contributed to a growing gangster hagiography and titillation that continues to surround her and those men connected to her. This explains why her death brought new attention. Yet, Blanco’s story is another New York City organized crime tale with many twists and turns: changing criminal enterprises, licit and illicit work, lovers turned traitors, and police/criminal chases across continents.

Mexico’s Election: Drug Continuities or Contingencies? By Javier Alvarez-Isasi and Elaine Carey

July 30, 2012July 30, 2012 by lenicarey

As historians, we know that there are historical continuities and contingencies. We study these, debate these, and occasionally we attempt to make a few insights into the present day. This post attempts to perform the latter. So, here we go again with another Mexican presidential election that is rife with continuities and contingencies.

Mexican Election — Voting in Atlacomulco, July 2012

In 2000, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost seventy continued years of presidential power. That year, we observed the elections and the massive eruption of street celebrations when it was announced that Vicente Fox had won the election. Twelve years later, 2012 was the PRI’s come back year, and it ran as a deep-pocketed opposition party with a telegenic candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. Of course, the PRI had less support from the middle and educated classes, groups that the party had courted since the 1940s. With the murder of the PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, the Zapatista uprising that same year, and the Aguas Blanca massacre of a group of campesinos (Mexican peasants) in 1996, the PRI lost credibility in all levels of the public sphere. The PRI political machine had long created an illusion of respectability and control through sheer force and media manipulation. However, massacres, social upheavals, bank collapses, power politics resembling organized crime syndicates, hyper inflation, and devaluations became more and more difficult for Mexicans to stomach and ignore.

Doing Drugs in the Archives

June 25, 2012June 25, 2012 by lenicarey

The summer brings scholars from all across the United States and the world to New York City’s libraries and archives. For the past three years, I have been introducing my undergraduate students to “doing history” with my former student Raymond Pun who is a librarian at the New York Public Library. In some ways, teaching undergrads to use archives is my day job. My other gig is that I have spent the last seven years doing drugs. . . . that is doing them in the archives and libraries in the city. My collaboration with Pun, as well as other librarians and archivists, has given me an opportunity to mine historical and contemporary sources that I never would have found without their knowledge and assistance. This list is not exhaustive, but rather it highlights a few public and private libraries and archives.

The New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwartzman Building (SASB), the main research library, is the forth-largest library in the world and the second largest research library in the United States. The stacks stretch under Bryant Park as well as onto offsite locations in New Jersey. This lion guarded edifice is also full of drug paraphernalia in the form of novels, books, documents, images, maps, realia, and ephemera. The periodicals division where Pun is the librarian holds newspapers from around the world, but also Traffic in Opium and other Dangerous Drugs. It was in the pages of that publication that I found the some early photos of seizures including heroin-infused fibers, a skill that continues into the present.

A Perfect Partnership: Gun Smugglers and Drug Traffickers:

May 21, 2012May 21, 2012 by lenicarey

The fallout from Operation Fast and Furious has demonstrated the desperation of the U.S. government to deal with the flows of drugs and drug violence from Mexico. At the heart of Operation Fast and Furious are guns: AK-47s, AR-15s, FN Five-sevens, and AK variants that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) permitted to pass into the hands of gun smugglers so the arms could be traced to the upper echelons of Mexican drug cartels. These traceable firearms have been used in an estimated 150 murders of Mexicans as well as the shooting death of a U.S. border patrol agent. That murder triggered an investigation of the controversial operation now ensnares the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Justice Department in hearings.