Features

These are current features running on the Points blog.

Navigating Cannabis Use in Legal and Illegal Contexts Across Continents: An Interview

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As part of our Pharmaceutical Inequalities series, Ejura Salihu interviews a 25-year-old Nigerian man, who now lives in the United States and uses cannabis, to understand his experiences of navigating the legal considerations of using cannabis in different geographical contexts.

Points Interview: the History of Elemental Analysis in Mexico with Mariana Reynoso and Gabriel Gonzalez-Bravo

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Today’s post features an interview with Mariana Reynoso, a Mexico-based pharmaceutical historian and Gabriel Gonzalez-Bravo, a Mexico-based chemistry researcher. These scholars focus on the history of chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences in Mexico. Mariana and Gabriel recently authored ‘Johann Wilhelm Schaffner, Leopoldo Rio de la Loza, and elemental analysis in Mexico’ in the recently-published issue of the History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. Find out more about their backgrounds, article and future research plans in this interview.

From the Streets to the Kitchen: The Changing Face of Cannabis in the Media

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Figure 1: An ad for a film titled “Marihuana.” (National Library of Medicine)

The representation of cannabis (also known as marijuana, marihuana, pot, or weed) in the media has evolved over time. In the past, media coverage of cannabis primarily focused on its potential harms and association with criminal activity, pervasion, and addiction. From 1980 to the early 1990s, news stories about drug busts and the dangers of smoking cannabis dominated headlines, while print media, movies, and TV shows depicted cannabis users as dangerous. In popular culture, smoking cannabis was considered a forbidden ‘rite of passage’ spoken about in whispers. This type of coverage was the norm for several years and contributed to the low prevalence of cannabis use and the stigma and criminalization of cannabis users (as shown in Figure 1).

However, with the rise of medical marijuana legalization in the early 2010s, the media shifted its narrative. Journalists started reporting on the potential benefits of cannabis for treating various medical conditions, such as chronic pain, anxiety, and epilepsy. News stories featuring medical cannabis patients and their stories became common, and documentaries exploring the science behind cannabis and its medicinal properties gained popularity.

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Historical Hangovers: Picturing the Drunken Woman from the Nineteenth Century to the Present.

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April sees the return of the Grand National and the British media are always hungry to report on a particular spectacle – Ladies Day. For years, the British tabloids such as The Daily Mail have focused primarily on the behaviour of Aintree Races’ female attendees, tapping into negative stereotypes associated with the recreation of women from predominantly working-class areas. In recent years, the tireless shaming of Liverpudlian racegoers has come under scrutiny for its sexist and classist sentiment. But the ridicule of the publicly intoxicated woman is nothing new. The nineteenth century ‘drink question’ bore a wealth of material culture portraying drunk women as especially deviant, and researchers have noted that the Victorian temperance movement has had a lasting impact on the way in which we think about the relationship between drunkenness, gender, and class.

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Brenda Dean Paul: Morphia, Camels, Lipstick and Chiffon Knickers

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It is possible to read the life of Brenda Dean Paul in a variety of ways. While Elliott Hicks in a recent article focuses very largely on class relationships in interwar Britain, this short piece concentrates more on issues with a specific connection to the drug policy context and to the development in Britain of social modernism. These lines of inquiry are of course linked to social class but cannot be ‘read off’ from class positions.

By the term social modernism, I am referring to lifestyle practices associated with modernism in the arts and literature, alongside which it crossed the English channel in the interwar years. Brenda Dean Paul belonged, largely through the influence of her mother Irene Poldowski, to a rich and complex European modernist network. The lifestyle practices to which I refer would include divorce, bisexuality and same sex relationships, travel, bohemianism, liberal views of the proper relations obtaining between parents and children, the frequenting of nightclubs and so on. Although modernism has frequently been associated with a disdain for popular culture, it is noteworthy that jazz music and jazz modes of dancing were also part of this mix and would lead some of its adherents into the politics of race in the United States. Social modernism was also closely linked to experimentation with drugs.

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Sobriety as self-care?

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Since the turn of the 21st century there has been increasing popular engagement with the phenomenon of self-care. By this I mean those (sometimes everyday) activities that individuals carry out to manage and restore their own health, both mental and physical. This is how self-care has been most commonly understood within Western healthcare and clinical settings (Levin and Idler, 1983). However, themes of self-care have been co-opted by consumer brands within marketing campaigns, particularly targeted at women. Products and services are sold with the promise of relaxation, fulfilment and wellness – sometimes with a substantial price-tag attached, and with the expectation that consumers are able-bodied. Alcohol brands have also been found to draw upon similar, feminised themes of respite, reward and time-out within their marketing in order to present a healthful interpretation of alcohol-consumption. Wine or gin is sometimes portrayed as a key, constituent part in a woman’s self-care routine (Atkinson et al., 2021). Indeed, this is quite the departure from the self-care that was practiced within radical feminist circles of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Dudley-Shotwell, 2020) and Audre Lorde’s writings on living with cancer: Lorde described her self-care as ‘a political decision as well as a life-saving one’ (1988 [2017], p. 130).

This rise to prominence of self-care has coincided with the emergence of women-founded, UK-based online sobriety communities that utilise social media platforms to help people change their relationship with alcohol, such as Club Soda, Sober Girl Society and Sober & Social. These communities primarily facilitate peer to peer support and sometimes provide additional services, including coaching and social events. The majority of their members are women, compared to men, who are less likely to utilise traditional, evidence-based treatment programmes (Davey, 2021).

In a recent open-access, peer-reviewed article (Davey, 2022), I explored the ways in which women, who utilise or lead online sobriety communities, conceptualise their sobriety as a form of physical and mental self-care. I found that women draw on discourses of wellbeing to position sobriety as a practice of individualised, embodied self-care whereby they experience improvements to their physical, mental and menstrual health. Women used sobriety as a strategy of care for their minds and bodies when medical assistance was lacking or not forthcoming.

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Addiction Lives Interview: Susanne MacGregor

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The “Addiction Lives” interview project, a print and online collaboration between the Society for the Study of Addiction and the journal Addiction, explores the views and personal experiences of people who have especially contributed to the evolution of the field of addiction. In this episode, Virginia Berridge is joined by Professor Susanne MacGregor. You can find out more about this interview with Professor Susanne MacGregor and listen to a short audio clip here.

Professor MacGregor is an honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Middlesex University London. She previously held academic posts at the University of Edinburgh, Institute of Psychiatry, Birkbeck University of London, and Goldsmiths University of London. She is a former associate Editor of the International Journal of Drug Policy, and a Scientific Advisor to the Department of Health in England.

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A Snapshot of Drug Advertising Laws in the USA: Impact on Consumer Protection and Health

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Traditional drug advertisements involve drug ads and promotional material targeted at healthcare professionals to increase clinician knowledge of advancement in treatment options. On the other hand, direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) is pharmaceutical advertising directed at patients to increase their awareness of available drugs and treatment options.

There has been renewed interest in the value of DTCA in recent years, which makes it seem like a modern phenomenon, but the practice dates back to early medical training. The argument in support of DTCA is that targeting consumers instead of healthcare providers gives patients power and agency over their drug consumption (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2016). While this argument has some merits, it is vital that we know the history of drug advertisements in the United States to understand how DTCA has shaped public perception of drugs, drug use, and public health. Only with this understanding can we make a sound judgment on the need for DTCA in present times and the future of healthcare.

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