In the early hours of the morning of 1st July 1937, Gerald Edward Mary O’Brien was detained by police officers on the ferry returning from Dieppe. He had crossed the channel with six grammes of high-quality heroin concealed about his person. It was the last of what had been a regular series of trips to Paris from his home in London, and he had sourced the heroin from two young Americans living in a hotel in the Pigalle, which was the entertainment and ‘vice’ district of the French capital.[1] The transaction was a small part of a broader global network overseen by Corsican and Sicilian organised crime groups; the poppies were grown on the Anatolian plains of Turkey, the opium shipped to Marseilles and converted to heroin in illicit French laboratories before arriving in Paris and being taken on to North America and around the world – the early, rudimentary beginnings of the famous ‘French connection’ that would take heroin to the mean streets of North America in the postwar years. The Paris route to London was a minor facet of an increasingly global trade.
Hidden Figures of Drug History
Profiles and reflections on lesser known actors within the history of drugs.
Brenda Dean Paul: Morphia, Camels, Lipstick and Chiffon Knickers
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.
Elizabeth Bass, The G-Woman at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics – Part 2
Editor’s Note: In the second of two posts which re-open the Points ‘Hidden Figures of Drug History‘ feature, Bob Beach explores Elizabeth Bass’s career as a G-Man at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Picking up where we left off, Elizabeth Bass was appointed as district nine supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in Chicago in 1933. Even if we consider what we know about the role of women during the Prohibition phase in the war on drugs, and the context of the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to break political taboos in appointing women to prominent roles during his term, the appointment of a woman to this position seems rather remarkable.[1]
Her age, 71 when she took her position, was perhaps more remarkable. It was over the limit for federal employees in the Civil Service, but was waived by one of Roosevelt’s many executive orders, allowing her and other aged political allies to join his administration.[2] Her glaring disqualification as a lifelong political operative was her complete lack of law enforcement experience. This concern was exacerbated by deeply embedded assumptions about gender (not to mention age) in the world of law enforcement.
Elizabeth Bass, The G-Woman at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics – Part 1
Editor’s Note: In the first of two posts which offer new additions to former ‘Points’ feature ‘Hidden Figures of Drug History‘ Bob Beach explores the colorful career of Elizabeth Bass prior to her role as a G-Man within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Hidden Figures of Drug History: Melissa Cargill
This is the first time researching a post in my “Hidden Figures of Drug History” series has legitimately pissed me off. Usually, when I’m trying to learn more about someone like Joan Ganz Cooney, Lenore Kandel or Kitty McNeil, the fantastically-nicknamed “Babbling Bodhisattva,” my research takes me to enlightening places, where I can locate the influential impact these unacknowledged women have made on America’s long history with intoxicant use.
But over the past few days, as I tried to learn more about the mysterious Melissa Cargill, I became enormously upset about how overshadowed this talented chemist was by her larger-than-life partner, Augustus Owsley “Bear” Stanley III, the man “responsible” for the purest LSD in San Francisco in the 1960s, as well as the Grateful Dead’s famous “Wall of Sound.”
But was Owsley really the one manning the beakers? Or was it Cargill all along?
Hidden Figures of Drug History: Kitty McNeil, “The Babbling Bodhisattva”
Editor’s Note: Today we add another post to our ongoing Hidden Figures of Drug History series, which highlights the historic roles women have played in drug and alcohol culture in the United States. Note that next week Points will be taking off on Tuesday to celebrate Christmas, but we’ll be back on Thursday and throughout the rest of the year with more great content. Happy holidays to you and yours from your friends at Points!
In his introduction to the collected San Francisco Oracle archives, Oracle editor Allen Cohen described Kitty McNeil, better known as the paper’s “Babbling Bodhisattva,” as “a suburban housewife, theosophist of the Alice Bailey variety, a psychic, and a lover of LSD and hippies.”
McNeil had first introduced herself to Cohen when she wrote the paper a lengthy reply to a question Oracle columnist Carl Helbing, the “Gossiping Guru,” had reprinted in an earlier edition. Helbing, an artist and astrologer who lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood (along with most of the Oracle‘s staff), asked readers, “Who then can tell us further of Him who was born on February 5, 1962, when 7 planets were in Aquarius?”
McNeil’s response, according to Cohen, was “a joint meditation on the inner planes with all the world’s adepts providing the spiritual energy and will needed to bring about the birth of the next avatar.”
Pretty heavy stuff for a “suburban housewife,” even if she was a psychic and a lover of LSD. “Of course,” Cohen wrote, “we made her a columnist.”
Hidden Figures of Drug History: Joan Ganz Cooney
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in our new Hidden Figures of Drug History series, with more to come in the future. Next week Points will feature more exciting news about drug and alcohol history in the media, as well as a great recap of LSD use in New York City in the 1960s. Enjoy this post and come back next week for more!
There are few subjects I like writing about more than the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse’s 1972 report, “Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding.” Also known as the Shafer Commission, the group’s report enlivened my book Grass Roots, and I’ve continued to mine it for material on how we can understand the Trump administration’s response to the opioid overdose epidemic today.
But there’s something of particular interest for those who want to understand the role gender has long played in American drug history within this report as well. And that’s a name that appears within the list of the commission’s thirteen members, nine of whom were appointed by President Richard Nixon, and four of whom were senators and members of Congress.
And that name is Mrs. Joan Ganz Cooney.
Hidden Figures of Drug History: Lenore Kandel (1932-2009)
Editor’s Note: As a working mother of an active toddler, I don’t have a lot of time to keep up with popular culture. But a few months ago my husband and I finally watched Hidden Figures. The movie is well done, and it got me thinking. First of all, is there anything Janelle Monae can’t do? And second, what if we applied this same idea – revealing the hidden and important roles of women – to our own field of drug and alcohol history?
And voila – Hidden Figures of Drug History was born. Today’s post is the first installment, in which we discuss Lenore Kandel, a too-often ignored leader of the counterculture and Beat movements. Enjoy!
“When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell.” – Lenore Kandel
Kandel, who died in San Francisco in 2009 at the age of 77 from complications of lung cancer, was an uncommon woman in both the Beat and hippie countercultures. A peer and a participant rather than a girlfriend or a muse, Kandel was one of the strongest, most poetic, and perhaps the most frankly sexual voice of the female experience of San Francisco in the 1960s. Though she published only two books of poetry during her lifetime and was virtually unheard of for nearly thirty years preceding her death, her small body of work attracted both critical and popular acclaim, as well as wide-ranging legal ramifications. Nonetheless, a thorough understanding of the artistic movement of the 1960s is simply incomplete without considering her poetic, political, and psychedelic contributions. Lenore Kandel was a pioneer, challenging conventions in the realms of female artistry, literature, and the fight against censorship. The countercultural canon is incomplete without her.