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

Situation Report: Conducting Research at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland (Archives II)

April 21, 2022 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: This situation report provides an overview of the current protocols at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland (Archives II). Please note this refers to Archives II only, as at early April 2022, and may be subject to change. Please check the NARA website for updates and communicate with the archives before making any definitive research plans. For further information and updates see: https://www.archives.gov/college-park.

Many thanks to Bill McAllister for agreeing to share his personal experiences/correspondence with the Points audience.

The Lincoln Family and Pennyroyal: Re-Evaluating Medicines in the Archive and Beyond

August 31, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: Guest blogger Emma Verstraete is a doctoral candidate in Archaeology at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Why would a person buy this medicine? What were they trying to treat? As a historical archaeologist who focuses on consumer medicine, I’m faced with this question more frequently than many historians of medicine. Archaeologists rarely have access to journals, letters, or other primary sources that mention specific products present in an archaeological assemblage—such as the one pictured below from my own research about the material culture of consumerism. Historians of business and economics who research drugstores or pharmacies, too, are frequently faced with daybooks that list the product being purchased and by whom, but without specific context or rationale for the purchase.

archaeological assemblage — A photo of a typical artifact assemblage from a an urban archaeological site. Dating to the 1870s–80s, this assemblage featured over 50 medicine bottles, including vials from a medical field kit and 15 embossed bottles indicating specific drugstores or proprietary medicines. Photo courtesy of Fever River Research, a Cultural Resource Management firm that has conducted extensive research in the Springfield, Illinois, area.

Despite differences in research methods and artifact access, archaeologists and historians frequently confront such uncertainties relating to medicine use and disease treatment. Such subjects are also often considered taboo and are therefore sometimes not as extensively discussed in the written record. These circumstances place a burden of speculation on the researcher that demands acknowledgement of personal bias and, importantly, the biases of information recorded in archives.

Many cultures and communities, for example, rely on oral traditions, which can sometimes limit a researcher’s ability to find archival sources that deal with specific folk traditions or beliefs. Historically, who has been allowed—or not been allowed—to write down knowledge can also influence possible interpretations. And the places researchers go to verify and fact check information can also have limitations. Books and manuscripts accessioned by archives or libraries and institutional collecting policies, themselves, often reflect the history and the values of the majority culture at the expense of other groups [1]. Current efforts to decolonize and diversify the archive are working to improve these issues, but such efforts are long processes.

As a small case study, this post will discuss how such biases and silences in archival sources may have led a popular 1984 article about Abraham Lincoln to arrive at incomplete and (unintentionally) biased conclusions about the Lincoln household’s use of pennyroyal, a common plant used in nineteenth-century pharmaceutical preparations, folk medicine, and herbals.

From the Archives Back to the Clinic: How Historians of Psychedelics are Protecting the Public Domain

June 24, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is by Chris Elcock, an award-wining independent scholar working on the history of LSD and psychedelics

There was a time when LSD and other vision-inducing psychedelic drugs were associated with the American counter-culture and for conservative observers with license and dissent. Amid the psychedelic hues of light-shows, magic buses, and tie-dye shirts, the medical history of these substances was relegated to a footnote of the 1960s, a decade that symbolized cultural change rather than experimental psychiatry. For better or worse, LSD had spilled out of the clinics and what seemed to have mattered most was that it had landed in the hands of Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead.

While these stories have been told endlessly in popular books and documentaries, historians of psychedelic psychiatry have meticulously examined the way medical doctors initially looked to gain new knowledge into mental illness by inducing a temporary and controlled form of psychosis with mescaline and LSD, and how they subsequently used these substances to treat alcoholism and to help terminal cancer patients to serenely come to terms with death. In 1962, however, fundamental changes in the implementation of clinical trials, which laid critical emphasis on objective measurements and scientific reproducibility, greatly frustrated the research teams working in the field, to a point where psychedelic science had come to a near standstill by the early 1970s.

Despite these early setbacks, research in psychedelics has particularly boomed in the last decade as national and international laws regarding the therapeutic use of psilocybin and other psychedelics have begun to change. In this new regulatory environment, drug companies and investors have rushed to file patents for new psychedelic drug uses and technologies in hopes of monopolizing—and monetizing—the next blockbuster treatment.

In response to this knowledge grab, a recent collaboration between historians and legal experts sponsored by the Usona Institute, a non-profit psilocybin research organization based in Madison, Wisconsin, relies on historical and archival research to protect the public domain. Usona has established a new open-access online repository called Porta Sophia—the doorway to wisdom—that documents extant therapeutic techniques that have used psychedelics as adjuncts. This easily accessible project seeks to ensure that new patent filings are truly innovative.

Porta Sophia Glowing Orb — Graphic from the web page of Usona Institute’s Porta Sophia, Psychedelic
Prior Art Library. Image Courtesy of Porta Sophia.

The NJWEEDMAN Saga Part 1: The Making of an Activist

June 16, 2020June 16, 2020 by emilydufton

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Bob Beach. Beach is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Albany, SUNY.

On January 27, a 20-year old Spencer Alan Boston walked into a Wilson County, Tennessee General Sessions court, to discuss sentencing on a simple marijuana possession charge. Tennessee law penalizes possession of less than a half-ounce of marijuana as a misdemeanor, subject to as much as a year sentence. But instead of discussing his case, Boston started to make an argument in favor of legalizing marijuana in the state as he reached into his pocket, pulled out a joint, and lit it up.

Screenshot 2020-06-15 at 7.23.03 PM — Spencer Alan Boston lights it up

Rehousing Archives from the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation

January 31, 2022December 19, 2019 by emilydufton

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is exciting. The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation is looking to rehouse its extensive archives. If you’re interested in learning more about these materials, contact CJPF’s executive director, Eric Sterling, at the information below.

Eric Sterling, former counsel to the House Subcomittee on Crime (1979-1989) and Executive Director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation (1989-current) is looking for a proper home for his archive of drug and alcohol literature. These materials include materials from NORML, the Drug Policy Foundation, the Drug Policy Alliance, Marijuana Policy Project, and many smaller organizations and initiatives. These include congressional materials such as the printed hearings of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, documents relating to the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and monographs from NIDA, ONDCP, DEA and other agencies. There are about 500 books on marijuana, cocaine, heroin, psychedelics, methamphetamine and the sociology and history of drug use, addiction and treatment. There are also materials related to sentencing, prisons, policing, organized crime, money laundering, gun control, pornography and prostitution, and materials related to Congress and politics. The materials include videocassettes, audiocassettes, pamphlets, and other papers.

Sterling has been involved in drug policy reform since he testified for marijuana decriminalization in 1976. If you’re interested in learning more about this information, or in acquiring some for your own library, contact Eric at the information below.

Eric E. Sterling, Executive Director

Criminal Justice Policy Foundation

8730 Georgia Ave., Suite 400, Silver Spring, MD 20910

www.cjpf.org

direct: 202-365-2420

@CJPF_tweets

Points Interview: Stephanie Schmitz, Purdue University Archives & Special Collections

August 9, 2018August 9, 2018 by emilydufton

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted and written by Lucas Richert, Chancellor’s Fellow in Health History at Strathclyde and co-editor in chief of Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Enjoy!

Stephanie Schmitz is the Betsy Gordon Archivist for Psychoactive Substances Research at the Purdue University Archives & Special Collections, where she is responsible for building collections pertaining to psychedelic research, and ensuring that these materials are discoverable and accessible in perpetuity.

The conversation took place on June 8, 2018. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Stephanie and I sat down to talk in the Purdue Memorial Union’s coffee shop early on a Friday morning and immediately realized we couldn’t stay. There was far too much activity. It was incredibly loud. “I know another spot,” she told me.

Five minutes later, we found ourselves in an adjacent building. Stephanie was sipping coffee, as was I. We were set. Except not. A speaker on the floor beside us unexpectedly started up and the Kongos’ song “Come with me now” boomed. So we swiftly collected our belongings and moved across the room to a quieter table.

“Alright,” Stephanie laughed. “Now I can think.”

The Eyes of the City: Fiorello La Guardia’s Committee on the Marihuana Problem in New York

October 25, 2016 by Bob Beach

I recently attended the Urban History Association conference in Chicago, October 13-16 along with Tina Peabody and Shannon Missick, two colleagues from the University at Albany, SUNY, presenting a panel about the shifting focus of municipal resources toward (and away from) issues of trash collection, food access, and marijuana use. I examined the La Guardia Committee Report on the Marihuana Problem in New York, published in 1944. The committee was tasked with investigating the validity of public hysteria surrounding marijuana use in New York City during the so-called Reefer Madness era, which galvanized political support for the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.

The committee report stands as a clear refutation of Anslinger’s version of the marijuana threat, and though largely ignored at the time, constitutes a rallying cry for advocates of legalization today who use the report to expose the flimsy bases for the drug’s initial prohibition. The report has thus become a hot new source for historians to re-examine. In a newly published article in the Journal of Policy History, Emily Brooks discusses the disconnect between federal marijuana policy approaches and local marijuana policy approaches, centering the La Guardia report within this policy conflict. Brooks argues that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was able to exert its power to shape marijuana policy and along with an assist from the American Medical Association, to circumscribe medical and scientific inquiries into the plant despite the efforts of La Guardia and the New York Academy of Medicine to counter their power in the late 1930s.

Gendering Reefer Madness

June 16, 2015June 14, 2015 by Bob Beach

In their 2011 book, Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World, Nancy Campbell and Elizabeth Ettorre problematize the male-centric knowledges that frame addiction research and treatment programs. They call for a more inclusive treatment strategy that does not consider the neurochemical “male brain” the baseline for recovery. According to the authors, these “epistemologies of ignorance” limit, even eliminate, the useful options available for female addicts.

In many similar ways, epistemologies of ignorance also manifest in the historical record of marijuana users in the 1930s. Perhaps “ignorance” is not quite the right term, even as its effects were just as restrictive, especially for women users in during the decade. But due to the American obsession with gender and sexual normativity during this period, both female and male users (as well as male and female anti-marijuana activists) occupied mutually exclusive discursive spaces from which two separate gendered narratives about marijuana use emerged. Reading past these stereotypes though, utilizing Michelle McClellan’s notion of “damp feminism” (here, and here), historians can make use of these highly problematic portrayals of female marijuana users from this period.