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

The War on Drugs: From Book to Website

January 28, 2022December 14, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is from Dr. David Farber, Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Modern U.S. History at the University of Kansas. He is the editor of the recently published, War on Drugs: A History (NYU Press, 2021).

Over the last 36-and-a-half years I have done what research-oriented history professors of my generation were supposed to do: I wrote books and published articles. What I did not do—until now—was produce a website. Defying the ageist canard about old dogs and new tricks—albeit admittedly in collaboration with my much younger colleagues Clark Terrill and Marjorie Galelli—I’m happy to report that the War on Drugs Project website is now live.

“Global Histories of Drugs: Why and What’s Next?”—Reflections on the Cannabis: Global Histories Workshop

January 28, 2022December 9, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Notes: Today’s post by Eron Ackerman reflects on his participation in the “Global Drug Histories: Why and What’s Next?” workshop held jointly this past October at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy and the British Library. Dr. Ackerman recently completed his dissertation, “Cannabis and Colonialism in the British Caribbean, 1838–1938,” at Stony Brook University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Albion College.

When Lucas Richert invited me to attend the joint US-UK meeting, “Global Histories of Drugs: Why and What’s Next?” at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy on October 6, I jumped at the chance—even if it meant having to cancel some mid-week classes. The meeting was inspired by the release of the new collection of essays Cannabis: Global Histories (MIT Press, 2021), which intersects so closely with my own work about the history of Caribbean ganja that I couldn’t miss it. The organizers used Zoom to link our group in Madison to a larger group of book contributors and guest panelists “across the pond” at the British Library.

Watch 2021 “Kreminar” Videos—History of Opiates & Opioids

January 31, 2022August 10, 2021 by Points Editor

In May and June of 2021, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy and the Alcohol and Drugs History Society hosted and helped organize the second annual Edward Kremers Seminar in the History of Pharmacy & Drugs. The Summer 2021 “Kreminar” explored the theme of Opiates & Opioids and featured six virtual seminars, presentations, and discussions by scholars and practitioners researching and writing about the history and the contemporary status of opiates, opioids, and addiction. The six presentations were:

Dr. Benjamin Breen: “Three Ways of Looking at Opium: Flower, Latex, Pharmaceutical.”
Dr. Diana S. Kim: “Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia.”
Dr. Daniel Skinner in conversation with Kerri Mongenel: “The Humanity of Addiction: What We Can Learn from Families, Educators, and Practitioners”
Dr. Nancy Campbell and Dr. David Herzberg: “Unexpected Histories of Opioids and Overdose.”
Dr. James Bradford: “Poppy Politics: Drugs in Afghanistan, Past and Present.”
Maia Szalavitz: “Undoing Drugs: Harm Reduction, Opioids and the Future of Addiction.”

Each 2021 Kreminar event drew between 50 and 70 attendees for a total attendance of 327 people across the six webinars. The hosts and sponsors of the Summer 2021 Kreminar were: the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy, and the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Videos of each presentation are embedded below or available to watch on AIHP’s YouTube channel.

Watch “A Century of American Drug Use” Virtual AHA Panel

July 30, 2021 by Points Editor

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

The annual gathering of historians for the American Historical Association’s yearly meeting is set to resume in January 2022 in New Orleans, barring a major resurgence of Covid due to the delta variant. The pandemic caused the cancellation of the 2021 meeting slated for Seattle, Washington, but the AHA selected several panels to present at its virtual AHA colloquium, which started early this year and will wrap up this month. Panels not selected for the main colloquium were still encouraged to hold sessions, and the AHA generously offered space on its YouTube channel for recordings of Zoom meetings to be uploaded.

I was part of such a virtual AHA panel entitled “A Century of Drug Use: Psychoactive Drugs Among Native Americans, Hippies, and the Working Poor” that met on the most appropriate day possible for such a thing—April 20, 2021. We gathered together on Zoom with a group of 50 friends for a very productive 90-minute panel.

Event Alert—A War on Research: Drug Policy and 50 Year of Lost Knowledge

January 26, 2022June 20, 2021 by Points Editor

Editor’s Note: This event alert is part of Points’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Drugs.

Mark you calendars for this coming Thursday, June 24. The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) is hosting a panel titled, “A War on Research: Drug Policy and 50 Years of Lost Knowledge.” Sponsored by the DPA’s Department of Research and Academic Engagement, the panel discussion will explore the research and knowledge that has been delayed or lost due to the drug war.

Title: A War on Research: Drug Policy and 50 Years of Lost Knowledge
Date: Thursday, June 24 from 4:30pm–6:00pm ET
RSVP link: bit.ly/50YearsLostResearch

Description: On June 17, 1971, President Nixon declared the war on drugs. Fifty years later, the devastating harms of the war on drugs—ranging from mass criminalization and police violence to soaring rates of overdose —have been well documented. Less well documented are the ways in which the drug war has been a barrier to research and science.

A Century of Drug Use – AHA2021 Panel Presentation on 4/20

January 26, 2022March 26, 2021 by Points Editor

The annual meeting of the American Historical Association, to be held in Seattle, was called off due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of this year’s replacement online virtual AHA2021 conference, four drug historians, including Points Contributing Editor Bob Beach, will be presenting their research about drug users in modern history on Tuesday, April 20, at 1:00PM EST. The panel is titled, “A Century of American Drug Use: Psychoactive Drugs Among Native Americans, Hippies, and the Working Poor.”

The online panel is free to attend, but advanced registration is required. Please click this link to register and you’ll receive instant confirmation.

Coming Soon: ADHS Conference 2021: “Rethinking Alcohol and Drugs: Global Transformations /Local Practices”

June 8, 2020 by emilydufton

“Rethinking Alcohol and Drugs: Global Transformations /Local Practices”

Alcohol and Drugs History Society bi-annual conference 7-10 June 2021

A collaboration between the ADHS, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IIS-UNAM) and the Centro de Estudios Internacionales-El Colegio de México (CEI-Colmex).

Screenshot 2020-06-05 12.35.22 — **Jose Maria Obregon,** ***El descubrimiento del pulque*** (***The Discovery of Pulque),*** **1869**

Call for Papers: The Moral Landscapes of Drugs in Africa

March 10, 2020 by emilydufton

Screenshot 2020-03-09 at 8.44.09 PM

Special issue coordinated by
Corentin Cohen (Sciences Po/CERI, OxPo) and Gernot Klantschnig (University of Bristol)

Deadline for the submission of proposals: 20 April 2020

Context
The trade and consumption of psychoactive products are not new to Africa. There are traces of cannabis cultivation dating from the sixteenth century in Eastern and Southern Africa (Duvall 2016) and records of colonial concern with its cultivation since the 1920s in Nigeria and Ghana. At least since the 1950s the region has started to be used as a transit point by some heroin smugglers (McCoy 1991) and in subsequent decades there have been reports of a clear increase in the volume of cocaine trafficking from Latin America. This has made West Africa into a socalled global hub, a place of transit for more than a third of cocaine exports to Europe and a « new » space of consumption for drugs, such as synthetic opioids (UNODC 2006, 2008, 2017, 2018). Existing data regarding heroin and crack show that consumption has also increased locally while amphetamine production capacities have developed in Nigeria and Guinea Conakry (UNODC 2012).

Most of the existing literature has been discussing these developments from state and security perspectives. Fueled by sensationalistic media reports and the proliferation of discourses on « narco jihadism », part of the literature has also borrowed from the paradigm of failed states and has thus described « weak », « fragile » or « destabilized » states as engulfed by the drug trade (Sindzingre 2001 ; Felbab-Brown 2010 ; McGuire 2010). In particular, Guinea-Bissau has been described as a « narco state » (Chabal and Green 2016), a concept that has little analytical value regarding the importance of illicit economies for the state and the role of illicit activities in countries, such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Guinea Bissau, and Morocco, but which has nonetheless gained traction in the African context (Chouvy 2016).