Mexico

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.

Introducing ‘The Drug Page’: A New Online Resource and Digital Humanities Project

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Editor’s Note: In this latest ‘Points’ blog, Isaac Campos introduces thedrugpage.org which features his new digital humanities project on early twentieth century cannabis discourses in the United States. Below, Campos describes the origins of the research featured on The Drug Page and his intended mission in sharing it. We look forward to watching its evolution!

Twenty years ago, when I was living in Mexico City researching my dissertation, I had a daily routine. I’d spend the first part of the day, roughly from 9-3, at one of the major historical archives. Then I’d take the subway downtown to the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Library. After a rejuvenating cup of coffee nearby, I’d go into the library’s dimly-lit, cavernous research room to pore over old newspapers. That is, the original, printed copies from a century ago. Each of the desks was equipped with a big wooden stand where the ample bound volumes could be safely opened to reveal their weathered old pages. I can still hear the sound of pages turning backed by the echoes from the teeming city. I did that for two hours every afternoon. I turned a lot of pages at the Lerdo Library that year.

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Reflections on how the Yaqui Intercultural Medicine Clinic – a unique model of community well-being and mental health treatment in Sonora – came to be.

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If you read my previous post, “The Toad Boom: the false narrative of ancestral 5-MeO-DMT use”, you may perhaps have wondered why I wrote that post with such vehemence and confidence. In this post, I would like share that the reason for that is that I witnessed first-hand how that story unfolded.

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ADHS Presidential Address: “Why are We in México? 5,000 Years of Pivotal Drug Histories in Las Américas”

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Editor’s Note: This is an edited version of Paul Gootenberg’s Presidential Address at the Alcohol and Drugs History Society 2022 Conference, delivered at Universidad Nacional Autónima de México (UNAM) on 15 June 2022.

Welcome

Thank you/mil gracias for the kind introductions and especially to UNAM and and its renowned Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales for hosting and welcoming us to our international biennial ADHS conference.

It is a deep privilege to deliver this ADHS Presidential Address, particularly here at UNAM, the intellectual heart of Mexico, and even of “las Américas”

So, why are we here in Mexico?

The easy answers, being a beautiful, peopled, world cosmopolis, wonderful food and tequila, and everyday links with drug wars, need not be addressed!

Of course, we’re here mainly for the serious biennial purpose of intellectual exchanges — through new papers, roundtables, and exciting keynotes — around our booming, increasingly recognized field of global drug and alcohol history.

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The Marijuana Experiment

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Stefano Tijerina, a lecturer in management and the Chris Kobrack Research Fellow in Canadian Business History at the University’s of Maine’s Business School. 

It is difficult—and perhaps impossible—to judge whether or not marijuana use is good or bad. Much research is yet needed before we can draw any definitive conclusions. Ask the daily or the occasional consumer, and you will get one set of answers. Ask a person who has had a bad experience, and you might get a negative take. And ask the anti-marijuana moral champion, and you will possibly hear “the gateway to other drugs” story. In fact, there is no concrete answer;  the judgment is personal and deep inside the brain and soul of each individual.

Yet, the law continues to punish and ruin the lives of thousands of American citizens who do not have the luxury to live in states where medical or recreational marijuana is legal or partially legal. One thing is clear, though, the marijuana map is changing with each election cycle, and, like every federal policy, the weight of the majority will force the minority of states to change when the right time comes. That time might be now—under the Biden administration—but it is not yet clear. Especially so, after the recent firing of five White House staffers for “past marijuana use.”

Marijuana Legalization Map
Map of marijuana legalization status by state (from disa.com).
Read here for more information about the state-by-state status of marijuana.

The United States, like many other countries around the world including Canada and Uruguay, seems to be transitioning towards a federally legal world of marijuana. But the American process is slow, because individual states still have leverage and power over the federal government. South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Kansas, Wyoming, and Idaho— where marijuana is fully illegal—may be holding the nation back, but they are now clearly in the minority. Perhaps the millions of dollars of tax revenue each of these states leaves on the table will eventually force their leaders and their communities to the negotiating table. Perhaps the first big victory will be the federal decriminalization of marijuana.

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Review: “Commodifying Cannabis: A Cultural History of a Complex Plant in the Atlantic World”

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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. 

Borougerdi book Commodifying Cannabis
Cover of Commodifying Cannabis

I’ve been reading about pot since before my formal history training. I’ve always been fascinated by the inclusion of the standard story about the “long history” of cannabis that seemed to appear in the introduction to just about every book or article on the subject. As a teenager/young adult first experimenting with cannabis after a childhood of “Just Say No” sobriety, I was somehow comforted to know that I could tap into the wonders of a cannabis high in the same way that many ancient societies had in India, China, or the Middle East.

I have since learned a lot more about the plant, and it is clear that my assumptions had been based on problematic conceptions of “other” cultures. The growing historical literature about intoxicants has further challenged my formerly overly simplistic understandings about how societies manage drug use and about how drug policies and public opinion interact to shape beliefs about drugs. I’ve been struck, though, that the connection between ancient uses of cannabis and our more recent social and cultural contexts have often been missing from these analyses. Such a long-term historical perspective could help us better understand the dynamic flows of drug knowledge across time and place.

Bradley J. Borougerdi’s 2018 book Commodifying Cannabis seeks to make these types of connections. Borougerdi focuses on the Anglo-American Atlantic World and describes the plant as a “triple-purpose” cultural commodity. He builds on previous work by scholars like Isaac Campos who has previously investigated how re-interpretations of Spanish and indigenous knowledge influenced the circulation of information about cannabis in Mexico. Borougerdi, here, examines how orientalist assumptions shaped knowledge about the plant as it moved through the Anglo-American world. He argues that the different meanings of cannabis—attached to its different modes of use—dictated the trajectory of cannabis commodification in the early modern period, the prohibition of cannabis in the nineteenth century, and the recent re-commodification of cannabis.

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The Points Interview: Holly M. Karibo and George T. Díaz

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Editor’s Note: Today we’re excited to feature a Points Interview with Holly M. Karibo and George T. Díaz, editors of the new book Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America (University of Texas Press, 2020). Karibo is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Díaz is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015).

Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

(Holly M. Karibo, left, and George T. Díaz, right)

The book is a series of essays on how efforts to police the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico border have often failed. We’d tell our bartender that all this talk in the news about securing the border is both misleading and misinformed. Neither the U.S.-Canada or U.S.-Mexican border have ever been effectively secured.  The essays in the book show that border people have always found ways to subvert laws they didn’t like and the government’s best efforts often end up hurting innocent people.   Women used to smuggle liquor up their skirts in order to get around border agents and today it is something else.  The book shows the long history of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico trying numerous ways to police the border, and accomplishing some, but nowhere near all, the governments’ wanted.  

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Points Interview: “Sacred Places, Sacred Plants, and Sacred People: Carving Out an Indigenous Right amid the Drug Wars,” with Alexander Dawson

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Editor’s Note: We’re continuing our series of interviews with the authors of the newest edition of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, ADHS’s journal, published by the University of Chicago Press. Today we feature Alexander Dawson. Dawson holds a PhD in Latin American History from SUNY Stony Brook, and is an Associate Professor of History …

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