peyote

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

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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. 

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.

Virtual AHA Panel

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

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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.”

Virtual AHA Panel

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

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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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Mabel Dodge Luhan’s First Peyote Trip

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Today’s post comes from guest poster Dr. Chris Elcock, an adjunct professor at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in Lyon, France, whom you might remember from his previous articles on the early years of cannabis activism and LSD in New York. Today he explores the first recorded peyote trip in Manhattan, which occurred in 1914. Enjoy!

Raymond Harrington had been enamored with Native American culture since he was a child. While he was still in high school, he successfully located an old camp site in Mt. Vernon, New York, and became employed by the American Museum of Natural History thanks to the then curator Frederick Putnam. He went on to study anthropology at Columbia University under the great Franz Boas and conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Indians in Oklahoma. One day, during the spring of 1914, he attended a party in Greenwich Village and regaled the attendees with his stories. But when the subject turned to an obscure cactus that had the power “to pass beyond ordinary consciousness and see things as they are in Reality,” everyone begged him to carry on, including the hostess, the eccentric socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan.

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