Satirical cartoon published June 4, 1921 after discovery of still in local mine, from Smith (2004)

Mine personnel and visitors, Hecla mine near Mullan, 1927

Defense attorney C.H. Potts’ summation drew upon the deeper historical roots of Mullan’s special cultural circumstances.  Potts argued that the village’s origins as a mining camp, peopled with prospectors “who follow adventure, with their free-and-easy life and desire for entertainment” provided the relevant context for the town’s special relationship to prohibition.  Smith added regarding Potts’ special plea:  “After a long, dangerous day a thousand feet underground miners sought amusement, and to accommodate them, establishments with liquor, gambling, and prostitutes catered to their needs.  How, he asked, could the present officials be responsible for these conditions?” (p. 143).  In the end, however, it was all to no avail.  Ray won his treasured convictions.  One tacit message thus sent by the jury was that supportive community sentiment so prevalent in the mining district was not also available in the City of Coeur d’Alene, 56 miles westward.  This sort of localism was evidenced in other ways as well.  When Ray’s subsequent prosecution convicted a similar array of defendants from Wallace, Spokane’s newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, described the mining town as a “modern Sodom” (p. 180).  Spokane, it seems — some 85 miles west of Wallace and even though it was the beneficiary of the mining district’s massive historical contribution to the region’s wealth — had little moral support to offer besieged Wallace.  Shoshone County citizenry reacted angrily to the slur.  A resolution in The Wallace-Press Times noted that 100 local businessmen in the county “voted to stop subscriptions to Spokane newspapers and boycott Spokane businesses that supported the dailies” (p. 180).  A separate resolution out of the Shoshone County Board of Trade shot back at the Spokesman-Review and Spokane as well:

In this period of adversity we have learned something about our neighbors.  We have found that a great community, built and supported largely by the wealth which our pioneers and their sturdy successors have uncovered in the hills of the Coeur d’Alenes, is not our friend in this hour, but rather in its fanatical adherences to the principle of making men righteous by law has rejoiced in our misfortune and been ready to heap opprobrium upon us. (quoted in Smith, p. 181)

Yet Ray’s vigorous prosecutions ultimately unraveled.  The convictions of some Wallace defendants were reversed on appeal, causing Ray, magnanimously, to free the other convicted Wallace defendants as well.  The convictions of Mullan defendants Sheriff Weniger and Deputy Bloom were overturned in 1931.  Prominent district figures sent letters to President Hoover urging pardons for all.  Smith noted that even national WCTU president, Ella A. Boole, wrote the U.S. Attorney General in 1931 requesting that ‘“if there are any extenuating circumstances that justify the pardon of these politicians” to let her know’ (p. 206).  The blessing of full pardons was finally delivered by President Roosevelt on August 16, 1934.

The tale Smith recounts so beautifully left a lasting imprint on Shoshone County’s mining district, with implications and effects that stretch far beyond the turbulent era of alcohol prohibition.  Because local sentiment backed the “license by fine” system, the prosecutions, convictions, and incarcerations of prominent and respected members of the community left an enduring imprint that even today still shapes local culture and attitudes toward outsiders, whether relatively nearby in Coeur d’Alene City or Spokane, or farther off in Washington, D.C.  Donna Krulitz Smith’s well told and richly documented account nicely bridges the gap between the 1929 trials and Shoshone County’s larger cultural disposition.  Incidentally, Smith’s concluding chapter notes that the Coeur d’Alene Mining District’s situation in relation to prohibition was by no means unique.  Many small communities around the West with natural resources-based work forces evolved similar tribute systems with similar popular support and makeshift legitimacy.  These also on occasion fell victim to federal prosecutions, with varying results, as Smith recounts.

In a recent email exchange about Smith’s thesis with local historian and retired judge, Richard Magnuson, (3) he offered the following observation:

It is no wonder we are entranced by the stories of the people who walked the gulches of our mining district. They were a special breed, which are hard for outsiders to understand. [Yet] their history seems so logical to us.

Yes.

Acknowledgment:

Warmest thanks are due local historians Dick Caron and Tom Harman for bringing Smith’s thesis to my attention and for making a copy on loan from the University of Idaho library available to me.

Notes:

(1)   Donna Krulitz Smith, “It Will All Come Out in the Courtroom”: Prohibition in Shoshone County, Idaho, Master’s Thesis, History, University of Idaho, Moscow, 2004.  (I was saddened to learn that Smith passed away in December, 2009.)

(2)  Sarah Hand Meacham, Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

(3)  Richard G. Magnuson, Coeur d’Alene Diary: The First Ten Years of Hardrock Mining in North Idaho, Portland, OR: Binford & Mort Publishing, 1968/1983.

Absolut Tampax: Absolute Stupidity.

In order to provide their audience with an objective, measured assessment of the situation, KPHO led with the “experts.”  As Valley High School security officer Chris Thomas explains in the broadcast, “This is not isolated to any school, any city, any financial area.  This is everywhere.”  Similar to made-for-TV ads capable of shaking housewives out of ambien-induced comas by shouting, “Wait! That’s not all,” KPHO kept the shock coming—its not just teenage girls getting in on the fun.  Again, American crime-stopper Chris Thomas breaks the news, “this is definitely not just girls.  Guys will also use it and insert them into their rectums.” But Wait! That’s not all….

KPHO finishes strong, exposing the real danger on the horizon, the growing trend of “butt-chugging” amongst misguided youth.  You heard that correct, “butt-chugging.”  Unfortunately, this is exactly as it sounds.  Enthusiasts use a funnel/beer-bong and apply the tube directly to their anal cavity.  After watching 10 minutes of actual “butt-chugging” clips, I find myself asking the same question you all are, WHY?  What’s wrong with using your mouth?

Turns out folks, Officer Thomas is a harbinger of truth.  Alcohol tampons and butt-chugging are truly a global problem.  Reports have surfaced over the last 13 years not just in the United States, but in Finland, Germany, and Columbia as well.  The first known coverage of vodka tampons dates back to 1999.  The Oxford Journals first documented the use of vodka tampons in 1999.  That same year, Reuters documented the creativity of teenage Finnish girls, noting that several of them had been experimenting with “tampons dipped in vodka as a way of getting tipsy without parents detecting boozy breath.”  Here, we have our first inkling as to why underage drinkers might find this appealing:  they think they can hide this form of drinking more readily.  In addition, the use of alcohol tampons and “butt-chugging” both bypass the stomach, allowing users to feel the effects faster, without the worry of an upset stomach.  For those watching their figure, this form of consumption also avoids many of the calories associated with alcohol consumption.  Reports have also suggested that naïve teens may also believe this is good way to beat a Breathalyzer.

Now, let’s unpack the mythology.  Despite not consuming alcohol orally, those that use alcohol tampons or chug will not have booze-free breath.  Alcohol is partially expelled through the body via the lungs.  Once alcohol is in the blood, it will be partially removed from your system as you exhale.  This is why breathalyzers work—they measure blood alcohol content—and why you won’t beat the test.  As for not getting sick, this appears to be accurate.  However, this is not panacea for those looking to avoid the cons of heavy alcohol consumption.  Because these practices circumvent the stomach, those with potential alcohol poisoning will not vomit, but simply pass out.  Furthermore, this may present an unexpected problem for medical authorities: “If a person does pass out or lose consciousness, health care professionals won’t necessarily know that they have to look in those areas and that may delay treatment,” explains Dr. Dan Quan of the Maricopa Medical Medical Center in Phoenix.  Worse still, Dr. Quan lamented that teenager’s cutting edge use of funnels and tampons may cause serious “mucosal irritation to the vagina and rectum.”

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness and general discomfort caused by both practices, rumblings sporadically surface in the popular press.  Following 1999 murmurs out of Finland, a May 2003 review of a Vic Chesnutt album in the St. Louis Riverfront Times applauds his “hilarious” song “Band Camp,” in which he “recounts the story of a high-school girl who soaked a tampon in vodka and fell off her stool in science class.”  In 2005, police arrested a Houston-area woman after her alcoholic husband died of a “lethal sherry enema” she administered.  In 2008 vodka tampons and “butt-chugging” reached their zenith in popular culture, highlighted in major national programs CSI and The Doctors.  This past year, local Phoenix news station KPHO renewed the hysteria with their own tabloid-style report.

"I Didn't Go to Medical School for this...."

In each report, one element is alarmingly absent: actual proof.  Perhaps the age of users presents complications for reporting.  However, college-aged users would not present this complication and are conspicuously absent.  Nowhere are actual users consulted and/or mentioned.  In addition, reports rest on “expert” opinions like that of security officer Thomas, not upon concrete statistics and realities.  More likely than not, it is the reports themselves—the popular attention (advertisements) granted to alcohol tampons and “butt-chugging”—which perpetuate the existence of both practices.

Given the lack of sustained attention, what we have here hardly qualifies as a legitimate moral panic relating to alcohol or drugs.  Nonetheless, much of the reporting got me thinking about a three part entry on panics by our Managing Editor Joseph Spillane last spring.  In part two, Spillane discusses the common errors made which allow for panics to happen.  These errors include: failure to quantify the behavior in question, often involving disproportion regarding the scope and severity of the problem; reporting a behavior as a “new” problem that previously existed; a failure to understand the actual danger presented, and often, ignoring larger structural problems.  Certainly, various reports on alcohol tampons and chugging have made such errors, the KPHO report makes all of them.

Spillane also discusses Phillip Jenkins’ 1999 work, Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs.  Jenkins rightly asserts that the drug-war era “promised rich political dividends to any group or individual who could successfully draw attention to a plausible new drug menace.” [p. 101]   Certainly, KPHO and others would have been excited to find more evidence to support future follow-up pieces.  News networks have long understood the value of a good panic, highlighted most significantly by network coverage of Crack in 1986, spanning nearly four months of saturated hysteria.  Cultural crusaders also found benefits.  Nancy Reagan learned that teaching the nation’s children to “Just Say No” enhanced her public image; Reverend’s found inspiring copy for sermons and community outreach; law enforcement sought occasion to demand more funding; politicians scrambled to write legislation, and public figures nabbed more air time.  The net result: The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 establishing the now notorious minimum sentencing guidelines which contribute to what Michelle Alexander has coined The New Jim Crow.

In this particular case anecdotal evidence failed to create significant shockwaves.  However, the common errors in coverage of alcohol tampons and chugging are how larger panics develop.  Moreover, the financial “dividends” of alarmist drug-war era  rhetoric assure that reporting like this will continue as long as we pay attention, as will obscure drug and alcohol related activities. Reports based on anecdotal evidence which present a “new” problem as ubiquitous should not be taken seriously.

But let’s get back to why kids that actually try this decide it might be a decent idea: they are underage and want to hide their illegal behavior. What if the legal drinking age were lowered to 18?  Might the same kids be more inclined to imbibe using… Gasp… their mouths?  Would this troubling practice probably disappear rendering previously “illegal” behavior by college-aged drinkers both legal and mainstream?  We will write to KPHO and Officer Thomas for reliable answers on these questions, but until then, reader comments are welcomed…

Exhibit Flyer, Museum on Main Street, Washtenaw County Historical Society

Co-sponsored by the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and by the University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center (UMSARC), the Research Theme Semester, as it is known, has included seminars, visiting speakers, a film series, and more.  Those of us involved in the museum exhibit hoped that it would bring the semester’s events into the community and also encourage student involvement with the county historical society, which runs the museum.  Like many local historical societies, this one includes a number of older people on the executive board, and I assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that they might not endorse this idea for an exhibit.  In fact, they have been enthusiastic supporters, providing many research leads for the students to explore and, in some cases at least, sharing their own memories of drinking escapades.  Since much of the semester has focused on addiction, with a very serious tone as a result, I found their good humor a welcome change of pace.As the students and I, along with a post-doctoral scholar from UM’s History Department who managed much of the project, began thinking about the exhibit, our first challenge was spatial and organizational.  The museum, located in a small historic home, has three rooms.  How would these spaces structure our story?  We decided to assign a substance to each room.  This approach meant we lost a sense of chronology and risked leaving visitors with the impression that these substances have isolated trajectories.  But it brought a spatial logic that seemed to fit the place—had we chosen a chronological format, we could not guarantee that visitors would go through the rooms “in order.”  Furthermore, this method allowed us to highlight local connections, an important consideration since the museum’s mission is to preserve and showcase county history.

The students then duly embarked on their research assignments, concentrating respectively on alcohol, drug stores and pharmaceuticals, and cigarettes and marijuana.   Research proved fruitful, if frustrating at times, and was a valuable learning experience.  One student reflected, “I was really surprised at just how far back the history of drugs and alcohol go, in this county and in the country itself.”  Another student appreciated how national issues could be understood in a local context.  Once students had identified major themes and events, we looked for artifacts.  Some came from the museum’s existing collections, others—such as a wine-making press—were loaned specifically for the exhibit, and still others–like a bar!–were purchased from Craig’s List.

Topic areas reflected student interest and local tie-ins, as well as, I am realizing now, a kind of self-censorship that was operating almost unconsciously to keep us “respectable.”  As many of us have noted on this blog before, it can be hard to strike an appropriate tone when talking about drugs with students or in any public venue.  Staging this exhibit required us to take an interpretive stance, but as we learned, we could not control the way visitors reacted to the exhibit or the conclusions they drew from its text panels, objects, or the fact that it had been done at all.

Carry Nation in Ann Arbor. Courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library.

The largest room, which visitors generally enter first, focused on alcohol, reflecting its preeminence as a normalized recreational drug and one that looms large in college culture.  Text panels explained the context of temperance and Prohibition, while photographs and some artifacts emphasized local developments.  Temperance agitator Carry Nation spoke in Ann Arbor more than a century ago, and a photograph documenting her speech is prominently displayed on a fabric panel that hung from the ceiling.

Front room with text panels, wine press, and fabric banner featuring Carry Nation.

Other photos highlighted a police raid on a local fraternity that served as the headquarters of a bootlegging operation.  We also provided a large map of Ann Arbor upon which we invited visitors to mark their favorite local watering holes.   While this is currently done with push pins, students are working on an interactive online version that will complement the wall map and help document the locations of saloons and bars in Ann Arbor and elsewhere in the county over time.

The next room centered on the development of pharmaceutical drugs, emphasizing that any division between medical and recreational use is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.  Text panels relayed the early history of drug stores in the county, while a mocked-up storefront suggested a typical establishment of the late nineteenth century.

Drug store replica, Museum on Main Street.

This topic also allowed us to focus on the role of pharmaceutical companies in the area, particularly Pfizer which had a substantial presence in the county until quite recently.  One corner of this room also features an exquisite collection of elegant lighters and ashtrays, which look exotic, even bizarre, to many young adults and kids today.  Juxtaposing that collection with signs that triumphantly declare the University of Michigan to be smoke-free illustrates, we hope, the rapid reversal in attitudes toward cigarette smoking.

Finally, the back room highlighted the experiences of John Sinclair, a local activist whose drug-related arrests in the 1960s and 1970s helped shape attitudes and regulations regarding drugs, especially marijuana, in Ann Arbor.

John Sinclair artifacts, Museum on Main Street.

Sinclair’s allies organized events and rallies to protest his arrest and raise money for his legal fees, including a huge concert featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono, along with many other rock icons, at Crisler Arena in 1971.  Coupled with the material on Sinclair, we included text panels on the “Just Say No” campaign and the DARE program.  Information about Michigan medical marijuana program rounds out the back room, suggesting to visitors that drug-related debates are far from resolved.

The process of doing this exhibit has underscored for me how challenging it can be to talk about drugs and alcohol in mixed company, as it were, and how objects, images, spatial relationships, and the implied authority of an institution like a museum can augment or trump the written word.  As I edited a text panel on gender and alcohol, for example, I found it almost physically painful to have to compress nuanced ideas that in another context would merit entire books into 150 words.  At the same time, I appreciated anew the power of the visual.  On the reverse side of the Carrie Nation fabric panel, we hung a photo of a flapper with a flask in her garter (a relatively well-known image from the Library of Congress that we also used on the exhibit flyer, shown at the beginning of the post).  When the light is just right, the two images merge.  This effect was an unintended consequence of the type of fabric and their proximity, but I wonder now whether it isn’t more persuasive in conveying early twentieth-century transformations in gender roles than any text I can produce, whether short or long.

"Plus ca change..." U. Michigan students drinking in fraternity house, 1890. Courtesy of W. Stevens.

Fann-Hock Pharmacy, Dakar

In a panel on “Drugs in Africa” at the African Studies Association annual meeting in Washington, DC in November, Donna Patterson, a historian in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, presented a paper on “Drug Trafficking in Africa:  Historical Cases from West Africa,” which in contrast to other papers on the panel looked at the commerce in legal pharmaceuticals.  The discussion that followed made clear the value of exploring the histories “legal” and “illegal” drugs in conjunction one with the other—something that has rarely been done for Africa, where the focus has been much more on understanding the linkages between “traditional” and Western medicine.  At the same time, the discussion led us to consider how those very linkages might inform our understanding of the trade and consumption of various kinds of drugs—however categorized—in African societies.

Patterson specializes on Francophone Africa, African-Atlantic exchange, health, and gender and is working on a larger project, “Expanding Professional Horizons:  Pharmacy, Gender, and Entrepreneurship in Twentieth Century Senegal,” that  examines the emergence and expansion of African medical professionalization between 1918 and 2000.  That work explores the growth of the African biomedical industry, African access to French systems, and the training of doctors, pharmacists, and midwives.

Pour la Protection de l'Infance Indigene (1912)

It also considers the origins and expansion of African-owned pharmacies in colonial and postcolonial Senegal.  She has also begun to study the history of African American pharmacists in New Orleans.

Patterson’s fascinating paper sketched the history of pharmacy in Senegal—a topic about which there is almost no scholarship.  In fact, there’s almost no research on pharmacy anywhere in Africa.  Drawing on arguments made by Jean and John Comaroff, Patterson traced a history that blurred distinctions between legal and illegal against a background of racial privilege.  The professionalization of pharmacy in Senegal dates to the 1920s and until independence it was almost entirely dominated by whites.  From a very early stage there is evidence of circumvention of regulations and by the post-war period trafficking in pharmaceuticals was linked to various kinds of smuggling—although not apparently to trade in illegal narcotics.  From the 1960s the pharmacy profession became increasingly Africanized and expanded very rapidly.  Various kinds of trafficking continued—involving both the importation and distribution of legally produced pharmaceuticals outside of legal channels and the production and distribution of counterfeit drugs.  By the 2000s these trades had become big business and a market in Dakar had become the focus of the trade.  In 2008-09 this market became the site of a major confrontation between traders and the authorities, which seemed to have much more to do with struggles over control and profits than with actual suppression.  The market was in fact burned to the ground, but quickly revived.

Although it was clear that many of the pharmaceuticals involved in illicit commerce were in fact being obtained for “recreational” uses, for the most part discussion maintained a commonly understood, and quite sharply defined, boundary between pharmaceuticals and “illegal” drugs.  But discussant Justin Willis, a historian from the University of Durham, UK, challenged us to rethink those kinds of boundaries from the perspective of local therapeutic systems.  Willis the author of Potent Brews:  A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850-1999 (Ohio University Press, 2002) and many articles on alcohol and drugs in African history,  challenged those present to discard morality narratives and the global vocabulary of suppression and control and to focus on a simple question:  why are people using these various drugs? How do they see their use?  His commentary ranged productively over the examples of heroin users in Tanzania, anti-drug campaigns in Nigeria and the use of Khat in East Africa, but the questions he raised about the history of the “illegal” pharmacy trade in Senegal were especially provocative.

The vibrant unsanctioned trade in pharmaceuticals, from one perspective, represented a struggle to challenge and defy the professionalization of pharmacy and high costs that resulted from such state-sanctioned monopolies of distribution—in the process securing for ordinary traders some cut of the large profits that the professional clique attempts to maintain for itself.  Even more interesting, however, was the suggestion that the “illegal” traders not only provided drugs more conveniently and at lower cost to Senegalese consumers, but did so in a way that was more consistent with their expectations for drug therapy.

The Informed Consumer in the 21st Century

Dolores Estévez Zulueta, aka "Lola la Chata" (1908-1959)

When drugs were legalized in Mexico, Lola la Chata (“Snub-Nose Lola”) was furious. She’d been pushing in Mexico City since, well, forever, but “narcotics” sales on the part of the government, at market rates, messed up the whole racket. Two days after they opened the heroin dispensaries, the junkies stopping buying from her. There was little she could do, except offer loyal customers a pilón—a little extra for free. But it wasn’t enough.  Then the prices fell. So maybe you had to let go of the margins. But business was in the toilet.

That’s when she began to threaten them. In desperation, she followed the junkies around, telling them she’d ordered hits—that she’d kill them if they didn’t buy from her. Nothing seemed to work.

After years of effort, scientific experiments, meetings with lawyers, cops and public-morals committees, a handful of doctors at the Ministry of Health had managed to convince the president that the best way to check the current toxicomanía—a so-called “drug craze”—was legalization.  A state monopoly was to be set up for distributing drugs as well as treating addicts as patients, offering previously illegal substances—seen as a “necessary evil in our civilization”—to users at market prices. Thus on 17 February 1940, the Lázaro Cárdenas administration’s Ministry of Public Health enacted new federal regulations regarding drug addiction, which were duly published in the government’s official gazette. Their rationale was in fact quite eloquent.

Whereas experience has demonstrated that prosecution [of “drug addiction” (toxicomanía) and narcotics trafficking] only apprehends a small number of addicts or, in the short term, drug dealers, who, lacking financial resources, cannot buy impunity; and whereas,

The prosecution of drug addicts as called for in 1931 legislation contravenes conceptions of the justice that is denied those convicted, addiction should be understood more as an illness to be treated and cured, and less as a criminal act to be punished; and whereas

Due to a lack of state financial resources, it has to date been impossible to follow appropriate recovery protocols in the case of all addicts inasmuch as it has not been possible to establish an adequate number of hospitals for the treatment of such addicts; and whereas

The sole outcome from the enforcement of the 1931 statute has been an excessive rise in drug prices, which in turn affords enormous earnings to traffickers…

In real terms, the new laws placed a rather onerous burden on Health Ministry physicians. The Hospital for Addicts that was next door to the Castañeda Psychiatric Facility was closed due to its inefficiency as a rehabilitation center, and in any case, doctors knew addicts could carry on with their normal lives outside, acquiring their usual doses of heroin, morphine or cocaine at the dispensaries. All the facility’s addicts were sent home. They even let the ones facing criminal or police-related charges go free. When criminal charges were dropped, the rage went with them.  At the same time, clinical dispensaries were opened to distribute daily doses. A registry of imprisoned users was established so that they, too, could get their fixes.

One of the most popular dispensaries was 33 Sevilla Street. The space was by no means luxurious: a small installation, attended by Dr. Martínez, an experienced, conscientious and diligent physician. He toiled up to twelve hours daily, with two assistants, Dr. Clotilde Oroci Bacien and young Dr. José Quevedo. Every kind of person would show up—an average of five hundred per day. Other dispensaries, such as one on Versalles Street, that was a little bit nicer, was favored (at least according to rumor) by attorneys and doctors. Thirty-three Sevilla, on the other hand, served mechanics, carpenters, construction workers, potters, bums and the odd petty thief.

Toxicomanos in a Public Park (Source: Excesior, May 1, 1937)

Dr. Oroci was quick to grow impatient. It was a lot of hard work for so few people—there were never enough resources—but Dr. Martínez didn’t seem to want to hear about it. He wanted everything in order, every visit carried out by the book, everything in its place. He oscillated between patient visits and general reprimands. Suddenly a patient showed up, limping and completely disheveled. “Doctorcito, good morning.”

“Good morning, my boy. How are you feeling?”

“Not good…not good at all.”

The patient placed his crutches aside once the doctor had prepared a number-20 vial with ten millimeters of alkaloid. He asked the patient for his arm and jabbed the syringe into his grubby skin.

“Next!” And as the next patient appeared he barked another order. “Throw out everyone who’s already gotten his dose! And make sure to collect their tokens or they’ll try to come back for a second fix!” This was no place to be wasteful. Dr. Oroci merely harrumphed. If that weren’t bad enough, reporters in search of today’s hot item showed up to bombard her with questions. That’s when this kid of sixteen came in. A beardless pup, he approached Dr. Martínez, rolled up his sleeve and got his fix.

It left Miguel Gil, a reporter from El Nacional Revolucionario, heartsick. How could someone so young be so far gone, he asked, and was told—as they used to say back then—that the boy had fallen victim to “evil dope pushers.” He was a working potter who brought home 1 peso 75 centavos daily, most of which went to his fix. If he didn’t shoot up, he felt like his bones were cramping. It had all started several months ago: “’Manito, you’ve got to try this stuff. I’m telling you, man, it makes you feel incredible!” a neighborhood friend enthused to the young potter.

“What is it?”

“Just try it…you’ll see I’m not kidding…”

At the beginning he gave it to him for free, and then began to charge when the kid really needed it.

The story upset Miguel Gil. Questions swirled in his reporter’s brain, but Dr. Martínez couldn’t spare any time for him. There were three other journalists and patients were swarming all about. He asked Dr. Quevedo to respond. The young doctor’s youthful appearance intrigued Miguel Gil. He was tall and stocky, with dark, restless eyes “that shone with intelligence.” He asked Gil to step into his office, where he began an extensive and enlightening explanation of the rationale behind the new laws.

…In short, we’ve reached the conclusion that in order for addicts to meet the minimum requirements of their life responsibilities, they must use drugs. It’s their only path to happiness. That is, if they are forced to go without—if they are forbidden from using—they must go to even greater extremes to get what they need and end up victims of even worse exploitation. What we acknowledge in general terms is that drug addicts are the necessary product of the capitalist civilization in which we currently live. And by the way, I’m no communist. Addiction is a necessary social evil and the only way to assimilate it into a society where people have a right to live is to place it within a legal framework…

Dr. Quevedo went on with his explanation, based, as it was, on ten years of studying addiction. He was convinced that if addicts were treated as medical patients rather than delinquents, it would eliminate the “daring, heroic” glamour associated with “outlaws.” By breaking the spell of prohibition, consumption would gradually decrease—as would illegal trafficking throughout Mexico.

It would undermine and destroy pushers like Lola la Chata, a source of acute resentment to the doctors—she was Mexico City’s main heroin, cocaine and marijuana dealer. Everyone knew she’d been at it for years, that she’d learned it from her mother at La Merced market, and that she’d perfected her skills after living for a time in Ciudad Juárez. When drugs were legal in Mexico, life was impossible for dealers like Lola. What a shame doctors like José Quevedo are no longer in fashion.

At the same time all this was taking place, the United States suspended its medicinal trade with Mexico. The bad news even reached the president in the form of a telegram during an official visit to Chiapas. The Mexican government initiated diplomatic talks and a few months later the new laws were repealed.

Suspension of the Reglamento (Source: El Nacional Revolucionaria, July 5, 1940)

No one was interested at striking any more blows at Lola’s racket since the big issue was the acquisition of US-manufactured medicines: the Second World War had complicated buying from German pharmaceutical companies. Doctors who had worked in dispensaries returned to tasks they had carried out before. Addicts penned letters from prison hoping the president might be sympathetic to their plight. How hard would it be to send doses to users on the registry? It was all in vain.

Lola stayed in business and the Ministry of Health rolled out more aggressive enforcement. She was arrested eight times between 1934 and 1945. In spite of aid from US officials, Lola stayed in business for decades, as did her daughters. Doctors resisted the onslaught of criminalization until 1947, when the preamble to the Mexican public prosecutor’s authority with regard to “drug dependency” and “trafficking” no longer made mention of toxicomanía.

We here at Points stressed quality over quantity more than ever this past week. Gearing up for a busy late February, we put up just three posts, though our writers addressed many of our favorite topics, such as moral panic, the science of addiction, and artistic depictions of addictions. Links to each of these excellent pieces are posted here for your perusal.

Monday: The week kicked off with the last part of Emily Dufton’s outstanding (and quite popular) “Debate for the Ages” series. In  “The Parent Movement, Or “Mama Said Knock [the Drug Culture] Out,” Emily looks at the War on Drugs from the perspective of the Parent Movement and that groups’ concentrated efforts over the last three decades of the twentieth century to scare kids off drugs…that is, until they’re adults.

Tuesday: Stanton Peele provided Points with a fascinating analysis of Cambridge University’s sensational new study on addiction, twins, and genetics in  “Nora Volkow Explains (Not Really) Why People Don’t Become Addicted.” The study, printed in the venerable Science magazine, was the result of researchers investigating siblings – one of whom was an addict and one was not – in the hopes of finding evidence that addiction is the result of an inherited brain dysfunction. If you like analytics, you’ll love this.

Thursday: Rounding out our social science-science-humanities triumvirate of articles this week, longtime contributor Eoin Cannon shared with us his excellent “This is Your Brain on Art House.” Struck by the popularity of the 2000 film “Requiem for a Dream,” Eoin asks how an art house film that received limited release and press eventually developed a cult following among college students. Furthermore, Eoin investigates the implication of director Darren Aronofsky’s combination of art house aesthetics, subtle timelessness, and unironic anti-drug handwringing.

Friday: A new, retooled version of Friday Reads will be back next week.

But what surprised me was its popularity among adolescents. Among my students, even those who had not seen it knew classmates in high school who had watched it together and who had urged them to check it out. It seems that Requiem’s burgeoning status as a cult favorite encompasses not only a reputation among adult film enthusiasts, but also word-of-mouth circulation among audiences who may or may not have permission to watch its “unrated” content.

By contrast, Steven Soderbergh’s drug film Traffic came out in wide release the same year, to massive critical and commercial success, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone under the age of twenty-five today who has seen it outside of class. Not for nothing this similarity, though: in both Requiem for a Dream and Traffic, knockout punches on the perils of addiction come in graphic scenes of upper-middle-class white girls being held in sexual captivity by black beasts. The question that inevitably arises about drug films is their relationship to the historical exploitation genre, in which an ostensibly anti-drug message serves as cover for lurid entertainment. Many viewers describe it exactly in those two registers: as an intoxicating sensory experience and a powerful Just Say No polemic. I think it would be unfair, based on this reception dynamic, to reduce the intensely wrought Requiem to the status of, say, a Reefer Madness. But the film’s drug content does, in a perhaps more interesting way, come from that era. 

Aronofsky’s second film after the critically acclaimed Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dreamtraces the downfalls of four Brooklyn addicts, played by Oscar-nominee Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Marlon Wayans, and Jennifer Connolly. Using a range of creative visual techniques and digital effects, and an imposing score by Clint Mansell, it renders the highs, lows, and rituals of drug use, as well as the steady drumbeats and exploding crises of addiction. Each character begins with high hopes: of rejuvenation, material success, escape from the streets, and creative work. But their combinations of delusion and drug habit produce rapid descents. The climactic movement of the film is a grim, overpowering, sometimes shocking montage weaving together each character’s final plunge to a traumatic low. This sequence is responsible for the film’s “unrated” status, as well as its reputations for both intense entertainment and scared-straight messaging.

Ellen Burstyn: Overpowered

Both Selby and Aronofsky have said that the addiction narratives in their respective novel and film are vehicles for exploring more general problems of desire, delusion, and materialism in American culture. But at the same time, neither has shied away from overt anti-drug rhetoric. Selby, who died in 2004 at the age of 75, spoke openly of his longtime opiate addiction. Aronofsky last year created four melodramatic public service ads for an anti-meth campaign.

Watching those PSAs confirmed my sense that there really are no indie quotation marks around the drug horrors in Requiem. Not only in its reception but in its composition, it is a drug film that offers a contact high in a cautionary tale. The critical response to Requiem reflected these mixed effects, in a hedged set of judgments that stood in contrast to the wide adulation accorded to Traffic. Most reviewers saw Requiem as either a breakthrough achievement or at least a highly original and affecting film. But a significant minority denounced it as classic drug exploitation dressed up less with morality than with lifeless art house pretensions. I wasn’t the first viewer to think of Reefer Madness as the exploitation standard against which to consider such judgments.

I don’t think the comparison implies a total deflation of Requiem’s purposes, though. In a Quentin Tarantino world, the fusion of art house and exploitation styles and purposes is a surface fact, not a critical conclusion. I don’t call a melodramatic or even horror-inspired storyline a disqualifying factor in an addiction film, even if it lacks a sense of humor. I can respect the appeal of classic drug tropes to directors interested in formal experimentation and dark social commentary. As much as I hate to read some viewers gush about Requiem’s “realism,” I just don’t find the exploitation dynamic to be as deeply deceptive as the word implies.

Instead, the comparison to Reefer helped draw out something else I find fascinating about Requiem. The setting of the film is obscurely dated, in a dreamy, deserted, out-of-time version of Brooklyn. Further, Aronofsky and Selby kept the names of the four main characters: working-class Jewish widow Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his jive-talking black friend Tyrone C. Love, and Harry’s over-analyzed/underloved upper-middle-class Jewish girlfriend Marion Silver. How do you name two hip young heartthrobs Harry Goldfarb and Tyrone C. Love in a turn-of-the-millennium movie?

Brooklyn: the Timeless Classic

Theirs is the ethnic Brooklyn of mid-twentieth-century fiction, not contemporary reality. Similarly, their efforts to boost goods, raise bread, cop some pure, turn on, and dig tunes, seem roughly of that same era. Of course, users of illegal drugs do all those things today, too. But there is a certain analog-era quality to the entire drug milieu of the film, not least its language. It is the world that was shaped by Harry Anslinger and his draconian reign at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930-1962. Its argot echoes Beat fiction and, perhaps more reliably, can be found in the words of David Courtwright, Herman Joseph, and Don Des Jarlais’ subjects in Addicts who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America, 1923-1965.

This half-century time lag is not inexplicable. Selby drew for his 1978 novel on his own experiences as an opiate user and addict, which ran from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Certainly, there must have been users in the mid-1970s who still talked the way his characters did. But, well, here are a couple of examples:

When everything was straightened out they would simply cut the whole scene loose, but for now theyd take an occasional taste to hang loose.

The cats in the streets were generating steam trying, desperately, to dig up the bread to cop, but how can you boose enough to be able to go for five hundred bucks? Hustlin, scufflin and boosin enough to cop a couple a bags a day was a bitch, but five hundred????

Aronofsky has said he wanted to recreate exactly what he felt reading Selby’s novel, an experience of being “in the darkest place imaginable, but it’s completely human.” He called the style that achieves this effect “emotional expressionism” and said it is the key to his composition of the narrative.

I don’t know exactly what role the film’s fidelity to Selby’s midcentury content played in the development of this style. But I think it’s fair to say that drug realism was not his first priority. Personally, I don’t find the film to have consistent emotional depth either; after some early scenes of the characters’ happiness, they become cartoonish precisely when they enter their addiction spirals.

Heavy, Man.

One of the closest comparisons to Requiem’s content that I can think of is “Hooked!”, the comic book distributed at New York’s first methadone clinic in the mid-60s. It has most of the main character types and plot elements of Requiem.  Yet I find the film fascinating, beyond its visual inventiveness. It’s because of the history of its particular narrative stretching back through Selby’s life, and the uncertain historical awareness it seems to have about its own genre. Is it the result of a young, technically brilliant indie director’s storytelling naiveté, or is it that same brilliance producing a multilayered meta-narrative? I don’t know but, like the kids today, I don’t mind watching it.

You have heard about the earth-shaking new study proving that addicts inherit a brain dysfunction that causes them to have poor impulse control?

The Cambridge Brains

Published in the most prestigious fundamental research journal in the world, Science, investigators at Cambridge found that siblings, half of whom were drug-abusers/addicts and half of whom were not, shared this trait.  This proved to the researchers that the brain anomaly preceded the drug abuse, and was not a result of it.

Here, let’s turn to Nora Volkow (as Science itself did) for an explanation:

“The inferior frontal gyrus is really one of the main ‘brakes’ of our brain,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study in Science. “[Drug users and their siblings] have less [sic] connections that are linking the rest of brain with the inferior frontal gyrus [and other key regions] that form a network that allows you to inhibit responses.”

The Alcoholism Gene

Really, the study—since it measured no natural populations—tells us nothing about whether this brain condition is any more prevalent in addicts at large than it is in non-addicts. (Do you remember the ballyhooed 1990 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found the gene for alcoholism and addiction in one group of alcoholic cadavers?  It was never replicated among any general alcoholic-addict population.)

Nothing daunted, Volkow (as described by addiction reporter Maia Szalavitz for Healthland) builds a whole edifice on such nothingness:

But the big question, as Volkow points out, is why the siblings in the current study ended up following such different paths when they shared the same vulnerabilities to addiction. Why did one become addicted, but not the other?

Additional results from the brain scans may provide intriguing hints at an explanation. For instance, people with addiction—but not their siblings—showed decreased activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). “That area is crucial in terms of enabling you to have flexibility and to shift your behavior as a function of changes in [the] environment,” says Volkow.

Well, that explains it—doesn’t it?  “Brain-disease” Volkow offers as the reason that some impulsive people abuse drugs and some don’t is their (hypothetical) deficient functioning in another area of their brain!  These poor souls are doubly diseased!

Ain’t science grand?  I’m being ironic, of course—this isn’t science.  It’s as though, having found something in the brain—but something not able to account for addiction—the writer doubles down on her brain-behavior bets.  Why, she has become addicted to seeking brain explanations!  This disease is known as reductionism: the ironclad belief that describing events in biological terms comprises a scientific advancement no matter how hypothetical the explanation is and how little it improves our understanding of—or ability to influence—outcomes.

And the disease is catchy. Forbes magazine’s coverage of the Science study purported to defy its results—”Your Brain May Be Wired for Addiction but You Don’t Have to Surrender.” But it actually reified them by fantasizing that the resiliency against addiction in half the subjects must have stemmed from some yet-to-be discovered “variations in the brains of the un-addicted siblings.”

Control for Childhood Dysfunction

Brains, brains, brains.  Nothing in the addicts’ and non-addicts’ lived experiences had any impact? The researchers carefully controlled for childhood experiences, and ensured that the siblings’ upbringing was similar (they found high levels of family dysfunction and abuse in the early lives of both the addicted and non-addicted siblings). Since abuse also causes addiction (we are told), then certainly abuse + genetic predisposition must equal addiction. Except, then, we still have the one addicted sibling and the one nonaddicted one, given the presence of both factors.  That’s because negative childhood experiences are just as nondeterminative as predictors of addiction when actually measured in general populations as is brain structure.

Isn’t there any other possible explanation for the differences in siblings’ addictiveness?  How about the role of purpose, social support, learned skills, etc.?  The reason to suggest these things is that another government agency, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), spent a year surveying leading behavioral mental health professionals in order to uncover the common current elements in people’s lives that lead to recovery from mental illness and addiction.   SAMSHA identified these psychological and environmental conditions that prevent and dispel addiction: Health, Home, Purpose, Community.

But you can’t find those things in a laboratory.  And that is why the revolutionary SAMHSA initiative has received virtually no media attention from the likes of Time Healthand.  I guess it depends on how you define science—is it the result of work by people wearing white lab coats or is it identifying the things that make a difference in comprehending and dealing with the world?  The factors identified by SAMHSA seem so prosaic.  Their only advantage is —that they are prosaic.  Because these are the fiber of human lives, the things parents and people themselves can strive to attain, the things society and social agencies can encourage.

Oh, and these factors actually account for which people resist addiction, and tell us how and why they are able to do so.  If that isn’t science, then nothing is.

Recovery: A process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential. -- SAMHSA

Frank Zappa: Straighter-edge than you might think

Stumbling around YouTube the other day, I came across this incredible video of an interview with Frank Zappa, recorded by Canada’s CBC Television on Valentine’s Day in 1971. Interviewer Ralph Thomas asks Zappa what the drug culture had done to the youth of America.

“It’s taken away a lot of their ambition,” Zappa explained. “I think we have yet to reap the so-called benefits of the acid generation as the burn-outs begin to turn up more frequently.” Thomas continued, asking if rock music contributed to this change. Was radio a “propaganda vehicle for the way drugs have been sold?” “Certainly,” Zappa replied. Radio, both AM and independent stations, have “definitely assisted in the popularization of various forms of drugs.”

When I found this video, my jaw dropped. Finally, after years of searching, I knew the answer to the age-old riddle, what do Frank Zappa and the Parent Movement have in common? As it turns out, the answer is: a lot. Both faulted a powerful popular culture (movies, television, and rock & roll) for luring innocent kids into drug abuse, and both found the results similarly upsetting: drug-using kids showed a frightening lack of ambition (later known as ‘amotivational syndrome’), and a tendency to take both a metaphoric and a literal “stumble down the stairs.” 

It wasn’t until five years after Zappa’s prescient interview, however, that the Parent Movement debuted on the national scene. In the summer of the nation’s bicentennial, as Americans celebrated with parades, festivals, and fireworks, Marsha ‘Keith’ Manatt Schuchard and her husband Ronald found, to their horror, that their thirteen-year-old daughter was smoking pot. In a tale that has since become the origin story in Parent Movement mythology, Keith and Ron threw their daughter a birthday party in hopes that it might shake the girl’s newly-acquired saturnine mood. Instead, they discovered that their daughter was only one of the many red-eyed pot-smoking youths that inhabited the wealthy suburbs of Atlanta – and the rest of them were apparently gathered in the Schuchard’s backyard. During the party, as pre-teens stumbled in and out of the house or huddled in groups in the darkened periphery of the lawn, the food went uneaten and Keith got increasingly concerned. This, she realized, was why her previously bright and happy daughter had become morose and withdrawn: drugs.

PRIDE shows it's pride with jazz hands

By 1 a.m., Keith and Ron were out, scouring the lawn in their pajamas, flashlights in hand, searching for proof that their daughter was going down a dangerous path. Marijuana “roaches,” empty bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, and other drug- and alcohol-related ephemera littered the yard, filling the Schuchards with terror and inspiring Keith to launch a grassroots social movement that would dramatically change the war on drugs for the next thirty years. What began as a small organization of concerned parents in Keith Schuchard’s living room morphed with unprecedented speed into an influential nationwide gestalt. Led by organizations like National Families in Action – organized by Schuchard’s friend Sue Rusche in 1978 – and the Parents’ Resource Institute on Drug Education (PRIDE) – formed by Schuchard and Buddy Gleaton in 1977 – activists like Keith oversaw the formation of thousands of individual parent groups across the nation. Over four thousand of these groups had formed by 1983, and by Ronald Reagan’s second term as President, they were influencing national drug policy.

With “Parent Power” as their rallying cry, the movement promoted a zero-tolerance approach to youth drug use and stressed prevention and anti-drug education for children and parents alike. The groups decried the “commercialized and glossily packaged popular youth culture” that Schuchard saw stemming from the overly-liberal 1960s, and worked to counteract anything that presented drug use as fun and cool, or as undermining “traditional adult authorities who could nurture a young person’s ability to reject drug use.” These groups feared that drug use by children as young as eleven and twelve would result in a generation of Americans stunted physically, emotionally, biologically, and morally. Taking Schuchard’s 1979 NIDA-produced publication Parents, Peers, and Pot as their sacred text, they decided that “parents are a child’s main defense against the pressures [to experiment with drugs], but parents need to recognize that they are up against powerful social and economic forces. They may face a hard struggle in helping their child to be drug-free, but the struggle will be worthwhile.”

The Parent Movement is the focus of my dissertation, so for a longer examination of the Movement’s history and effects, check that out in (hopefully) 2014. As for this post, I wanted to look specifically at how the Parent Movement participated in the core debate of this series – did parents see drug abuse stemming from root causes like poverty and unemployment, or was personal culpability still at addiction’s heart?

Like last week’s discussion of rights and choice, the Parent Movement again reframes the debate, as most previous conversations had focused on legal adults (save for my post on Teen Challenge, which also focused on underage youths), asking if the economic and social pressures addicts faced were the underlying causes of drug abuse. The Parent Movement was concerned primarily with young people – pre-teens, teenagers, even elementary school students – who were not legal adults, could not make their own decisions, and could not legally consume our society’s legal intoxicants, alcohol and tobacco. Teen Challenge did not paint young drug users as dangerous criminals or disadvantaged minorities; they were helpless, naïve, and gullible children who were at the mercy of a venomous, ravenous drug culture that wanted to take their money and their lives.

Lifetime drug abstinence is not the goal, sayeth the good book

Youths needed to be protected from a culture that would destroy them, but once they reached eighteen, they were free to do as they pleased, so the thinking went. As Schuchard repeatedly stated in Parents, Peers, and Pot – though the idea escapes most historians of the Parent Movement – “the parents did not preach prohibition forever.” Rather, they “insisted that their children not use drugs while they were too young and vulnerable to handle the psychological, physical, and social hazards involved.”

Since kids aren’t necessarily being demonized by this view, we must shift the root causes versus personal culpability debate away from a focus on the underage user and toward an understanding of the society that has allowed such drug taking to occur. If there are ‘root causes,’ the Parent Movement saw them as located in the popular drug culture that sold rolling papers and Frisbee bongs to “Tots Who Toke.” If there was an argument for personal culpability, blame for failure to take responsibility could be spread widely. It fell both on the parents who had for too long naively ignored their children’s drug use and on the “experts” who told them that drug use was no big deal.

Once children were highlighted as victims of the drug culture, rather than criminals endangering the safety of American society, the Parent Movement turned their attention to rescuing children from the scourge of drugs. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Parent Movement-inspired pop culture attacked both drug abuse’s root causes and personal culpability issues through a series of anti-drug television specials and comic books, including:

• 

  Captain America, Drug Warrior

  Captain America Goes to War Against Drugs (1990)

• The New Teen Titans, a DC Comics-produced venture in conjunction with Keebler, IBM, and the American Soft Drink Industry. (1983)

• Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, which featured nearly every character in the Disney catalogue trying to convince young Michael to stop smoking pot or, presumably, trying crack. (1990)

Kermit, Ms. Piggy, and the rest of Mikey's crypto-parents

These cartoons represent only a small fraction of the wave of anti-drug pop culture that the Parent Movement inspired. Their answers to the nation’s drug ills are both fitting and troublesome. These shows blame both the user and society while promoting a message that ostensibly promotes a loving and caring family environment that will accept the user once he comes clean. Shows like Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue brought this message home through the mouths of the Muppet Babies: “You use, you lose,” Baby Kermit the Frog said to Michael, before Baby Miss Piggy added, “Listen to us! We care about you, Mikey!”

The Parent Movement perfectly embodies the tension in American society. They sought to counteract drug culture by providing a loving family environment, one that threatened steep ramifications for drug use even as they loved the user. This push-and-pull effect – that both frightens and embraces kids – has, in many ways, come to define the modern war on drugs, exclaiming “Kids, don’t do this! But adults, you should – as long as you’re purchasing alcohol and cigarettes.” The Parent Movement’s potent mixture of self-esteem building and scolding assured us of two things: that we’re just fine without drugs, but if we take them we’re headed straight for our rooms.

This parental tension was not missing in 1971, however. After all, how did Zappa conclude his interview, when he was asked about giving advice to a hippie girl who had joined the Weathermen? “I was actually too stoned to know what I was talking about.”

Thanks for hanging out with me over the past month. It’s been great blogging for Points, and I hope these posts have entertained you. Frank Zappa and I both wish you happy a Valentine’s Day, and a very insightful rest of the year!

In the past week, Points investigated a pair of provocative questions:  “Where do people get their drugs/alcohol?” and “What makes for an addict?” Our contributors addressed these issues with their typical wisdom and élan, covering subjects as varied as Michael Jackson’s sleep patterns, the immigrant Jewish experience, and the language of the LCBO. For your personal reference, please enjoy our Week In Review.

Monday: The week began with the third instalment of Emily Dufton’s wonderful “Debate for the Ages” series, “Civil Rights or Civil Disobedience, or Doing Drugs in the Free World.” Using the Nixon-era White House Conference on Youth as the locus of her discussion, Emily investigates the ways in which discussions about the “right” to use recreational drugs have developed throughout the War on Drugs era.

Tuesday: We were extremely pleased to feature a post by Dan Melleck,  the Editor-in-Chief of our sister publication The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, the official journal of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. Much like Emily’s post, Dan’s “Semantics, Addiction Concepts, and Abnormal Drinks: A Reflection on the Historical Language of Habit” discusses the public language of addiction and abuse, taking us us into Dr. Melleck’s fascinating research on the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).

Conrad Murray: Sinner? Saint? Neither? Both?

Wednesday: Alexine Flack’s great Hump Day post considers the ethics of Michael Jackson’s now-disgraced former physician, Dr. Conrad Murray. In “Michael Jackson’s Addiction Problem,” Alexine considers Murray’s role in Jackson’s untimely demise and asks what we should ultimately make of il dotore.

Thursday: One of Points‘ head honchos, Joe Spillane, sat down with Georgia State’s Marni Davis to discuss her new monograph, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition. In their compelling discussion, Professor Davis elaborates on a central question: “What happens when the cultural attachments and economic practices immigrants bring with them to their new home are seen as incompatible with American conventions?”

Friday: As is the norm, the work week ended with, “Friday Reads,” our weekly roundup of interesting news stories and long-form periodical pieces.