Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 9-to-5 low-cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work related. And with monday.com, work is just easier. monday.com for whatever you run. Goodamonday.com to learn more. Welcome to the new books and political science podcast. My name is Heath Brown, and today we'll be talking to Isaac Campos about his new book Homegrown, marijuana, and the origins of Mexico's war on drugs. I hope you enjoy today's interview. Welcome to new books and political science. My name is Heath Brown. Isaac Campos, how are you today? I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to talk to you and have read your book Homegrown, Marijuana, and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs. Before we get to the book, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself, what your academic background is, and what brought you to write this book. Sure, no problem. Well, I'm a historian. I'm a historian of Mexico. My job title is actually of Latin America, but I'm a specialist on Mexico. I actually began my -- in graduate school, however, I was interested in doing international history, which is the field that was once called diplomatic history, and it's now called international, to try to make it a little more inclusive than it used to be. And that's actually what got me interested in studying the history of illicit drugs. I was interested in working on the war on drugs with an international phenomenon. But what ended up happening is I learned more about the war on drugs and began reading more about the -- you know, reading more of the literature on the history of the war on drugs in North America. I recognized that there was almost nothing that had been written on the early history of the war on drugs, drug-provisionist policies, and so forth in Mexico in the early 20th, 19th century, etc. So we really had no idea what the foundations were of Mexico's drug policy in the 20th century, and there were a lot of assumptions out there about what had been Mexican policy, most of those suggesting that everything that had occurred in Mexico had happened because the United States had forced it to happen. But we really didn't have much research, so that's how I ended up actually becoming a Mexicanist rather than an international historian. And ultimately, we ended up writing this book on the history of marijuana rather than the war on drugs in general for various reasons that I can go into if you're interested. Yeah, so we'll talk a little bit about that, and like much good writing about political science is being done by non-trained political scientists, and what your contribution is as a historian I think is really important in what we learn about the specific policy area, but also a little bit about the transmission of what we know about policy I think is also -- you can really gather that from this book. So let's actually get into the book, which I really enjoyed reading. In the start of the book, you tell the story of the assassin's legend and Sylvesteré De Séci, so am I saying this name right? I believe it's De Sasse, but I'm no French speaker, so I could be wrong too. So somewhere in between these is this legend, and this sets the stage for the western descriptions of cannabis. I wonder if you could recount a bit about this assassin's legend, and its significance for establishing a foundation for your book. Sure, well, this is -- I talk about the assassin's legend in the chapter where I describe, as you know, the larger global history of cannabis and the development of ideas about cannabis around the world. So I actually begin the book by not talking a whole lot about Mexico just so that I can set the stage. So let me -- if I can just back up a little bit just to set this up. So the book introduces -- there's a major question at the center of the book, as you know, which is that if we go back and look at all the records we can find about marijuana in Mexico from the middle of the 19th century up until it was prohibited nationwide in 1920, marijuana was overwhelmingly associated with two effects in Mexico. It was overwhelming associated with violence and madness, and in fact, not only was it overwhelmingly associated with violence and madness, but there were almost no other -- there was no counter discourse to this idea. So there was -- it was never -- essentially never reported that marijuana actually had any positive effects on people, and the vast, vast majority of reports suggest that it created these quite extraordinary effects. And usually the kind of violent madness we're talking about was when someone would smoke few, have a few, you know, toaks from a marijuana cigarette, and then they would wind up becoming violently mad, usually acting like a wild beast running down the street with a knife and that sort of thing and stabbing people to death, anybody nearby. So what I try to do in the book is explain how this idea developed in Mexico. And one of the first things I do is I look into the pharmacology of cannabis, but also at the larger global history to ask the question of whether or not these kinds of descriptions had occurred anywhere else. And I actually find that marijuana had been associated with madness all over the world, really, at various points in time. But then there were also, of course, some key moments and some key ideas that helped to spawn and to -- well, it helped to serve as the foundation of this idea of what we now call reefer madness in the U.S. throughout the world and in certain areas in the West, in particular. One of those is this essay by Sylvester DeSassie, who was one of the, maybe the preeminent Orientalist in Europe in the 19th century. And he wrote an essay about the origins of the word assassin, which it turned out were connected to a particular sect called these, is my Elise, in the Middle East. And this story is actually pretty well known. If you read the most popular histories about marijuana, they will mention the assassin legend because the assassin legend came to be recycled over and over again well into the 20th century, particularly by the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the United States, Harry Anzlinger. In fact, he wrote a very important essay in the mid-30s as he was trying to get marijuana prohibited on the federal level in the U.S. called marijuana assassin of youth, and he was clearly referring specifically to this old legend. The short version of this, I've already made it very long, but the short version of this is essentially that the word assassin derived from this sect that in the 11th, 12th centuries used to use a kind of form of public assassination as their main form of political violence, essentially. So I call them essentially the world's most famous suicide bombers, which is what they were. And it turned out that these people were called the hashishans at the time. Why that is isn't exactly clear, but that word hashishan, which is connected to the word hashish, which is a form of cannabis used in that part of the world, wound up serving as the foundation of the word assassin in English. And there's a long story about this that Marco Polo recounted that supposedly there was an old man of the mountain who would drug young men with a certain potion, and then he would bring them into these sumptuous gardens and give them all the pleasures of the world, their virgins and this and that, rivers of milk and honey and that kind of thing. And then he would drug them again and take them out of the path, and they would wake up to, they would wake up to the incredible disappointment of the real world, and then he would tell them that he could send them back to this great paradise if he would, if they would carry out assassinations for them. And supposedly he could get them to do just these extraordinary assassinations that would always result in them being killed because they were assassinations against very public and important figures. And so this was ultimately the foundation of the word assassins. And this later by Western sources, particularly with people like Harry Anzlinger, but others as well, Westerners started connecting the origins of this word to somehow that they were called assassins, or they had become assassins because they were using hashish, which caused this kind of violent behavior. So this is just one thread in the development of this larger idea that really exists in many parts of the world that marijuana caused to kind of, or cannabis, it was only called marijuana in Mexico originally, that cannabis caused a kind of violent violence and, you know, this sort of violent behavior. Yeah, this, and you cover a lot of ground in the early parts of the book, a lot of ground in terms of time and also sort of movement around, but by the second chapter, you end up in Mexico. And I thought that it was really interesting for someone who doesn't study Mexico, the way in which you explained the integration of these different cultures. And so you describe European Indigenous and African cultures coming together in the Spanish colonization in Mexico. And one of the things you were talking about was that they were diverse, but similar in many ways, in terms of their view towards medicine and drugs. Now, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those, not necessarily the three cultures, but the way in which they were similar in terms of their views of medicine and drugs. Sure. Well, the idea of that chapter is to try to show that, so cannabis was brought to the New World by the Spanish originally in the 1530s, and it was brought as an industrial fiber, but it was gradually incorporated into local pharmacopoeas in Mexico. And what I tried to show in that chapter is that as it became incorporated into those local pharmacopoeas, it also became incorporated into the very controversial world that was medical and religious practice. And so the similarities between the three major cultural groups there in New Spain, which is what Mexico was called during the colonial period, the three major, the main similarity is that all three cultures had a view of illness that combined both kind of what we would call rational understandings and the supernatural. So illness was understood to be something that was connected both to the sort of modern rational processes and also to the gods in some way. And so this led to the sphere of medical practice being a very controversial one in New Spain, because of course the Spanish had, you know, were engaged in two kinds of conquest. One was a political, but the other was a spiritual. And once the Inquisition got underway in New Spain, medical practice winds up being a major point of emphasis for the inquisitors, because this is where you see a lot of the connection between this supernatural and rational ideas. And in Mexico, of course, this was particularly acute because Mexico is the world's richest country in hallucinogenic drugs. And many of those hallucinogens, things like peyote, olelequi, various other kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms, were used in both medical and religious practice, usually both at the same time medical/religious practice by Indians in Mexico in particular. And this was extremely controversial. So the inquisition has already banned peyote in Mexico in 1620. And various other hallucinogenic drugs are the same similar properties were banned over these centuries. And cannabis winds up getting mixed up in all of that. And so this is what leads me to talk about this sphere during the colonial period. Yeah, and some of the parallels between the treatment of the different types of drugs and the world we live in now is, I think, you know, obviously kind of the context on which this book can be placed in 2012. Maybe we can get to that in a little bit. Okay. But you tell some really interesting stories about some of the people who feature in Mexican history. And one of them was about Jose Antonio Elzate. Yeah. And I wonder if you talk about who he was and what made him important to the story you tell. Sure. Well, Elzate is he's one of the great enlightenment figures of colonial new Spain. So he was like so many intellectuals of the middle and late 18th century, he was deeply influenced by the enlightenment. And he was, interestingly, and which was also typical for the Spanish Empire, he was also a priest. So he was both a priest and a scientific thinker, which kind of parallels this history of medicine, one that we were just talking about in new Spain. And Elzate began publishing his own scientific journals in the 1760s and 1770s. And he would write about all sorts of different things. His main area of scientific area was in astronomy, but he would publish about like so many people that era, just about anything from zoology to astronomy to everything in between. And he winds up writing a very fascinating paper about the somewhat notorious drug in Mexico that was not very well understood, called the People's Cinciensles, which was a novel word meaning of the most noble princes. Now, the People's Cinciensles first appear in any records in Mexico in the 1690s. Now, that's when they first begin appearing in Inquisition files. And there's also a published book in that decade that mentions the Cinciensles. And they wind up being a major point of emphasis for the inquisitors, but also there are a couple of bands put out by the Archbishop of Mexico and various other things. And this was a drug that was said to behave on people or to act on people very much like Peyote did or some of these other drugs that I've already mentioned. So that is it was seen to be a substance that was used by Indians supposedly to help them commune with the supernatural. And it was also repeated supposedly to make people mad, make them go mad. And so Alsate being the enlightenment figure that he was decides to go and try to figure out what the People's Cinciensles are. Nobody knows what their real identity is. And he goes down to one of the herb dealers in Mexico, these usually women who would sit on the streets and sell medicinal products. And he asks for a sample of the People's Cinciensles. And they give him a what essentially turned out to be a handful of seeds and leaves that he looked at and he said he recognized it is looking like classic European hemp that is cannabis. Now this becomes especially interesting because he not only recognizes that these leaves and seeds look like cannabis, but he decides to try to verify it being the great scientist that he was. And he goes home and he plants them in his garden. And sure enough within not very much time, classic European cannabis emerges in his garden. And it turns out that at least one of the identities of the People's Cinciensles in Mexico was actually cannabis. He ends up going back to his library and searching some of the sources to see if the effects that are attributed to cannabis, or excuse me, the People's Cinciensles could be the product of cannabis. And he concludes that indeed they could because he reads some of these European sources from that period that suggested that cannabis could cause madness and other somewhat alarming effects. Now what's especially interesting about this story is that he's essentially the first person to discover the use of cannabis in local pharmacopaedas in Mexico at number one. Number two, he's the first person to report that cannabis was supposedly causing a certain kind of madness in Mexico. So already in the 1770s, you have this association with madness in cannabis in Mexico. But thirdly, it was very interesting his argument about all this, which was that while it was obviously a real problem for the spiritual, both the physical and spiritual health of Indians that they were using this drug in this manner, his argument of how to deal with this was not to prohibit the People's Cinciensles, which had already been done by church authority, that they shouldn't prohibit the People's Cinciensles, but actually just explained to Indians that the effects of this cannabis were perfectly natural and normal, so that that way they would stop using the drug to commune with the supernatural, because he argued that if they, if you were to tell them that the problem with this is that it was the product of the devil, then they would just be more interested in it and want to use it more. So a very early example of someone arguing that prohibitions and policies actually make people want to use the substances that are prohibited more than actually deterring their use. Right. Was he in conversation with figures from the time period in other countries? Is he that? Is his work in reputation and stature such that he's in in sort of open dialogue with scientists elsewhere? To a certain extent though, and I'm not an expert on this field, but I think of this. I had something to do with the fact that the, you know, the enlightenment was a somewhat dicey, dicey proposition in, in, you know, Catholic, very Catholic, Spain, and then in other places in the world. So his work was, you know, he had to be very careful about the way he proposed things. He'd actually had his, his journal shut down once or twice. And so he was in some conversation, but that essay about the People's Cincienslesles is a, is a rare one and almost no one has ever cited it. There's an article in the late '70s, Mexican ethnobotanist cited that article. But other than that, I'd never seen anyone cite it before I came across it in the archive. Yeah. And let me, let's talk a little bit about what you actually did. Use a method that's familiar to political scientists to analyze newspapers in chapter four. What did you tell us what you did and what you, what you found? All right. Well, one of the problems that I encountered from the very beginning in researching this topic, and one of the things that made me actually especially interested to keep working on it, was that when I went into the archives in Mexico, I had a really hard time finding any references to marijuana in the 19th and early 20th century. This was kind of a surprise. It was the first important finding because the literature in the United States on marijuana's history has long suggested that marijuana use was extremely common in Mexico and that it was Mexicans who began coming across the border in the 1910s and because marijuana use was so common among them, this created a kind of reaction among people north of the border to prohibit the drug because it was associated so closely with Mexicans and they were so using it so commonly. But what I actually found at the beginning was it was actually really, really hard to find any references to marijuana use. And so this led me in the, in the early days when I was working on this project, to spend an enormous amount of time working through newspapers manually the old-fashioned way. When I began this project, there wasn't a single Mexican newspaper from the era that had even been indexed, much less digitized. So this was literally taking a sample of the newspaper and just going page by page looking for references to marijuana. Right as I was getting ready to publish the book, a new set of digitized Mexican newspapers became available. It's a partnership between the Center for Research Libraries and I forget the name of the other. Anyway, I cited it in the book. And that opened up about 13 newspapers that were suddenly totally digitized from this era and allowed me to suddenly do a kind of quantitative discourse analysis on the development of the discourse surrounding marijuana in Mexico. This, to my knowledge, is the first time this has ever been done in the field of certainly Mexican history. Surely somebody's done something like this in US history where this kind of thing has been more available, these kinds of digitized resources. But in Mexican history, this had never been done. This had just become available. And it was ideally suited to the topic that I was dealing with because so much of the research was like searching for a needle in a haystack. And this not only allowed me to find all the needles in the haystack, but allowed me to quantify how the discourse developed over time. And what I ended up finding was really quite fascinating. I found that over 70% of all the references to the effects of marijuana in these newspapers between the 1850s and 1920, over 70% referred to the effects of marijuana as either being violence or madness or both. And among all the other effects, there wasn't a single one of them that could be considered to have been seen as a positive effect during that period. I mean, literally, there was not a single newspaper article that suggested that marijuana had positive effects. And furthermore, even more extraordinary it seemed to me, was that there was not a single article that suggested that some of the really wild and outlandish accounts of marijuana effect, there wasn't a single article that suggested that those were exaggerations. And this is especially weird because this was a period of a lot of journalistic competition in Mexico, where newspapers would routinely call each other out for exaggerating or sensationalizing or what have you. And during this period, there isn't a single published account that suggests that people are exaggerating about marijuana's effects, even though marijuana is usually being described as making people into violent maniacs. So that was quite fascinating and a really wonderful demonstration of how these new digital technologies are allowing us to really understand certain aspects, especially subaltern aspects of history that previously were just impossible to get a real grasp on. And I'll also add, I was able to use the same kind of technology to trace the movement of these ideas from Mexico to the United States beginning in the 1890s. So I show actually that Mexican influence was actually very important in the development of the idea of reformateness in the United States, but not because Mexicans were coming to the U.S. smoking marijuana, but because their ideas were beginning to filter into the United States informally through the press beginning in the 1890s. And that's, again, something that was pretty much impossible to document prior to these new digitized databases. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the book were these illustrations that you include in a couple of chapters, particularly in chapter five, and a little bit hard to describe them, but maybe if you could try to describe one of these really interesting, evocative figures, one 10, one 11 in the book, and how they fit into the narrative, some of it coming across in newspapers that you describe. But also these visual representations of this forming myth about marijuana and marijuana usage. How do you get your hands on these? Are these readily available? Well, the images you're referring to are lithographs that were produced by a lithographer who much of your audience has probably seen his work, but may not know his name. His name is Jose Guadalupe Rosada, and he was active in the late 19th century. I think he died in 1913. He produced thousands of lithographs during this period, anyone who's seen the classic lithographs of skeletons, some of the famous ones have skeletons dancing at parties or playing the guitar, what have you. These were all productions of Rosada in the late 19th and early 20th century, and Rosada winds up being really important to my book, because while I'm able to do this wonderful quantitative discourse analysis, the problem with the quantitative discourse analysis in 19th century Mexico is that 90 percent of Mexicans were illiterate. In order to get a feel for what ordinary Mexicans were hearing about cannabis, you have to get away from the written press. Now, some of the written press was obviously filtering out to people through people who would read newspapers on corners and that kind of thing, but more importantly were the kind of words that Posada did, which was these penny press lithographs that would usually reproduce the same exact same stories that were appearing in the regular press at the same time. The images you're referring to specifically here demonstrate are part of a chapter that's demonstrating that the ideas about marijuana's effects were not actually that unusual in Mexico. One of the things I tried to explain, not only where these ideas came from in Mexico, but why they seemed so believable. And one of the reasons they seem so believable is because they fit right into larger discourses about the effects of drugs in general. And by drugs, I mean, not only the drugs we consider illicit today, but also alcohol, which was the main drug of abuse in Mexico as it is today. And Posada, it turns out, would represent this kind of violent madness that could accompany drug use, but also just madness in general. He represented in ways that were very, very similar to what was being represented in the press, with as much sensationalism in most cases. And these representations suggest that ordinary folk, and this, and I have other sources that suggest this as well, that ordinary folk were seeing, understood the effects of these drugs to be very similar to the way that elites did. So this was not a top-down process where ideas were imposed from above, suggesting to people that this is the kind of effects that marijuana had. But in fact, I show in the book that in many ways, this may have been as bottom-up as it was top-down. And so that's the way it used those. Yeah, I think it's just one of the great parts that I can never book to have, to have these kind of visuals. I think it was really enjoyable. So let's get to what the Mexican government actually does. And so when does the government actually step in and begin to formally regulate marijuana, and what was their initial method of regulation? What were they doing? Well, the first ban that I'm aware of in Mexico, on marijuana itself. So we have this, people to see sleaze our ban by the church in the late 18th century. And the inquisition is interested in them before that. And that is, we could call that a cannabis ban, but it wasn't always cannabis. The people, since these were sometimes another drug as well as I described in the book. So the real first formal ban on cannabis that I'm aware of, occurred in Mexico City in the 1860s and 1869. And these kinds of bans were, this was a ban on the sale of cannabis. So you weren't allowed to sell, and in some states, municipalities, you would get bans on cultivation as well. And then sometimes more rarely on use. One has to understand that in the late 19th century, old-fashioned liberalism was dominant in Mexico. And the idea that you could ban someone from using a drug was a somewhat radical idea at the time, gradually, that things developed. So it didn't seem so radical anymore. But at the time, that was a very radical idea. These were the first specific bans on the use of marijuana in Mexico. There were also pharmacy regulations, which are the real foundations of modern drug prohibition. And these actually got off to, these were, it had very early start in Mexico, not so much for cannabis, but more generally for drugs of abuse, things like the opiates morphine in particular. And then eventually cocaine once it was discovered, and so on and so forth. So these were the two main kinds of regulations that existed in Mexico prior to the 1920s. Local and state bans, you couldn't have federal bans, because the 1857 Constitution in Mexico was a very powerfully federalist document that made it impossible to make a nationwide prohibition of this kind. But you could have local and state provisions. And then we also have these pharmacy regulations, which were also on the state and local level. And these were the things that first regulated cannabis and other drugs. And these actually, most of these appeared prior to similar prohibitions in the United States. So as I argue, and I show quite clearly in the book, the foundations of Mexico's were on drugs actually were there prior to the United States becoming interested in all this kind of thing, at all in this kind of thing. And Mexico actually had the kind of regulations that would be demanded by international treaties on drugs before the United States had them. So the idea that the United States forced all this stuff on Mexico is quite clearly false when one looks at these early regulations. Yeah. And without giving away too many of the blockbuster parts of the book, what's the case to for the transmission of the ideas? This is sort of the central thesis of the book that this idea, this regime of policy regulation, didn't in fact move from north-south, but may have moved in the opposite direction. What's fundamentally your case? Do you mean specifically about drug regulation or about these ideas with respect to marijuana? The drug regulation. Is there a case to be made of the idea of the prohibitions and the focus moved from Mexico to the US? Or is it the path less direct? Well, no, I don't think the prohibitions themselves. You could make the argument that in the early 20th century, as people in the United States first started hearing about marijuana, one of the things that they were learning about it when they learned about its effects was also they were learning that it was already prohibited in Mexico. So you could make the argument that as people in the US were learning that marijuana had bad effects, they were learning that this was also prohibited drugs out of the border. But you couldn't argue that the United States copied Mexico's drug policies. Instead, what I would argue is that what so often happens in the modern world is that these kinds of developments with respect to pharmacy and drug regulations began appearing in lots of places around the same time. So they weren't just invented in one place and spread elsewhere. You wind up having, there's actually a historian named Lauren Benton who's argued that modern history is full of what she calls wormholes, which is you wind up having the development of very similar processes in multiple places at the same time. And it appears there must be a connection between these two places, but there's no clear direct link. There just is these things popping up popping up at the same time because people in different parts of the world are dealing with very, very similar processes. So things related to industrialization and modernization or urbanization and so on and so forth. And so these things start cropping up in Mexico in part because of the Spanish influence. The Spanish in the early modern era were actually ahead of most of the rest of Europe on matters of pharmacy and medical regulation. And this was in part a product of having been colonized by the Muslim conquerors for several centuries prior to the 16th century. And so the Spanish were already regulating medicine and pharmacy well through the colonial period. And this gives Mexico kind of a head start on all these things that would become the standard way of dealing with the distribution of dangerous drugs during the 19th and early 20th century. I think it's quite a, the basic foundation of this, the idea that there should be restrictions on the distribution of certain dangerous substances is a pretty logical conclusion to come to that as drugs start being mass marketed in the 19th century and so on and so forth. What changes is that what's really important the most important developments I think in turning this from a reasonable regulatory regime into a war on drugs is the fetishizing of certain drugs. And that's where I would say that so the fetishizing of the opiates and cocaine in marijuana, right? Those are the three big ones. Later we have other things that come into the forest. And there is where you can say that Mexico had a very important influence on the United States and on other parts of the world in that it was in Mexico that you have such a powerful development of this idea that marijuana caused violent madness, that marijuana was the most dangerous and powerful of all these drugs. And Mexico in fact there was a kind of gateway theory a hundred years ago but the gateway was that you would start with alcohol and tobacco and then move on to opium and then if you were really, really degenerate you would wind up using marijuana. So that's where you could say that Mexico had the very important influence on making marijuana one of the big three targets of the 20th century war on drugs and that's it. Yeah and let's sort of let in the interest of time take this up to today and so towards the end of the book you ask a question you say why do policymakers despite the enormous evidence that the drug war cannot succeed continue to insist that the fight must go on? What's your answer to this question? Well I think there are a few different levels. I mean in part I'm here actually right now I'm in Oakland California which is kind of the center of ground zero of major drug reform and I've been down in Oaksterdam and talking to people around there and and a friend of mine here was explaining to me that one of the major problems is you know some of these things are very practical so there's an enormous amount of institutional inertia. There's so many agencies and you know associations and everything else you know bureaucracies that are reliant on the war on drugs that there's an enormous amount of inertia of number one. That's not so surprising there are a lot of people who are you know reliant on the revenues that come from the war on drugs about police forces and prisons and all those things and most of your listeners are probably familiar with those you know those ideas. I'm also though I think that there's also very deep deep-seated attitudes and ideas about this stuff that goes deep way way back deep into history the kind of thing that I'm writing about in my book. Things that go back to the you know these conflicts over religion and and the relationship between medicine and the supernatural and so on and so forth and I think all those things are very deep seated in people's minds and are you know and we're reminded them in very subtle cultural ways and that's the kind of thing that's very hard to put your finger on and probably political scientists aren't especially interested in but I think these kinds of things are also important this deep-seated ideology that we have related to these drugs and of course there are things that are more recent issue in this basic vein so the fact that marijuana becomes such a you know important symbol in the culture wars for example the United States in the last 30 or 40 years has of course you know will lead a lot of people to be very reluctant to you know change the mind about policy simply because what marijuana symbolizes right so I think all these things are working together to um continue to maintain a policy that almost every serious scholar independence scholar who's gone on study has said it's failing right yeah and it's it's quite a um an interesting puzzle but I also think it's going to be very hard to um unravel because there are so many aspects of uh of what's holding it in place yeah I think it's it's for that reason that that political scientists who often uh truncate the story truncate the history can learn a lot about not just the specific area but also about ways in which to study um deep entrenched issues and problems and that the way in which you approach this as a historian is in fact I think methodologically and sort of in terms of attitude towards the subject something that political science really could learn a lot about so Isaac Campbell's thank you very much it was a real pleasure to hear about the book uh your book home grown marijuana and the origins of Mexico's war on drugs was published this year by the University of North Carolina Press it's available at their website and on Amazon thank you again Isaac very much for your time well thanks for having me I really enjoyed it. you [BLANK_AUDIO]
Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican media. Campos turns on its head the popular myth that drug regulation in Mexico derives from US sources. For political scientists and for all those interested in the issue, the book offers a deep historical context for the current “war on drugs” and related violence in the US and in Mexico.
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