History by ©Sarah Becker Marijuana – It’s Legal! In 1792, Quaker Edward Stabler borrowed 100 pounds to buy stock for his Alexandria Apothecary Shop. Now a National Historic Landmark, the Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary Shop’s history dates from 1792 to 1933. Medicinal cannabis was first introduced in the 1850s; on the Leadbeater families’ corporate watch. “Records do not tell us what feelings of uncertainty Edward Stabler may have harbored in relation to his venture,” Eleanor Leadbeater wrote in 1934, “but they do show that his business prospered to such an extent that he was able to return the loan and double his stock of goods during the first year.” Hemp: Cannabis sativa, an industrial crop; a highly profitable fiber crop used in the production of rope and such. The Commonwealth’s latest Industrial Hemp Law was enacted in 2015. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines Cannabis as “the dried flowering tops of hemp plants which contain the euphoric principles ^1-3,4-trans and ^6-3,4 trans-tetrahydrocannabinol. It is classified as a hallucinogenic and prepared as bhang, ganja, hashish, and marijuana.” Cannabism: “a morbid state produced by the misuse of cannabis.” Marijuana: “a crude preparation of the leaves and flowering tops of [male and female] hemp plants.” “Two recent articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, on the ‘Narcotics we indulge in,’ have attracted more than ordinary attention: tobacco, hops, opium, hemp, &c.,” The New York Daily Times wrote in 1854. “Smokers, the intellectual class of them, especially, think, speak, and write better under its influence; and the mere fact, that they are inferior to themselves without it, is a good reason for supposing that it creates an abnormal condition….” On February 27, 2021, Virginia became the 4th state to legalize marijuana by way of the legislature–in this instance for adult recreation use. The Virginia House of Delegates passed the…
The Border By Miriam R. Kramer Despite weighing in at a walloping 716 pages, Don Winslow’s The Border explodes off the mark like a doped-up Olympic sprinter. The final installment in a trilogy covering the United States’ War on Drugs, The Border picks up where The Cartel and The Power of the Dog leave off and brings the story to an electric conclusion. Winslow’s twenty years of research into the illegal drug trade between the United States and Mexico make him uniquely qualified as a novelist to bring its dizzying highs and lows to light. Art “Arturo” Keller, the American son of a Mexican mother and an absentee American father, is a former CIA agent turned DEA after Vietnam. Having spent more of his career living in Mexico than the United States, Art has seen everything from the burning of Mexican poppy fields in the mid-1970s to the vicious battles between cartels seeking to mark territory in the early 2010s in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Obsessed with bringing down Sinaloa cartel leader Adán Barrera, who murdered his partner, Ernie Hidalgo, Keller uses almost any resource possible, even other cartels, to find a way to destroy his bête noire. In The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, Winslow brings to life complex interactions between drug cartels; Mexican armed forces, police, and security agencies; ordinary and upper-class Mexicans; and Mexican journalists. In The Border, Winslow continues the gritty stories of his mesmerizing characters while turning his attention more towards the United States’ role. After staggering out of a firefight involving Adán Barrera and a competing cartel at the beginning of The Border, Keller has been tapped to become the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, placing him in the position to take his decades-long…