Catherine Carstairs

The Wide World of Doping: Drug Scandals, Natural Bodies, and the Business of Sports Entertainment

The wide world of doping : drug scandals, natural bodies, and the business of sports entertainment

The stages of the international drug control system

This paper argues that the history of the international drug control system of the League of Nations/United Nations can be divided into three cumulative stages. The first stage, the supply stage, dates back to early part of the 20th century, and aimed to reduce the supply of drugs through careful monitoring and trade regulations. This has remained the dominant control strategy. In the middle of the century, demand control, in the form of treatment and criminalization of the individual user, began to appear. This was the least successful stage. Finally, in the 1980s, the dangers of the drug traffic assumed an important place on the international agenda and measures to reduce drug-related organized crime were enacted. To date, this has been a process of proliferation of regulatory strategies. Recently, new challenges to the international drug control system have emerged, including well-funded non-governmental organizations critical of the war on drugs, and the adoption of harm reduction measures in national policies around the world.

Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove

In the 1930s, scientists learned that small amounts of fluoride naturally occurring in water could protect teeth from decay, and the idea of artificially adding fluoride to public water supplies to achieve the same effect arose. In the 1940s and early 1950s, a number of studies were completed to determine whether fluoride could have harmful effects. The research suggested that the possibility of harm was small. In the early 1950s, Canadian and US medical, dental, and public health bodies all endorsed water fluoridation. I argue in this article that some early concerns about the toxicity of fluoride were put aside as evidence regarding the effectiveness and safety of water fluoridation mounted and as the opposition was taken over by people with little standing in the scientific, medical, and dental communities. The sense of optimism that infused postwar science and the desire of dentists to have a magic bullet that could wipe out tooth decay also affected the scientific debate.

Our Sickness Record Is a National Disgrace: Adelle Davis, Nutritional Determinism, and the Anxious 1970s

America’s most widely read nutritionist of the postwar decades, Adelle Davis, helped to shape Americans’ eating habits, their child-feeding practices, their views about the quality of their food supply, and their beliefs about the impact of nutrition on their emotional and physical health. This paper closely examines Davis’s writings and argues that even though she is often associated with countercultural food reformers like Alice Waters and Frances Moore Lappé, she had as much in common with the writings of interwar nutritionists and home economists. While she was alarmed about the impact of pesticides and food additives on the quality of the food supply, and concerned about the declining fertility of American soil, she commanded American women to feed their families better and promised that improved nutrition would produce stronger, healthier, more beautiful children who would ensure America’s future strength. She believed that nearly every health problem could be solved through nutrition, and urged her readers to manage their diets carefully and to take extensive supplementation to ensure optimum health. As such, she played an important role in creating the ideology of “nutritionism”–the idea that food should be valued more for its constituent parts than for its pleasures or cultural significance.

The Dangers of Complacency: women’s history/gender history in Canada in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT Our contribution will focus on some of the intellectual developments occurring in gender history/women’s history in Canada in the twenty-first century, while also drawing attention to the decline of women’s history outside of the university environment. In the mid-1990s there was a vigorous debate over the merits of gender history vs. women’s history. Over the past decade, these debates have quieted along with a growing recognition that gender history and women’s history have many common goals. Today, biography and recent history (post 1945) figure among the strong trends in Canadian women’s and gender historiography. But the impact of government funding cuts under the previous decade-long Conservative government has seriously handicapped federal institutions such as museums and archives. So far, the current Liberal administration is moving in a more positive direction.

Book Reviews: Psychedelic psychiatry: LSD from clinic to campus

This book explores the history of early LSD experimentation in Saskatchewan, the unlikely birthplace of psychedelic psychiatry. In 1944, the small, primarily rural, province of Saskatchewan became the first province in Canada to elect a socialist government. The promise of health-care reform, including significant support for research, lured many medical researchers to the province. Dyck argues that the combination of progressive doctors, a high degree of professional autonomy and a supportive research environment allowed psychiatrists in Saskatchewan to innovate and take risks. One of the people who came to Saskatchewan was Humphry Osmond, a British-trained psychiatrist, who had been working on the links between mescaline and hallucinations. Along with several colleagues, Osmond had theorized that schizophrenia might be the result of an error in the metabolization of adrenalin, which led the body to produce a substance similar to mescaline. In Saskatchewan, Osmond met a number of sympathetic researchers including Abram Hoffer, a Saskatchewan-born psychiatrist with a background in agricultural chemistry, who shared Osmonds belief that much mental illness was caused by biochemical imbalances. Osmond, Hoffer and others began their research with mescaline but quickly changed to the more readily available and potent LSD. They began by using the drug themselves and cataloguing their reactions. Eventually, they tested it on friends, family members, health-care workers, students and members of a Mental Health committee at the Regina Chamber of Commerce. Their studies showed that LSD produced intense, but usually pleasurable hallucinations, a profound feeling of spiritual connection, even among non-believers, as well as difficulties with time perception and problems organizing and communicating thoughts. They compared these experiences with autobiographical experiences of mental illness and were struck by the similarities. Eventually, they gave LSD to recovered schizophrenics and asked them to compare the experience of LSD and their illness. By the late 1950s, Osmond and Hoffer began presenting the results of their work, arguing their studies showed that schizophrenia was the result of a biochemical imbalance. Dyck concludes that their work achieved little recognition outside Saskatchewan, in part because of their opposition to controlled clinical trials, which were then becoming the gold standard in psychopharmacology. Their failure to get their research more widely noticed made me wonder if their relative isolation made it difficult for them to keep up with a rapidly developing field, and if their research was the weaker for it, but Dyck focuses her attention on Osmond and Hoffers belief that research which took into account subjective (and often spiritual) experiences could produce better results for patients. Much of Osmond and Hoffers therapeutic work with LSD focused on alcoholism. They believed that LSDs power to effect personal transformation, especially spiritual growth, made it an excellent treatment tool. Supported by the local Alcoholics Anonymous, which also stressed the importance of spiritual growth, they treated hundreds of patients. But by the late 1960s, the growing black market in LSD, widespread use of the drug by young people, and gruesome media tales of the dangers of LSD made it difficult to continue their research. This book will be of interest to anyone in the history of psychiatry, the history of psychotropic drugs, and the history of medical research. The focus on Saskatchewan provides a valuable case study of how national and provincial politics affects research. That said, I wish that Dyck had more often broadened her focus beyond Osmond and Hoffer to explain what other researchers were doing with LSD at the same time. Hopefully, future scholars will take Dycks careful and insightful attention to the local and apply it to LSD research in other places.

Book Reviews: Heroin: the treatment of addiction in twentieth-century Britain.

Drug law reformers in North America have often held up the “British system” of heroin maintenance as a model for a more humane drug policy. But in this nuanced history of addiction treatment Alex Mold shows that while doctors and policy-makers in Britain were more open to maintenance than their US counterparts, abstinence-based treatment has also had considerable appeal. The “British system” never really existed, at least not in the form envisaged by drug law reformers. Until the 1960s, Britain had a small number of middle-aged addicts, most of whom became addicted through medical treatment. Doctors were permitted to prescribe heroin to these patients, although in other respects the drug laws in Britain were similar to those in North America. In the early 1960s, a small group of younger, recreational drug users emerged and successfully obtained very large prescriptions from a few doctors. This led to the creation of specialized Drug Dependence Units (DDUs). The psychiatrically-oriented DDUs moved away from prescribing heroin. Instead, following the American example, they provided methadone. Although a study showed that addicts maintained on heroin were more likely to continue attending treatment, and less likely to commit crimes than addicts on methadone, burned-out staff saw methadone as a step towards getting off drugs. As time went on, DDU doctors largely abandoned methadone maintenance, preferring short-term withdrawal therapy in addition to psychiatric treatment. In the late 1970s, heroin addiction increased rapidly creating long waiting lists at the DDUs. Many addicts were frustrated by the conservative prescribing practices of the DDUs and what they saw as patronizing psychiatric treatment, and they began to seek treatment from general practitioners (GPs). Mold argues that GPs trained in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s had been encouraged to see patients in terms of their social environment and life histories and, as a result, were more open to maintenance therapy. But DDU doctors and some policy-makers were uneasy about this new development. Ultimately Ann Dally, a prominent critic of DDU practices, faced two General Medical Council tribunals in 1983 and 1986/7 for over-prescribing and medical negligence. But the penalties she received were small, and Mold argues that the Dally cases can be seen as a minor victory for maintenance. The Dally cases coincided with the emergence of HIV/AIDS among injection drug users. In response, Britain introduced needle-exchange programmes and strove to make treatment programmes more accessible. There was a renewed openness towards maintenance therapy, and users began to play a role in policy-making. Since the mid-1990s, the drug issue, which has increasingly been defined as a drug/crime issue, has assumed a much higher political profile and there has been an enormous expansion of treatment facilities and options. New legislation allows police to drug-test people charged with robbery, begging and other offences. Those convicted of their crimes are frequently given the opportunity to go into drug treatment instead of serving time. So, once again, there is a mix of “treatment” and “control” in the British response to drug use. This carefully argued book is well-integrated with the existing historiography. Its focus on treatment will appeal more to medical and policy historians than to social historians, as there is very little about the addicts themselves. I was left wondering why heroin use increased so rapidly in the late 1970s. Who were these new users and why did drug use appeal to them? I also wondered why Mold focused only on heroin treatment when by the 1980s most of the drug users were poly-drug users. Is this because doctors and policy-makers focused only on heroin? Were treatments provided for other drugs? Given the increased complexity of drug use around the world, which Mold refers to in her conclusion, it would have been helpful to learn more about how Britain has faced the challenge of treating poly-drug users.