Marijuana Authors Talk at Oaksterdam

Campos, Kilmer, Campbell, and Rosenthal at Oaksterdam

Despite the May DEA raids and Richard Lee’s retirement, Oaksterdam University is still alive, and Saturday evening saw its first event under the leadership of his replacement, new executive chancellor Dale Sky Jones. It was a timely and informative one, featuring the authors of four recent books on marijuana, three of which we have recently reviewed, with moderation by David Downs, author of the weekly East Bay Express‘s Legalization Nation column.

The writers present were Isaac Campos, a University of Cincinnati professor (and SSDP chapter faculty sponsor), and author of “Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs;” Beau Kilmer of the RAND Institute and one of the co-authors of “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know,” Greg Campbell, veteran journalist and author of “Pot, Inc.: Inside Medical Marijuana, America’s Most Outlaw Industry,” and Ed Rosenthal, widely known as the “guru of ganja” and author of numerous marijuana cultivation books, including the “Marijuana Growers’ Guide.”

But before getting down to business, Jones took a moment to talk up Oaksterdam and its founder, who was present at the event.

“This is the first new Oaksterdam University presents, and it’s a perfect opportunity to put Oaksterdam University back on the map,” she said. “We cannot let this historic institution die, and we owe it all to Richard Lee,” Jones added, sparking a round of applause from the several dozen in attendance.

Then Downs took over, explaining that he would treat the event as if he were the host of a TV talk show and invite one author to the dais at a time to discuss his work before opening things up for general discussion and questions from the audience.

First up was Campos, whose research into historical Mexican attitudes toward marijuana is and should be leading to some revisions in the standard narrative of US pot prohibition, which both followed and echoed Mexico’s. As Campos showed, cannabis came to Mexico as hemp way back in 1530, then escaped into the indigenous pharmacopeia only to be demonized as a devil weed by the Inquisition, meanwhile picking up the marijuana moniker.

The Mexicans themselves developed a full-blown Reefer Madness, complete with the belief that pot smoking led to madness and murder, decades before we did. And we imported it, lock, stock, and barrel, thanks to the yellow press in both countries and the creation of the Associated Press, which allowed the same Mexican press horror stories to be picked up and circulated for years among different US newspapers.

“In the contemporary era, the US has been putting pressure on Mexico to fight the war on drugs, and people in the scholarly literature assumed this was always the case, but marijuana was banned nationally in Mexico in 1920, with the first local bans beginning in the 1870s,” Campos explained. “That doesn’t really fit the model. I’m a drug reformer, too, but we have to understand it’s not simply the US imposing this; it has deep roots in other places, Mexico being one, but others in Latin America, too.”

Article republished from Stop the Drug War under Creative Commons Licensing