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- [00:00]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Limu Imu and Doug.
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
- [00:31]
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Bradley Bourujerdi
So sick.
- [01:15]
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Bradley Bourujerdi
No way.
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To the new Books Network.
- [01:34]
Yana Byers
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Bradley Bourujerdi, professor at Tarrant County College in Arlington, Texas, to talk about his new book, Cannabis, out this year 2025 with reaction books. Hi, Brad. How you doing today?
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Great. How you doing?
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Yana Byers
I'm great. It's a beautiful afternoon. Love the fall. All good?
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Yeah, it's. It's very. It's barely fall here in, in Texas, we, we got a nice couple of days of cool weather, but now we got about a week of. Of mid-80s in, in November, which is just horrendous.
- [02:14]
Yana Byers
Man, I hate global warming. I hate it. I know, like, bold statement. Who doesn't? But, God, it just sucks, like now. And I'm thinking about it. All right, so let's talk about cannabis, which is something that we all like. Let's get there. So how did you come to write this book?
- [02:35]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Well, this is my. My second academic book. The first one.
- [02:43]
Was like, kind of like a rendition of my dissertation. Um, and it was kind of like a real hassle going through that whole process because I had given the manuscript to Oxford University Press, and. And they lost it. And then I gave it to. To Cambridge, and Oxford then contacted me saying they found it, but I was like, I already gave it to Cambridge. And then. And then Cambridge kind of butchered it. Turns out I gave him a bad copy. But I did get some good feedback, and when I was trying to revise it, I found this kind of like a little bit. Lexington Books was kind of like a lower press that just kind of fell in my pocket. And I was like, I just want to get this done, because I've been doing it so long, gave it to them, got it published, and maybe like a couple of years later, after the print, you know, the, after the paperback came out, I received a call from an editor at Reaction Press who asked if I wanted to do this book on. For. For their edible series. And.
- [03:52]
Yeah, I was interested in it because it. It. It had a little different approach. I mean, you know, my first book was a lot more academically oriented. It's one of those expensive press books that hardly anybody reads, and maybe university press, you know, I mean, universities buy it for their libraries. But this was a chance really to kind of provide a perspective to a broader audience that I was really interested in, because, you know, I'm a community college professor, and I like talking and teaching to. To a wider audience and trying to motivate my students to become a little more academic. And I kind of felt like this was a good opportunity to do that. You know.
- [04:37]
It'S always a negotiation process between academics. You know, do you want to write more erudite, or do you want to write more for a wider audience? And, and I tried to kind of like, bridge that separation in this book, provide it to a wider audience, but not lose sight of the kind of, like, academic style.
- [05:01]
And, yeah, I mean.
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Took me a lot longer, honestly, than I. Than I thought. I. I was really excited about it, but getting all of the copyrights for the images was. Was kind of a hassle. And the biggest problem was trying to condense all of this information into, you know, 25,000 words or so. I did my very best, and when I gave them the manuscript, it was like well over 30,000. And they're like, hey, you know, this. This is too long. And so I had to, even then, you know, spend a little bit more time trimming it up more, which I found kind of tedious. But, yeah, I mean, it was enjoyable. In the end. I was really happy with the final product.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, it's a beautiful book. You should be and it does the job. It's a smart book. It's thoughtful, it's clearly written by a specialist, but it's readable and it's fun and there's great images. It's, it's, it did what you wanted it to, but like, this was. So your dissertation was about cannabis and your first book's about cannabis. Why cannabis?
- [06:02]
Bradley Bourujerdi
It's a great question and the answer is probably different than most people who've came across the plant in their studies, because I started out as a Russian historian, a Russian, which was more Russian Russia more broadly. I wasn't very academic minded in high school and it took me a little while as a community college student. When I, when I got out of high school and then when I transferred to the university is when I kind of woke up and really found a passion for history. And it was in a Russian history class. And I spent several years after that just consuming as much Russian history as I could. I traveled to Russia, I studied the language, but I didn't get accepted to any of the Russian PhD programs like the University of Toronto and these other places that I wanted to go to. I did get accepted to the PhD program at UTA where I got my bachelor's and my master's degree. And they were like, you know, just apply all these places, you're guaranteed here, but you know, see if you get in anywhere else. And I didn't. So I went to uta and the very first semester of my graduate work, I took a class on the American Revolution which we had to like write one of these big, you know, seminar papers. And it was, it was a transatlantic history program which kind of deals with these intercultural cross cultural connections between nations and people beyond borders. And I didn't want to lose my, my, my, my interest in Russia. So one of the first things I did in that class was figure out a way to include Russia in the American Revolution. And there was this like, online database called like the Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution or something like this. And I Google or I searched in that database Russia and all of the documents that popped up made a reference to him. And I mean, at that time I didn't know very much about cannabis academically other than, you know, know, marijuana and, and the smokable substance. But everything I encountered in these documents were talking about the need for these American revolutionaries who are trying to break away from the British to find a new source for their hemp, which they used for.
- [08:38]
Naval stores. It was a, it was an important commodity for naval stores that Americans and the British always had a hard time producing the highest quality of. Turns out most of the naval store hemp that Americans used was imported from the British, who purchased it from Russia. And so that kind of got me into thinking, well, what is hemp and how does it connect to cannabis more broadly? And I started studying a lot more of its industrial uses, its Western associations as this kind of, like, important commodity for empires and productive work, and all this association with how hard it is to produce, and all these treatises about how to better produce it and all these other sort of things. And so. So that's how. That's. That's how my window into the cannabis plant more broadly emerged. But as I started, you know, studying more of it in the 19th century, I started encountering more terms like, you know, Indian hemp.
- [09:45]
Terms of. Of people describing its kind of negative associations. And this kind of led me on this path to kind of describe it in this multipurpose way.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. And I think that, like, brings up this really fundamental question, is, like, what is cannabis even? What is this plant?
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. There's a lot of words used for it. Right. And for many people, the answer is different.
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Some people refer to hemp, and when they think of hemp, they associate it with sinister intoxicants. Some people who associate it with hemp associate it with industrial purposes. Some people associate it with medical purposes. And this kind of led me into this idea that cannabis is this very multipurpose, broad plant that maybe to the untrained eye, if you're looking at different species or different.
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Molecular structured plants, you may not know the difference, but when you put it under the microscope and start testing it, you kind of see how it has this range and this variation that provides humanity with the ability to use it in these different.
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Settings or different kind of like, social.
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Areas. Like, I refer to it, like, as an industrial plant, a medical plant, and a recreational plant. It has a very durable fiber that one can use to make a range of different commodities.
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It has various aspects that help make medicine out of it. So it's this kind of very diverse plant that's been around for a very long time and has maybe changed as humans have used it for different purposes, for psychoactive purposes, for medical purposes, and for industrial purposes. It has kind of like, evolved or moved with the human. Human migration patterns where people have been.
- [12:00]
Adapting it to use for their social needs. So it's a strong utility plant that I find very, for most people, kind of confusing. It's like A lot of people, they'll know one aspect of the plant oftentimes and know very little about other aspects of the plant. Right. Like, some people are unaware that hemp is cannabis. You know, I remember I taught a class when I was finishing my dissertation, and it was called Hemp History and Culture. And I thought every, you know, cannabis enthusiast on the college campus was going to want to, like, show up and take this class and that there'd be a waiting list because everybody wanted it. Well, only, like, five people, five or six people signed up for the class, actually. And it turns out maybe because nobody really knew that hemp was marijuana. Right. If I called it marijuana, probably more people would have showed up. But those six students who. Who signed up didn't know that that hemp was. Was part of cannabis. And that just sort of like, fed into my idea of just how confusing the nomenclature of this plant has been and, in fact, still is, I think.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I. I have a grasp on cannabis, and for sure, you know, hemp especially is an historical product, but I learned so much about the ways you can use this product, and what they do is.
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Really exciting.
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So, like, if we're. If I'm going to bring up cannabis with the average person, they're going to think about the 60s, right? They're going to think about, like, Kona culture. But it. But our human relationship with cannabis goes back, like, very much farther than the 1960s. Yes.
- [13:50]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Oh, yeah, definitely. Much farther. And in fact, I think it. One of the arguments I try to make in the book is that you need to go back farther to understand the human relationship, people, plant relationships that developed around this plant. If you want to understand.
- [14:16]
Its place in the global sort of drug scene in the 1960s, there are. There's a lot of sort of maybe like, negotiation process that. That occurs over time that ultimately gets us to where the 1960s kind of like, developed this transgressive countercultural connection that people embraced with the plant. But, I mean, evidence. I mean, it's thousands of years old. I think some scholars have pushed it as at least 10,000 years old. It could be one of the first people plant relationships that was established. We don't know. But there's been all sorts of theories kind of passed down about why and how humans came in contact with the plant. Some people argue that maybe, like, the nutritious value of its seed is what maybe attracted early humans to it. Some people argue that, well, it would maybe the psychoactive aspects of it that attracted them to it, or maybe it's the fiber. And what's interesting, you know, there's, there's a lot of activists who write about this stuff. People who love the plant and talk about how wonderful it is, or people who hate the plant talk about how, how bad it is. And it's difficult to kind of sift through the weeds, so to speak, no pun intended.
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To kind of get at why and how people actually came to this. Like you see even, even, even some, some scholars who, who, you know, at some points in their life, you know, argued that it was, it was the, the seed or the, the psychoactive part that attracted them. Later on, after the, what I call like the hemp health movement where, where, where hemp resurges as in popularity, many of them started to revise their ideas and say, well, maybe it was the seed that got people attracted to it. But the, but because of this plant has this triple purpose threat or multi purpose kind of dimension to it where it can be used in these for rope, for cloth, and it could be used as a food and it can be used as a psychoactive substance. I think these three kind of uses maybe attracted people to it, maybe for different reasons at different times. But I think maybe this malleability, so to speak, of the plant to kind of fit into various dimensions of people's society is probably what kept it around for so long.
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Bradley Bourujerdi
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan. Real United Airlines customers. We were returning home, and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.
- [18:23]
Yana Byers
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [18:25]
Bradley Bourujerdi
I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
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It felt like I was the captain.
- [18:37]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. So we can just. Basically, we can do so much with it, right? Yeah. Like, so tell us, like, what are some of the things we can do with cannabis and have done throughout history?
- [18:53]
Bradley Bourujerdi
I mean, yeah, you can do quite a bit there. There are. There are sources that, that speak of this plant as if it is so ubiquitous that, that some of the authors, like, in the. In the 18th century describe. We don't. I don't even have to introduce this plant to you because it's known to all housewives, for example.
- [19:18]
It apparently would be. Everyone would have small little plots where they would grow some of. Some of these plants. It could be used for linens, any sort of cloth. It could be used for rope, any sort of rope that you need, or durable fiber as well, that you want to use for naval. Naval stores, depending on how you.
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Process it after it gets cut down, will determine how strong the fiber is and can be used for various different purposes. It's a fibrous plant that can be used for any sort of fibrous purpose that, that you. That you can think of. People used it as a medicine, but without.
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Its intoxicating properties. Because there are.
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Versions or varieties of cannabis that don't have the psychoactive compounds like thc, but have other cannabinoids. And people have used those for medicines. They've used it for food.
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They've used.
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In fact, they even used it. I mentioned a couple of times in the book how they used it as a unit of measure in a way like medical treatises will describe, like tumors that are the size of a hemp seed or a fishing manual will describe something that was as big as a hemp seed. I mean, these types of things kind of make us see how they were pretty ubiquitous. If somebody is using this to describe something else, it kind of implies that people know what it looks like. Right. And then of course, you have mostly in Asian regions, before it migrates to other areas, you have it as this medicinal substance of psychoactive capacity. But in Europe it was still considered a medicine without psychoactive substances. Right. So we gotta make sure that we understand that it had medicinal value that was non psychoactive, but then also had medicinal value that was psychoactive because before it became what we would call a recreational drug. So you have all these different uses for the plant. And what we know about the uses of commodity is that the way a society uses something, invests it with meaning. Right. Endows it with meaning. And because cannabis has such a diverse use connected to it, you're therefore going to have all of these different meanings that are arounding it, surrounding it. Right. And this kind of like contested sort of environment is important for helping us understand how it has evolved and transformed over time.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. So I, I didn't get this out earlier. Where, where does it come from?
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Bradley Bourujerdi
So there's a, there's two different sort of like patterns that we see of what, what many people today would describe like as cannabis sativa, although these are very controversial terms as well. Right. So we have to be careful with, with the way we use these terms. But the, the sort of non psychoactive cannabis kind of emerges in the Eurasian steppes region and migrates up north. And what many refer to as cannabis indica kind of begins in the Himalaya region, the Hindu Kush region, and kind of spreads through Asia and South Asia and then into Africa. It wasn't until the age of exploration and the Colombian exchange that followed that we see evidence of cannabis migrating across the Atlantic Ocean into the Americas.
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Yana Byers
So it's a so called old World plant.
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Yes, definitely.
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Yana Byers
And are there any, is there anything, any cannabis like situations, any plants in the New World that are kind of similar?
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Bradley Bourujerdi
I mean, it's a good question.
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We know that there are, there are a lot of drug plants in areas of the New World.
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That have been woven into sort of like the medical practices of indigenous people.
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There's also separate fibrous plants in the New World, the so called New World that people had used.
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And so when cannabis makes its way over to the Americas.
- [23:57]
It'S different uses kind of like get woven into different societies, like indigenous populations in what is today Mexico, for example, at some point begin to adopt.
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The medical uses for the plant. Right. Whereas in people in, in North America, where these European empires came with their ships that had a hundred tons worth of cannabis fiber on them. They brought it over to try and use it for these more industrial purposes, and they planted it there, they tried to cultivate it there.
- [24:44]
We don't really know specifically how the drug cannabis kind of comes. There's some evidence that suggests that enslaved Africans perhaps brought some with them. We have one account, not very many, but. But one account at least, of someone describing an enslaved African trying to conceal these seeds. We don't know exactly when it came, but we do know that there are African American societies and areas like Kentucky, for example, that have associations with it.
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So the idea is that it probably came.
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On some form or fashion with enslaved Africans, the drug cannabis did, and the fibrous cannabis came with these Europeans. But the thing that's important to pay attention to is that there are really no reproductive barriers to these different species. And, you know, male plants and female plants are separate when it comes to cannabis. When you plant the cannabis seed, it's going to grow into either a male plant that produces this pollen or a female plant that produces these flowers. And when the pollen attaches to the female flower, it produces these genetically diverse seeds that all have. Are a byproduct of the two parents, right? And we know that this, this pollen, this male pollen, can travel pretty far. I mean, I've. I've. I've had some interview conversations with, like, hemp farmers in the United States who were very upset by the fact that they thought that they grew all of these plants and only had female plants in these large fields, and they would still somehow get fertilized and get. Get seeds. And they're like, we don't have any male seeds anywhere. We don't know. I mean, if anybody around us has a male plant, it's going to contaminate our whole entire crop. They argued, right? And so, you know, we can kind of see how this. This pollen is very fine. Pollen just spreads. And so what this means, I think probably those two varieties that made their way to the Americas probably inadvertently, were.
- [27:05]
Breeding with each other, not maybe not deliberately at first, to create these very complex different strands that we now see today, which is just filled. The market is just filled with all of this nomenclature of all these different names, and it's hard to even keep up with because the new ones just keep popping up. And, and it's just this kind of, like, texture, flavor, the text, the pharmacological texture of the high that one gets, the flavor, the look. There's all these just different kind of things that we see because of the, The, The Genetic diversity of this plant.
- [27:44]
Yana Byers
You know, this is one of the things, like trying to explain to Europeans what an American cannabis store is like, is hilarious. It's like, well, I want you to envision a cross between an Apple store and, and the coolest record store you've ever been in.
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Certainly, certainly. Yeah. It's just, and it's just filled with all these names and these like, funny kind of like caricatures of names. It's almost like some people maybe come up with a new strand and like whatever they're doing at that time, maybe they start to try to like call the plan. You know, they got like cookie monsters and Fruity Pebbles and it's like, were you eating cereal and you know this? No.
- [28:28]
Yana Byers
Yeah, no, for sure. It, it's very. It's really funny. Yeah, there's something like, it feels like next generation, like craft brew too. It's like some new thing for people to be able to geek out on.
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Bradley Bourujerdi
Yeah, yeah. And, and I mean, because of how popular cannabis is becoming, I feel like, and I think I mentioned this somewhere in the book, like.
- [28:51]
There needs to be some sort of serious overhaul when it comes to.
- [28:58]
The words and we use to describe these different plants because, you know, you'll go in there and, and some of these bud tenders that, that they call themselves, these, these, these people with these jobs at these cannabis stores will say this has like this percentage of cannabis indica and this percentage of cannabis sativa or sativa. And.
- [29:20]
Every time I interact with some of these people, it's like I just want to have a whole history conversation about these different terms and some of the problems that are associated with them. And how do we really know that this is this percentage of sativa or this percentage of Kent of indica? And it's sort of like, well, you know, it's very ad hoc, really. I don't think it's very scientific oriented. So I think somebody would. Is probably going to come up with a better way to the standardize. I think that's what. Actually that's one of the biggest arguments I think I make in the book is that the lack of ability to standardize the experience of a cannabis high, if you will, is one of the things that has kind of kept it in this confusing gray area. Right. I mean, even when, when Westerners.
- [30:04]
Discovered, if you will, its pharmacological benefits from indigenous populations, from their proximity to indigenous populations, particularly when the British make their way into India and they, they encounter all this like, indigenous knowledge of, of cannabis.
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You know, some of these like, chemists are talking about how great and wonderful it is, and they. They make all these medicines, and these medicines go across the Atlantic. And then people describe, like, when I took this medicine, it didn't do anything to me. And others were, like, when I took a little bit, it kind of like, made me see demons and stuff like this, and.
- [30:42]
This kind of, like, variation in the experience. If you're. If you're a doctor and you're trying to provide your patients with. With this new medicine that people are saying is great but is not working all the time, and then when it does work, sometimes it's like, profoundly different effects. These things, I think, kind of like, helped create the aura of confusion around plant. Around the plant. And because it was also associated with these, like, sinister, what we call orientalized perceptions of people who use them, it's kind of like both of these things over time just helped magnify the problem to make people think that this was like, a dangerous substance that needed to be eradicated by. By any means necessary in a way. Right. I mean, there's been quite a. Quite a. Quite a few people whose lives have been ruined over the course of the past couple of centuries or so for their past century or so because of their connection and perception and use of this plant. That I think, has a lot to do with these perceptions that don't have much to do with the real pharmacological aspects of the plant. I mean, that's not to say that there's not problems associated with consuming.
- [32:08]
Cannabis that. That one should be aware of, but I think now it's pretty clear that the problems that we have argued that exist with it have been grossly exaggerated. Right? Like, grossly exact. Like, you're gonna go chop up your grandmother because you're. You're smoking cannabis or, you know, you know, stuff like this that. That's just filled with all these. These very orientalized kind of representations that's caused more problems than. Than anything else.
- [32:39]
Yana Byers
Sure, yeah. I mean, we. We know, like, what the war on drugs is. Inability to differentiate between cannabis and heroin is one of its great failures.
- [32:50]
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Yana Byers
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about Reefer Madness.
- [33:24]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Yeah, interesting, interesting time frame in US history that I think is also connected to global history. I think that's one of the important points that I was really trying to focus on and have been since before writing this book.
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Is, is, is the need to kind of put the US.
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Sort of Reefer Madness mindset into its global context. Right. Like, so the League of Nations that developed after World War I.
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Really kind of pushed this idea of an international kind of drug, anti drug culture that had been kind of brewing for a while, right? I mean they have, in the 1930s they created this, this committee. It was called like the Advisory Committee on the Traffic and Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs or something like this in 1930. But they'd been talking about this in the 1920s. And prior to the League of Nations there had been several of these like conventions that are associated with something similar about, particularly about opium. Right. I mean, the aftermath of the opium wars between, you know, China and the British really kind of got people thinking a lot about these drugs and different drug cultures and who's using drugs and why and why this is dangerous. And in that time period, cannabis was becoming a medicine. It was in the American pharmacopoeia by the mid 19th century. Again, it had problems with it. People talked about the problems, but it was still considered a legitimate medicine. But as opium starts to get more sinister kind of associations with it, this notion of like cannabis being a problem too is magnified. It's also associated with the Orient and associated with, with, with the East. And.
- [35:38]
It becomes, by the first two decades of the 20th century, it's starting to kind of have this aura of negativity around it. And even though the United States of America was never really an official member of the League of Nations, it had an advisory kind of board and it had people going to their meetings and so forth. And they were pushing the, these ideas of, of this drug as becoming something dangerous, something sinister. The United States had just started to develop a federal bureau associated with narcotics before that war. They established something called the Harrison act, which was creating really strict laws on opium consumption. And it just sort of maybe fit, I think, to kind of start attacking something like cannabis that, that was filled with all these sinister associations as well. And particularly after Prohibition, when the Volstead act was repealed and, and after this sort of decade of alcohol prohibition ended, you know, there's all these people with jobs that are connected to you Know, attacking alcohol that sort of fit into the maybe transition towards thinking about cannabis in all these negative ways. And of course, Harry Anslinger is the name of one of these, the leaders of these narcotic, federal narcotic organizations for the government who really starts to kind of inquire about cannabis as a problem. And.
- [37:20]
Next thing you know, it's sort of like a wave of paranoia or hysteria begins to spread about the plant. In the same way that I think the war on so called war on drugs has shown oftentimes like we see it with fentanyl today, right? People think if you touch fentanyl, you're gonna like overdose to the point where they're actually administering Narcan to people who are probably having panic attacks instead of actually overdosing. Right? Like, never underestimate the power of the mind when it comes to a drug that we don't know. And to feel a certain hysteria about it, right? People think that their teeth are going to fall out if they start smoking meth and all these other types of things or the crack epidemic. People thinking we're going to have a, you know, a wave of all these kids who are completely, you know, biologically destroyed because their mothers were smoking crack. And, you know, these types of exaggerated effects we see going on still to this day. Which you think, which we think you can also apply to the idea of cannabis, right? Where you see these, these attacks, these developments of it being bad. Look, it's, it's a medicine. The medicine's not working very well. The, the doctors are talking about the problems they're having with it. And then there's all these stories about strange people running amok on cannabis in the East. Marco Polo describes, like the old man in the mountain convincing people to assassinate people because they're on cannabis. And all of this stuff kind of leads the United States to begin a path of.
- [39:03]
Prohibition, which we call reefer madness. Because there was this attempt to kind of sort of exaggerate how crazy these things have become. And, you know, one of the biggest problems with reefer madness is hemp was a rather prominent commodity in the United States. I mean, it had always had problems they'd still been trying to use to perfect its.
- [39:31]
Its cultivation for fiber. They never quite got it. Synthetic fibers replaced it after the, you know, civil war in the late 19th century and early 20th century. But it was still around, people still used it. Hemp seed was something that was still very.
- [39:48]
It was still a commodity in the United States. Bird seed, animal feed, people used it, right? And in Fact, when this reefer madness stuff starts happening in the National Archives in College park in, in Maryland, I did, I did some research there for the book before this one, but I used some of that research in this book as well. And you encounter like these, like seed companies, like the Philadelphia Seed Company for example, that's writing letters to the federal government saying, hey, we got like federal agents coming around here worrying about us, you know, selling some dope. And we don't really know what you're talking about. This is what we're, you know, we just have hemp seed and they, they send samples of the hemp seed that they used in their bird feed to the federal government saying, you know, these are just seeds.
- [40:39]
And then there was a whole file in there called Indian hemp Doormats where, you know, the federal government apparently was worried or concerned that people were going to get high by smoking doormats. And you know, so it, it sort of like sounds rather comical now to us in hindsight.
- [41:00]
But you know, some people still kind of like see these similar kind of exaggerated things going on with fentanyl today that, that they, they, they don't question. Right. And so I think it's, it's important that we, that we have to kind of see how drug hysteria forms. And I think Reefer Madness is an example of how that forms around a drug when people associate that drug with foreign elements that are threatening to Western civilization. In fact, I think decades before Reefer Madness there were some books published by literary figures like Fitzhugh Ludlow, who wrote this book on the confessions of a hashish eater that kind of describes his like, enslavement with the drug very similar to the way Thomas de Quincey did with, with, with can't. With, with opium a couple of decades earlier. In fact, Ludlow was influenced by that book and, and, and he talks about how it, it's like enslaving him. And this fear of like contaminating Western capitalist, productive Protestant work ethic mentality.
- [42:14]
Has been kind of looming for a while. And then when the federal government sort of has a handle and more control and more power after the Progressive Era and the government's getting more involved in people's lives, more regulations and stuff like this, I think it just kind of fit in. Cannabis became the next sort of hysterical drug that we could use to, to, to create these, these prohibitionary elements. And you know, it started out first with like a tax on, you know, marijuana tax act that didn't quite make it illegal, but it just sort of deterred people from wanting to get into the business and things just kept magnifying. There was a film that came out that wasn't really that popular actually until later on.
- [43:03]
But there were, there were advertisements, there were all these different things that, that were kind of like making people look at the plant in more sinister ways until we get to the 1950s when the entire plant is essentially illegal by then with draconian laws to put you in prison for a good while if you have it.
- [43:21]
Yana Byers
Yeah. Like ridiculously serious laws for. And you know, in part of the 50s crackdown on all funds.
- [43:30]
And, and free thinking. Yeah.
- [43:32]
Bradley Bourujerdi
And we still have elements of that in the United States today. I think I mentioned somewhere later in the book how, you know, you got these, these TV shows like, called Bong Appetite and, and you have like people having these lavish parties with these like elaborate concoctions of cannabis that they're consuming and filming themselves consuming and talking about consuming and just a couple hundred miles from where they're at in the exact same country, you could be put in prison for decades for doing the same thing. Right. And so this kind of like problem, you know, is still lingering with us.
- [44:14]
Yana Byers
So one of the things I really loved that I think our listeners are really going to want to check out, one of the reasons they're going to want to buy this book are the whole chapter called Recipes where you've got historic and modern recipes. And this is the second time in two days that I have run across Alice V. Toklas's his hashish fudge. Apparently it's a sign from the gods. Right?
- [44:39]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah. Toklas is an interesting. That was a really fun part of that book. I, I did. I mean, I knew a little bit about this stuff before writing, writing this book, but I really got to get into some of these women who were kind of like at the forefront of transforming cannabis's perception. Tokalas being one of them. Inadvertently, I think, like the two Marys that I talk about later in the book, I think is. Was a more deliberate attempt to re. Fashion the meaning of this plant. But, but, but Toklas was there as well, kind of in invert, inadvertently, it seems. She doesn't seem to have been a cannabis consumer that we know of. Of course we don't, we don't know much about it, but she sort of like was in a desperate situation when she was, you know, living as an expatriate with Gertrude Stein. And after Gertrude Stein son passed away, all of her, their possessions were compensated by her family because, you know, these same sex relationships weren't really legal. And she was kind of struggling to find food, I mean struggling to, to kind of make ends meet. And so she decided to come up with this cookbook. And one of the recipes that she got from this cookbook book came from a friend of hers named Byron G. Who sent her this recipe for what he called cannabis fudge. And he described how, how to make it. She didn't really know what it was apparently, but put it in the book. And when they tried to get it published the United States, in the United States they.
- [46:36]
Censored it and, and took this.
- [46:39]
Reference out, but the, you in the UK they kept it in there and then subsequent publications afterwards added it back into, into, into the American version. But then after that there were some of these like counterculturalists who had, who had heard about it maybe who, who had transnational connections with Byron Jason, who was also an expatriate at the time or living in Morocco at the time. And this movie comes out, this countercultural movie called I love you Alice P. Toklas, which I'd never watched and I watched it for this, for this book and it was just hilarious. I, I just enjoyed watching it so much. And you know, you have this hippie girl who kind of like.
- [47:31]
This, this, this kind of straight laced lawyer type guy falls in love with and then he becomes like a hippie and, and, and lets himself go and has his hair free willing and all these other sorts of things. And, and, and she's making these brownies and she describes Alice B. Tokless as, as the one who came up with this recipe. And now after this, everyone knows this woman. Unfortunately she, unfortunately she passed away before the film came out. So she didn't really live long enough to see how her name became attached to this cannabis, you know, symbol of anti, anti, you know, countercultural ideas. But that's sort of how it worked. I mean it, it became attached to, to her name, her name became attached to, to the cannabis brownie. And still I think the cannabis brownie is sort of like the quintessential food that people associate when it comes to cannabis consumption. And it kind of can be traced back to that, to that film which, which took her recipe and gave her all this, this credit when she sort of was like, I didn't even really know it was that controversial. In fact, she's, she's quoted as saying, but yeah, it's a great story. And she seems, she seems to have been a really interesting character as well, kind of a small, quiet type of person who had lived with Gertrude Stein for a while. And I could imagine all these literary figures coming to their house and hanging out and talking about all these great things, maybe even consuming some cannabis, I don't know. But Toklas was sort of like maybe in the background, just kind of hanging out, you know, and then she is the one who's whose name gets attached to it.
- [49:19]
Yana Byers
Oh, it's great. And, you know, that is this book that's a lot about this, this plant, but also the perceptions and the way the plant's taken. This is probably is a pretty good place to wrap this conversation up. So thanks so much for joining me and talking to me today. It was it's such a pleasure.
- [49:38]
Bradley Bourujerdi
Yes, anytime. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [49:40]
Yana Byers
All right. Have a great day job.