Our first-ever journal overview. This sensible and scrappy rag has earned it.
Chronicle Journal Overview: The Baffler, No. 74, Altered States (June 2024,136 pp., $14 PB)
Writing about medicine and drug coverage would not have to return from educational presses or book-length journalistic reportage. Maia Szalavitz writes constantly cogent and well-informed brief items on varied elements of drug coverage as a contributing opinion author for The New York Occasions. And well-respected periodicals akin to The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Republic, and the New Yorker, amongst others, have contributed invaluable article-length reporting on drug subjects over time.
After which there’s The Baffler. Based in 1988 by progressive journalists Thomas Frank (of “What’s The Matter with Kansas?” fame) and Keith White, the feisty journal has produced punchy social, cultural, and political reporting and neatly written evaluation from the left facet of the spectrum ever since. The rag has lined drug-related subjects on and off from the start, however now it has produced a whole situation on the world of dope, and it is good, thought-provoking stuff.
A few of it’s a bit on the esoteric facet, as with “Okay-Pop: Our Forefathers Did Disassociatives,” journalist Dan Piepenbring’s examination of the present fascination with ketamine in gentle of the nineteenth Century use of ether and nitrous oxide and the unending pursuit of profound, however sadly fleeting, enlightenment. Likewise, author and translator Dylan Levi King’s “Sinopharmacology: Psychonauts with Chinese language Traits,” takes the reader on a tour of the Chinese language leisure drug scene, a captivating tour by way of an alien land.
However a few of it strikes nearer to residence, akin to Baltimore author and creator Baynard Wooden’s examination of tensions between supporting organized labor and supporting strikes towards social fairness in Maryland’s authorized marijuana enterprise. He additionally has a factor or two to say about working situations within the “glamorous” hashish business in “Excessive Expectations: Budding labor tensions within the hashish business.”
And given the continued drug overdose disaster, it’s no shock that opioid coverage generates two articles, with Chicago journalist Zachary Siegel taking over the framing of repeated “epidemics” in “Everlasting Disaster: Myopic responses perpetuate the ‘opioid epidemic,'” and discovering a lot wanting. In the meantime, creator Ann Neumann makes the case that we proceed to demonize opioid ache sufferers at the price of a lot human struggling and indignity in “Ache and Struggling: Demonizing opioids has unintended penalties.”
However wait, there’s extra: In “A Drug Towards Struggle: The Militarization of Ecstasy,” Philadelphia author John Semley examines the tensions and contradictions of making an attempt to deliver psychedelic therapies to in live performance with enterprise capitalists as he charts Lykos Therapeutic’s (previously often called the Multidisciplinary Affiliation for Psychedelic Research’ Public Profit Company) path to getting Ecstasy permitted for PTSD remedy by the FDA. The article was printed simply earlier than an FDA panel beneficial rejecting the appliance, which provides a wistful tinge to it now. Semley additionally examines the ironies of army veterans changing into the spearhead of the push for therapeutic psychedelics, particularly given the nationwide safety advanced’s historical past of making an attempt to make use of varied substances for nefarious functions.
And journalist, creator, and CUNY professor Osvaldo Zavala does an excellent skewering of the mythic collaboration between Hamas and the Sinaloa Cartel on tunnel building methods. A declare that rises up periodically from a former Israeli army officer who has an organization peddling border safety merchandise, it’s a compelling propaganda effort, bringing collectively two of up to date America’s scariest bogeymen. Zavala gleefully demolishes the declare and its ideological underpinnings in “Tunnel Imaginative and prescient: Notes from the Underground, from Sinaloa to Gaza.”
And there is some bonus, non-drug materials as effectively, together with a chunk on George Santos and the tip occasions, one other piece on the cultural historical past of McGruff the crime canine, and varied poems scattered about, together with “Ording a casket from Amazon Prime.”
In the event you’re a drug coverage wonk and ever wanted a cause to select up The Baffler, that is it. Or for those who’re only a fan of excellent writing on up to date tradition, hey, one other situation of The Baffler is on the newsstands now.
