53. Parke Davis Used to Have the Very Best Weed

Examining the anomaly of El Paso's marijuana market during the 1910s

Dear Readers,

Last week we took a break from our ongoing discussion of weed in the 1910s borderlands to consider a recent case of cannabis-induced temporary psychosis and murder. Today we’ll head back to those events of the 1910s.

Though, before we do, I want to emphasize that last week’s short layover in the present wasn’t as big of a digression from our ongoing story as it may have at first seemed.

Yes, 1917 and 2018 are almost exactly a century apart. But don’t forget that all the hoopla about 1910s-borderlands weed consumption was sparked by another incident of supposedly cannabis-induced temporary psychosis and murder, that one having taken place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on January 1, 1913.

As noted last week, before you learned about the 2018 incident, you were probably presuming that many elements of the 1913 Juárez episode were—in the technical jargon—bullshit. But knowledge of these more-recent events has likely altered your perception, expanding the limits of the possible in …