Mike Luce is not the first person to lament how increasingly banal marijuana becomes once the industry goes mainstream. Keith Stroup, who founded the nation’s oldest legalization lobbying firm, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), in 1970, told Rolling Stone in 1977 that the decade’s booming paraphernalia industry was developing just like anything else. “It’s a growth industry,” Stroup said, “that’s gonna be treated like tennis shoes must have been. I don’t say this out of any particular glee—I just think it’s a result of ‘the great free-enterprise system.’”

Luce, who founded High Yield Insights, one of the nation’s first cannabis marketing research firms, this past May, feels similarly as recreational legalization expands. “From a great distance,” Luce said, the “classic marketing research” High Yield does for its clients—which includes everything from crafting tailored patient and consumer insight reports, to consulting medical and recreational businesses…

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Dr. Seth Blumenthal, contributing editor and lecturer at Boston University. He’s been tracking the roll out of recreational marijuana legalization in his home state of Massachusetts and provides this report. Enjoy!

As I sat behind the police chief while he spoke to the City Council in favor of a ban on marijuana dispensaries in my city–Newton, Massachusetts–I realized I was in trouble. Surrounding me in the public seating section, every other attendee held up a brightly colored “Opt Out” sign in silence. One nice woman even asked me if I wanted a sign, which I politely declined. After all, I was there to follow the chief and offer a rebuttal. As a historian with a focus on marijuana history, I had already been active as an academic endorser for Question 4 that legalized marijuana in 2016, and so I was asked to speak…

by Alex

Julio Santo Domingo Jr was part of a Columbian business dynasty, straitjacketed by the trappings that came with moneyed social convention. Thoughout his life, though, he developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for collecting materials on ‘altered states’, sex, magick, and the occult, which he amassed from bookshops, auctions and galleries across the globe. Filling warehouses and mansions with rare first editions, pulp novels, letters and posters, after his death the collection was bequeathed to Harvard University, and a book appeared in 2017, Altered States, to accompany an exhibition at the Houghton Library, documenting the development of the collection and Santo Domingo’s vision and mentality.

It’s difficult to emphasise enough the sheer scale of the archive. Some estimates suggest that it numbers 100,000 individual items, and would fill at least three terraced houses. I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in October 2018, foraging for material that…