Ten students at two visitors at Wesleyan University have been hospitalized after overdosing on the recreational drug Ecstasy, the result of having received a "bad batch." The incident elicited a conventional statement from the President of the University: “Please, please stay away from illegal substances the use of which can put you in extreme danger."
The post America’s irrational drug policies appeared first on OUPblog.
Harris Wittels, stand-up comedian, author, writer, and producer for Parks and Recreation -- and generally a person who could make us laugh in these seemingly grim times -- died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty. He joins the list of people who brought pleasure to our lives but died prematurely in this manner [...]
The post Harris Wittels: another victim of narcotics and America’s drug policy appeared first on OUPblog.
Caffeine is the world’s most commonly abused brain stimulant. Daily caffeine consumption by adolescents (ages 9-17 years) has been rapidly increasing most often in the form of soda, energy drinks, and coffee. A few years ago, a pair of studies documented that caffeine consumption in young adults directly correlated with increased illicit drug use and generally […]
The post Is caffeine a gateway drug to cocaine? appeared first on OUPblog.
By Arturo Hernandez
Before I wrote my last blog entry, I got a Twitter account to start tracking reactions to that entry. I was surprised to see that people that I had never met favorited my post. Some even retweeted it. Within a day, I started to check my email to see if someone else had picked up on it. It felt so good to know that people that I had never met from all over the world were paying attention to me.
The addictiveness of Twitter is not specific to me. There have been articles about getting Justin Bieber to follow you as a form of addiction. But the problem is much more pervasive than that.
Many of the symptoms associated with cocaine addiction are popping up in people who are simply on the Internet. The toxic effects of cocaine addiction have been known for years. Studies find that rats will self-administer cocaine to the point of death over a period of time. The pharmacological effects are also well known; cocaine magnifies the effects of dopamine chemically. The interesting part is that Twitter, Facebook, and video games seem to have a similar effect as well. Thus, dopamine is part of a reward system.
Interestingly, dopamine is also known to play a role in the brain systems that are used to control our mental focus. Recent work has found that dopamine plays a role in the connection between the frontal areas that are involved in cognitive control and the posterior areas of the brain involved in processing incoming information from the senses.
And here, work in bilingual literature might have found an antidote to the plague of Internet addiction. Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues have found that bilinguals tend to be better at switching between tasks and at using inhibition — what researchers call cognitive control. Theoretical work by Stocco, Pratt and colleagues proposes that the use of two languages on a regular basis helps to strengthen the use of brain areas that are highly linked to dopamine. Many of the same frontal areas have been shown to be involved in control in bilinguals. Thus, it is logical to conclude that dopamine which leads to increased addiction may also be involved in giving bilinguals an edge in focusing. It is a classic U-shaped function where too little and too much are bad but somewhere in the middle is just right.
So what happens when a bilingual faces the onslaught of Internet addiction. Is s/he more resistant? I don’t know the ultimate answer to that question. But I was struck by how quickly the Twitter craze that had me checking my page every minute faded. Perhaps it is the four languages that I have learned that serve to protect me more and allow me to stop the urge to check my page again. Today, I am happy to report that I have written this blog entry with the understanding that any benefit will come long term. And I have my language learning history to thank for that.
But, please, favorite this; please, retweet it. Please, please, please!
Arturo Hernandez is currently Professor of Psychology and Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience graduate program at the University of Houston. He is the author of The Bilingual Brain. His major research interest is in the neural underpinnings of bilingual language processing and second language acquisition in children and adults. He has used a variety of neuroimaging methods as well as behavioral techniques to investigate these phenomena which have been published in a number of peer reviewed journal articles. His research is currently funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. Read his previous blog posts and follow him on Twitter @DrAEHernandez.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only psychology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Apple’s iPhone 4 with a busy home screen on the grass with chamomile flowers. © ZekaG via iStockphoto.
The post Dopamine, Twitter, and the bilingual brain appeared first on OUPblog.
By Bart Elmore
In the 1960s, Coca-Cola had a cocaine problem. This might seem odd, since the company removed cocaine from its formula around 1903, bowing to Jim Crow fears that the drug was contributing to black crime in the South. But even though Coke went cocaine-free in the Progressive Era, it continued to purchase coca leaves from Peru, removing the cocaine from the leaves but keeping what was left over as a flavoring extract. By the end of the twentieth century it was the single largest purchaser of legally imported coca leaves in the United States.
Yet, in the 1960s, Coke feared that an international counternarcotics crackdown on cocaine would jeopardize their secret trade with Peruvian cocaleros, so they did a smart thing: they began growing coca in the United States. With the help of the US government, a New Jersey chemical firm, and the University of Hawaii, Coca-Cola launched a covert coca operation on the island of Kauai. In 1965, growers in the Pacific paradise reported over 100 shrubs in cultivation.
How did this bizarre Hawaiian coca operation come to be? How, in short, did Coca-Cola become the only legal buyer of coca produced on US soil? The answer, I discovered, had to do with the company’s secret formula: not it’s unique recipe, but its peculiar business strategy for making money—what I call Coca-Cola capitalism.
What made Coke one of the most profitable firms of the twentieth century was its deftness in forming partnerships with private and public sector partners that helped the company acquire raw materials it needed at low cost. Coca-Cola was never really in the business of making stuff; it simply positioned itself as a kind of commodity broker, channeling ecological capital between producers and distributors, generating profits off the transaction. It thrived by making friends, both in government and in the private sector, friends that built the physical infrastructure and technological systems that produced and transported the cheap commodities needed for mass-marketing growth.
In the case of coca leaf, Coca-Cola had the Stepan chemical company of Maywood, New Jersey, which was responsible for handling Coke’s coca trade and “decocainizing” leaves used for flavoring extract (the leftover cocaine was ultimately sold to pharmaceutical firms for medicinal purposes). What Coke liked about its relationship with Stepan was that it kept the soft drink firm out of the limelight, obfuscating its connection to a pesky and tabooed narcotics trade.
But Stepan was just part of the procurement puzzle. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) also played a pivotal role in this trade. Besides helping to pilot a Hawaiian coca farm, the US counternarcotics agency negotiated deals with the Peruvian government to ensure that Coke maintained access to coca supplies. The FBN and its successor agencies did this even while initiating coca eradication programs, tearing up shrubs in certain parts of the Andes in an attempt to cut off cocaine supply channels. By the 1960s, coca was becoming an enemy of the state, but only if it was not destined for Coke.
In short, Coca-Cola—a company many today consider a paragon of free-market capitalism—relied on the federal government to get what it wanted.
An old Coca-Cola bottling plant showing some of the municipal pipes that these bottlers tapped into. Courtesy of Bart Elmore.
Coke’s public partnerships extended to other ingredients. Take water, for example. For decades, the Coca-Cola Company relied on hundreds of independently owned bottlers (over 1,000 in 1920 alone) to market its products to consumers. Most of these bottlers simply tapped into the tap to satiate Coke’s corporate thirst, connecting company piping to established public water systems that were in large part built and maintained by municipal governments.
The story was much the same for packaging materials. Beginning in the 1980s, Coca-Cola benefited substantially from the development of curbside recycling systems paid for by taxpayers. Corporations welcomed the government handout, because it allowed them to expand their packaging production without taking on more costs. For years, environmental activists had called on beverage companies to clean up their waste. In fact, in 1970, 22 US congressmen supported a bill that would have banned the sale of nonreturnable beverage containers in the United States. But Congress, urged on by corporate lobbyists, abandoned the plan in favor of recycling programs paid for by the public. In the end, Coke and its industry partners were direct beneficiaries of the intervention, utilizing scrap metal and recycled plastic that was conveniently brought to them courtesy of municipal reclamation programs.
In all these interwoven ingredient stories there was one common thread: Coke’s commitment to outsourcing and franchising. The company consistently sought a lean corporate structure, eschewing vertical integration whenever possible. All it did was sell a concentrated syrup of repackaged cheap commodities. It did not own sugar plantations in Cuba (as the Hershey Chocolate Company did), coca farms in Peru, or caffeine processing plants in New Jersey, and by not owning these assets, the company remained nimble throughout its corporate life. It found creative ways to tap into pipes, plantations, and plants managed by governments and other businesses.
In the end, Coca-Cola realized that it could do more by doing less, extending its corporate reach, both on the frontend and backend of its business, by letting other firms and independent bottlers take on the risky and sometimes unprofitable tasks of producing cheap commodities and transporting them to consumers.
This strategy for doing business I have called Coca-Cola capitalism, so-named because Coke modeled it particularly well, but there were many other businesses, in fact some of the most profitable of our time, that followed similar paths to big profits. Software firms, for example, which sell a kind of information concentrate, have made big bucks by outsourcing raw material procurement responsibilities. Fast food chains, internet businesses, and securities firms—titans of twenty-first century business—have all demonstrated similar proclivities towards the Coke model of doing business.
Thus, as we look to the future, we would do well to examine why Coca-Cola capitalism has become so popular in the past several decades. Scholars have begun to debate the causes of a recent trend toward vertical disintegration, and while there are undoubtedly many causes for this shift, it seems ecological realities need to be further investigated. After all, one of the reasons Coke chose not to own commodity production businesses was because they were both economically and ecologically unsustainable over the long term. Might other firms divestment from productive industries tied to the land be symptomatic of larger environmental problems associated with extending already stressed commodity networks? This is a question we must answer as we consider the prudence of expanding our current brand of corporate capitalism in the years ahead.
Bart Elmore is an assistant professor of global environmental history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of “Citizen Coke: An Environmental and Political History of the Coca-Cola Company” (available to read for free for a limited time) in Enterprise and Society. His forthcoming book, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism, is due out with W. W. Norton in November of 2014.
Enterprise & Society offers a forum for research on the historical relations between businesses and their larger political, cultural, institutional, social, and economic contexts. The journal aims to be truly international in scope. Studies focused on individual firms and industries and grounded in a broad historical framework are welcome, as are innovative applications of economic or management theories to business and its context.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post What Coke’s cocaine problem can tell us about Coca-Cola Capitalism appeared first on OUPblog.
By Alice Northover
It’s Friday once more and I’m holed up in my snow-proof bunker anticipating Nemo — both the storm and the movie.
Readers browsing through the damaged library of Holland House in West London, wrecked by a bomb on 22 October 1940.
The University of North Carolina’s Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library is publishing one piece of Civil War-era correspondence a day, 150 years to the day after it was written.
Academic reference inflation has set in.
The Millions has their first original ebook.
Music at New York Fashion Week.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Tracking people across security cameras today and forensic science of the Victorian era.
Bookish has finally launched and reaction is mixed.
Why aren’t academics tweeting? Not for the reasons you think.
Sir James may be number 1 in our estimation at the OED, but Google ranks him second to "Councilman #1" on Being Human. http://t.co/9bipfnCP .
The thriving academic blogosphere.
Why isn’t there cocaine in Coke anymore?
Click here to view the embedded video.
Timbuktu’s priceless manuscripts saved.
Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 over Bletchley Park mystery.
Clocks!
Teaching tips from Tim Gunn.
A Russian family cut off from the world for 40 years.
Sally Tomlinson’s life as a woman professor.
Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post Friday procrastination: Snow leopard edition appeared first on OUPblog.
Some of you may know that today is National Coffee Day. I've, personally, been trying to ignore the free/discounted offers around New York City since I'm trying to cut back, and decided to distract myself by putting together this quick video post about coffee and caffeine.
Now, I would be reimiss if I did not first mention the fantastic book Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine by Stephen Braun. This is a
