The Banana Peel Project

A relatively young man hobbles, in good spirits, into a medical marijuana cooperative.  He’s proud of having made it to the co-op today, his new aluminum cane giving him the style, confidence, and stability to find new places to interrogate, explore, and (yes) even to obtain his medicine.  And mirrored windows notwithstanding, this place showed […]

I just finished reading a really interesting article by Daniel Nunn (pdf) that details William Halsted’s thirty-year cocaine addiction.  Halsted was the first professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, and has been widely credited with being the first to describe the principle of local anesthesia by blocking nerves.  In the 1880s, Halsted developed a […]