Haggai Ram charts the (modern) history of Hashish in the Holy Land After a century of prohibition, we are witnessing a dramatic shift in cannabis culture and policy around the world from a “killer weed” and a cause of racial degeneration to an accepted recreational drug and a “magic medicine.” In his lecture, Haggai Ram will examine this global shift of cannabis by focusing on the social history of the drug (i.e., hashish and marijuana) in Palestine-Israel from the late nineteenth century to the present. Ram will offer a vista into the political and cultural contexts within which cannabis became a “drug”; the underworlds of Jewish and Arab users and traffickers; the complex roles played by race, gender, and class in the construction of cannabis “addiction”; the place of the Zionist project in dispersing cannabis use and enforcing drug restrictions; and the normalization-cum-medicalization of this intoxicant in recent decades. In the process, he will demonstrate the extent to...