The university’s Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research will host Dominic Corva of the Department of Public Policy at Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, N.Y. Corva will examine southern Humboldt’s policing experience in a retrospective of California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), launched in 1983.
Titled “Requiem for CAMP: Post-Mortem for a Drug War Institution,” Corva’s lecture also will dwell on CAMP’s legacy for future illicit cannabis production.
“The life and death of CAMP offer a unique analytical window into the time and space of the U.S. war on drugs in a global context,” according to the Department of Sociology’s Josh Meisel, co-director of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research. He is also associate professor and graduate coordinator of HSU’s Criminology and Justice Studies.
Corva’s analysis draws on CAMP report archives, ethnographic interviews and secondary data sources. He will survey the geo-politics of CAMP’s emergence, its attempts to police the “Emerald Triangle” and its eclipse by new political and economic realities, including the global recession that broke out in December, 2007 and the 2008 Wall Street collapse that ensued.