Bestselling author Michael Konik (The Man With the $100,000 Breasts; Ella in Europe; The Smart Money) abstained from using, or even trying marijuana until he was nearly 40. Then he went to Amsterdam. No longer able to dismiss pot as an herbal evil, he began to celebrate its salutary effects. Seven years later, Konik has penned a provocative and intelligent examination of America's most politically potent plant. Reefer Gladness: Stories, Essays, and Riffs on Marijuana explores this emotionally-charged subject through an innovative lens. It's an entertaining, elegant, and consistently heady study of a simple weed with the power to transform American society. Konik's pungent prose provides a literary contact high. His vivid characters, the regular (and irregular) people from every stratum of society who make marijuana a part of their lives, blaze off the page. Reefer Gladness is nonfiction and fiction, humorous and serious, a fascinating hybrid of reality and imagination. It's a great read--whether or not you enjoy marijuana.

Cannabis consumption, commerce, and control in global history, from the nineteenth century to the present day. This book gathers together authors from the new wave of cannabis histories that has emerged in recent decades. It offers case studies from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It does so to trace a global history of the plant and its preparations, arguing that Western colonialism shaped and disseminated ideas in the nineteenth century that came to drive the international control regimes of the twentieth. More recently, the emergence of commercial interests in cannabis has been central to the challenges that have undermined that cannabis consensus. Throughout, the determination of people around the world to consume substances made from the plant has defied efforts to stamp them out and often transformed the politics and cultures of using them. These texts also suggest that globalization might have a cannabis history. The migration of consumers, the clandestine networks established to supply them, and international cooperation on control may have driven much of the interconnectedness that is a key feature of the contemporary world.

Weighting for It to Go is an amusing and informative look at the science of health, both present and past. You'll learn about the latest interesting health studies and what they mean about the future. You'll get fun stats and figures. You'll learn about obscure phobias and manias. You'll even read funny epitaphs. And it's all presented in easily digestible morsels. This compilation of Wellnews columns includes everything from July 2014 to December 2014.