Amazingly, if you go shopping for a copy of N. R. de Mexico’s, aka Robert Campbell Bragg’s 1951 novel Marijuana Girl, some vendors will try to charge you $200 or more. That’s quite an ask for a flimsy old digest novel, but people must pay it, we guess. It certainly isn’t the cover art of a hapless model that makes the book valuable. Is it the prose? Well, the book was good, in fact far better than we expected. It sets up as a drug scare novel. The main character, Joyce, goes through the full progression—i.e. youthful smalltown rebelliousness leads to a permissive lifestyle leads to the big city leads to drugs leads to harder drugs leads to prostitution and so forth. We didn’t give anything away there—the rear cover provides all that information and more. We’re even told Joyce hangs with jazz musicians (which you understand to mean non-whites) and trades “her very soul” for drugs, so you know where this all goes before you even reach the title page.
But Marijuana Girl also defies conventions of drug scare books. For example, it portrays nearly all the drug users as regular folks well in control of their intake. In fact, the two characters responsible for introducing Joyce to drugs are the same two who work hardest to get her off them. Other easy plot choices are avoided as well, which is rarely the case in 1950s novels with numerous non-white characters. But here’s really why the book is unique—it goes into amazing detail about the process of consuming drugs. De Mexico zooms close during those moments, sharing the proper technique for smoking joints, clinically explaining how to use a needle, and how to pull blood back into the syringe to rinse out every last molecule of heroin. It’s all there. This had to be shocking for 1951 readers, which we suppose is what boosts the book’s value for modern collectors. Still, $200? We don’t think Marijuana Girl, or any paperback, is worth that much, but it’s definitely worth reading.
