Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out
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List Price: $23.95
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Manufacturer: Random House
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.450973
EAN: 9780679435334
ISBN: 0679435336
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 1998-06-01
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 1998-06-01
Studio: Random House
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Editorial Reviews:
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Six years in the making, Drug Crazy offers a gripping account of the stunning violence, corruption, and chaos that have characterized America's drug war since its inception in 1914. Weaving a provocative analogy between the drug scene today and the failure of Prohibition in the 1920s, Drug Crazy argues that the greatest danger we face is prohibition itself.
While the target of our nation's controlled-substance laws may have shifted from hooch to heroin, the impact on society--discriminatory policing, demonization of the users, graft and grandstanding among lawmakers and lawbreakers--is an instant replay. Instead of Al Capone, we have Larry Hoover of Chicago's Gangster Disciples running a multimillion-dollar drug syndicate from his prison cell in Joliet.
In a riveting account of how we got here, conventional wisdom is turned on its head, and we find that rather than a planned assault on the scourge of addiction, the drug war happened almost by accident but has been continually exploited by political opportunists.
From the explosive opening montage of undercover cops caught in a shoot-out on Chicago's South Side to a humid courtroom in Malaysia where a young American faced death by hanging for possession of marijuana, Drug Crazy takes us to the front lines of the war on drugs and introduces us to a cast of villains and heroes, profiteers and victims. Among them:
¸ Pauline Morton Sabin, a Republican aristocrat who administered the coup de gr'ce to Prohibition by leading a million women into the arms of the Democrats.
¸ Harry Anslinger, a former railroad cop who guided the Bureau of Narcotics through five administrations and engineered some of the most enduring and pernicious myths of the drug war.
¸ Pablo Escobar Gaviria, the Colombian kingpin who nailed a suspected informer with a bomb--killing him along with a hundred innocent airline passengers.
From the men and women in the forward trenches, Drug Crazy brings back a grim report: The situation is deteriorating on all fronts. In a sobering tally of the cost in crime, human suffering, and cold, hard cash, it documents the failure of crop eradication in the source countries, the hopeless task of sealing the border, and the violent world of the major players. We see the steady erosion of the Bill of Rights and a grinding criminal justice mill so overwhelmed that it's running a night shift.
We do, however, get a glimpse of a way out of this swamp. Lessons from Europe--and from our own experience--are pointing us toward higher ground.
In Drug Crazy, Mike Gray has launched a frontal assault on America's drug war orthodoxy, and his frightening overview of the battlefield makes it clear this urgent debate must begin now.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Everyone Should Read This Book!
Comment: I read this book last semester for a Criminal Justice class and it is amazing. It opened my eyes to exactly how wrong the war on drugs is. This book is my #1 recommended book. If more people would read it I think we'd finally be able to find our way out of this fruitless war.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sanity in sight
Comment: Q: What is the difference between the Prohibition and America's war on drugs? Mike Gray's overall answer is "very little," but the one glaring difference is that when Prohibition failed, the country repealed the Constitutional Amendment which had created it. Alcohol use remained at about the same level before, during and after the Prohibition years, but the murder, official corruption and gang battles that accompanied official proscription came and went. DRUG CRAZY analyzes the upshot of that distinction and its enormous worldwide effects. The U.S. led anti-drug effort has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars in enforcement efforts alone, not to mention the cost of prisons, imprisonment and court proceedings and has succeeded in creating an international drug consortium with an annual income higher than the U.S. defense budget. Thousands of innocent bystanders have died in sprays of automatic fire and bomb blasts. It has made pot easier to get than alcohol for most American teens and brought Colombian, Bolivian and Mexican democracy to the brink of collapse. Damningly, Gray reports that every refereed study since the 1890s has suggested that marijuana is harmless and that the opiates and cocaine are no more dangerous than alcohol (perhaps less). Even the infamous "crack babies" we heard about for a few years turned out to be an unsubstantiated myth. In every country where legalization and controlled prescriptive availability of harder drugs has been tried, addiction rates remained stable or fell, crime decreased and most addicts proceeded to live normal workaday lives. The U.S. has forced other countries to quit such programs through fiscal pressure and outright lies, insisting that all adopt our abolitionist stance. We have managed to export violence, crack cocaine, corruption and other benefits to numerous other nations along with our failed policy. At the same time, and to make matters worse, the nature of enforcement has become a defacto racist effort. Cocaine in Wall Street boardrooms is harder to see than crack runners on Main Street and while whites are the disproportionate users of illegal drugs, blacks are the disproportionate arrestees. In this country, one in four black males is either in prison, under probation or on parole, mostly as a result of drug or drug related crimes. Small wonder, as the author points out, that blacks think O.J. Simpson was framed: it is their daily experience. Police routinely lie in court to make drug charges stick. (Since private deals between consenting parties are very hard to actually witness, when police claim that a perpetrator dropped a bag or in some other way made evidence visible it is understood by judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and defendants that it is "acceptable" false testimony to cover an illegal search. So perjury is permitted in the name of enforcement.) Amazingly, the whole morass of current drug problems and policies could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen. Minus prohibition the drug cartels would be defunded. If prices fell, many farmers would find other crops more appealing. If currently illegal substances were distributed by prescription or through state-licensed stores, kids would be infrequently exposed. (How many pushers are selling beer in front of your local elementary school these days?) Mike Gray has brought his story telling skill (The China Syndrome and other screenplays) and his investigative/documentary bent (American Revolution and The Murder of Fred Hampton) to bear on an urgent national and international problem. His recommendations and observations are difficult to refute and his is a well considered voice in a growing debate which affects us all. Even now, the genie released when California and Arizona approved medical marijuana use is being clumsily stuffed back in the bottle by Federal mandate, disenfranchising voters and creating a rising uproar. As former U.S. Attorney General Elliott Richardson observes: "Anyone who thinks the war on drugs is succeeding should read this book. It shifts the burden of proof from the critics of existing policy to its defenders."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dealing with Our Addiction
Comment: When it became clear that the medicines called opiates were highly addictive and caused health problems, they were dealt with as nicotine and alcohol are dealt with today. There were honest and realistic public service messages warning of the dangers of opiates, and there was medical help that greatly limited the damage they did to the individual and which had a chance of eliminating his or her addiction. These methods worked, and where they are applied they work today. Then in the second decade of the twentieth century the country took a nose-dive into authoritarian attitudes and corruption, and people got the strange idea that you could eliminate a practice you didn't like simply by passing a law against it. Alcohol, and the opiates were completely banned, as was marijuana which was now designated a "drug" because of its association with minority groups. Alcohol use, which had always hovered between widespread and universal, had been declining but now became more common than ever before. Worse, the alcoholic drinks that were taken became much harder and not being regulated they might contain enough alcohol to be dangerous. Worse still, an untold number of criminals were created, crime of all kinds increased radically, organized crime came to control whole districts and corruption reached heights never seen before. "Public service messages" regarding what were now illegal "drugs" became simple expressions of hatred having very little to do with the "drugs" they were about, and everyone actually familiar with those "drugs" knew it. Medical treatment by doctors who were actually trying to help their paitents was declared illegal, and a number of doctors went to prison. The lives of opiate addicts had usually been no worse than the lives of nicotine addicts, but now those lives became impossible. Addicts could no longer hold jobs raise children or do anything else but concentrate on their addiction. Current "rehabilitation" for opiate addicts is an expression of hatred for those addicts and makes no attempt to help them. It mostly consists of telling them they are evil it they don't break their habits, and for those addicted to opiates or nicotine, breaking the habit altogether is usually not possible. Opiate use had always been an insignificant phenomenon nationwide, and in the early part of the century when it was being dealt with intelligently, it was declining. But then the hate laws were passed, and now a measurable percentage of the population is addicted and condemed to ruined, useless lives, organized crime is more powerful now than at any time in history, and whole countries like Columbia are completely dominated by corruption-- as are large sections of others like the United States and Mexico. None of this needed to happen. The things we call "drugs" were handled intelligently at the beginning of the twentieth century or were never a problem in the first place. If realistic laws were passed, the worst of the damage would be fixed very quickly since it is directly caused by bad laws. The rest of the damage would take a decade to undo, but if we begin treating the opiates as we treat nicotine and alcohol we will gradually undo it.
I think that is a pretty good thumbnail of what Mike Grey had to say, and he is completely right. Everyone in the country should read this book. Our real addiction is to hatred.
Customer Rating:
Summary: best review of the drug war I've seen
Comment: This is one of the best books I've read on the drug war to date (and I've read a bunch). The book carefully went through the origins, history, and effects of the drug war in a captivating and easy to follow manner. When finished, the reader will be left with an iron-clad indictment of the drug war which has covered all angles. This really is one of the most comprehensive and well written books on the drug war, and I highly recommend it.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Drug War: The History and Politics of Failure
Comment: Author Mike Gray tackles the failed drug war in this book and effectively shows how the present war has many similarities to alcohol prohibition in early part of the twentieth century. Gray begins his discussion of the subject of drugs by taking the reader back to 1925, in the city of Chicago, during the height of the nightmare of prohibition. Gangs ruled the streets. The air was filled with the smell of cheap booze and the sound of gunfire. Police were defenseless to the total chaos going on all around them. They simply could not stop the manufacture and consumption of alcohol. There was too much money to be made by selling this "forbidden fruit". There was no possible way that this "war" on alcohol could ever be won.
Does this sound familiar? It should, because the same thing is going on right now. The government's failed attempt to eliminate alcohol is now being attempted a second time with the war on drugs. These laws are discussed in the book with a history lesson on the various court rulings and congressional decisions that led to the present prohibitions on drugs. These laws have some of their roots in the U.S. Congress. According to the book, marijuana itself became illegal as the result of a lie told to congress by Fred Vinson, a man who would later become the U.S. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Vinson was sitting in a congressional hearing one day, just before congress was about to vote on whether or not marijuana should be made illegal. The American Medical Association knew of the benefits of marijuana in medical treatments, and was strongly against such a law. But when Vinson was questioned by congress, he lied and said that the AMA backed the proposed law 100 percent to make marijuana illegal. This was enough to help push the law through congress. Vinson's lie, coupled with the onslaught of government propaganda against marijuana, marked the beginning of America's second nightmare with prohibition.
The lying and deception by government cooled off a bit during the 1940 to 1960 period. But then, the lying and deception continued when President Nixon decided to revive the anti- drug crusade, in part to cover- up his own problems with Vietnam and Watergate. George Bush then escalated the damage even more by scaring the public into backing his anti- drug package and his "get tough" policies against drug dealers and drug users. Gray talks about these and other political maneuvers; why they happened and the true motives behind these so- called "moral" crusaders.
The present- day situation looks pretty bleak. Gray points out that the United States is now the largest jailer in the world with roughly half of all prisoners being non- violent drug offenders. We have also corrupted our police officers, with many of them actively taking part in the drug trade; cutting special deals, accepting bribes, etc, because of the allure of easy money. Respect for law enforcement is low, and violent criminals have been allowed early release to make way for non- violent drug offenders, thanks to mandatory minimum sentences.
This book is an easily manageable length: about 198 pages and fairly easy to read. There are a total of eleven chapters and two appendices. Appendix "A" details the changes in the U.S. murder rate, showing how it peaked during alcohol prohibition and during the present- day drug prohibition. It also shows graphs depicting the U.S. prison population and the Federal Drug budget. And to give the book some balance, Appendix "B" contains a listing of activist organizations, both pro- drug war and anti- drug war, along with a brief description of each and their respective websites.
As Mike Gray points out, the War on Drugs is one of America's greatest failures. Gray never specifically condemns the war. He wrote this book as a means to educate the reader on the motives behind drug prohibition and the reasons that politicians continue to fight a losing battle when they know that the war is not winnable. Gray never resorts to name calling or any form of moral persuasion. He really doesn't need to. He lets the facts speak for themselves, illustrating the endless problems created by a war of prohibition and why it is so important to stop this insanity once and for all.
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