The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim's new book, "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009).The new book shares the '80s generation's encounter with illicit drugs, and how they really caught on.
Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They...
I first heard one of LEAP's speakers back in 2006 at the Lawrence Library. Backed with considerable first-hand experience, their indictment of the War on Drugs is definitive and persuasive. Legalize and regulate all drugs. This may seem like a radical idea, but after filtering through all of the propaganda and cultural taboos that push genuine solutions to the side-lines, an honest discussion of...
While Americans are inundated with coverage of the Democrats' quibbling over Barack Obama's use of marijuana and cocaine as a teenager, a truly important drug story continues to be neglected: The hypocrisy of Big Pharma, psychiatry officialdom, and justice institutions regarding mood-altering (psychotropic) drugs -- specifically the denial of the similarity between illegal and psychiatric drugs.