Commentary and Reviews
This is an insightful
book about the discriminatory nature of the drug war in America and how
our politicians have converted a chronic medical problem into a criminal
justice problem.
It also explains how the increase in petty drug
busts has been used to make politicians look tough on crime, build jail
cells and deny funding for drug prevention and education programs for children.
Dr. Jocelyn Elders
Former U.S. Surgeon General, Professor of Endocrinology,
Arkansas Children's Hospital
Never did I think
one could learn so much about the drug crisis all in one place. Mike Gray
has written a book of profound compassion that nevertheless deals intelligently
with the facts. Drug Crazy is an antidote for passivity.
Daniel Shorr
This book sheds real
light on what is happening in American cities today and how current drug
control strategies undermine our efforts to keep our kids and streets safe.
Anyone who is serious about finding solutions
to drug-related problems should read this book, debate it with their colleagues
and demand real solutions from their elected leaders.
Kurt L. Schmoke
Mayor, City of Baltimore
This book tells the
public what many front line police officers know from their experience
-- the drug war needs radical re-evaluation.
Joseph McNamara
The Hoover Institution
Former Police Chief, San Jose, Califonia
This urgent issue
badly needs the exposure given in this book a chilling array of facts which
hopefully will move the country.
Henry Kendall,
Nobel Laureate
Chairman, Union of Concerned Scientists
I learned an enormous
amount about the underside of drug politics from reading Drug Crazy. It
is an eye-opener. The book raises controversial but reasoned suggestions
for rethinking drug policy in the United States. I highly recommend this
book to everyone concerned about developing an effective strategy toward
drug abuse.
Alvin F. Poussaint, MD
Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
The true story that
Mike Gray tells so effectively is indeed stranger than fiction. Who would
believe that a democratic government would pursue for eight decades a failed
policy that produced tens of millions of victims and trillions of dollars
of illicit profits for drug dealers; cost taxpayers hundreds of billions
of dollars; increased crime and destroyed inner cities; fostered widespread
corruption and violations of human rights -- and all with no success in
achieving the stated and unattainable objective of a drug-free America.
Milton Friedman
The Hoover Institution
Drug Crazy is an oasis
of clarity and common sense in a desert of misinformation and hysteria.
Ira Glasser
America Civil Liberties Union
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. That is
no mean achievement!
Elliot Richardson
Former United States Attorney General
This is a book that
every American who is concerned about the problem of drugs in America should
read and take seriously. It s a revealing and well-documented account of
some of the weaknesses and problems involved in our present approach to
drugs and a suggestion of how we can do better.
George McGovern
Former United States Senator
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gray brings a filmic sense of drama and action to a gritty, scorching look at the failure of
America s war on drugs.
Arguing that the federal government's $300-billion
campaign to eradicate drug use over the last 15 years has been a total
failure, Gray calls for legalization of drugs and government regulation
of their sale, with doctors writing prescriptions to addicts. Although
he scants specifics as to how this would work and the potential consequences,
his outspoken brief for decriminalization is bolstered by a revealing history
of drug use in America.
A Hollywood screenwriter, TV producer and director,
Gray brings a filmic sense of drama and action to a gritty, scorching look
at the failure of America s war on drugs.
As he jump-cuts from Al Capone's syndicate in
Prohibition-era Chicago to the abortive Reagan/Bush campaign to control
Latin American drug traffic, Gray maintains that hardcore addicts, a small
minority of drug users, have served as a scapegoat for politicians and
lawmakers, with the nation s moral focus selectively shifting from opium
and morphine in the first two decades of this century, to alcohol, then
to marijuana in the early 1930s, to crack cocaine today. It would seem
that if Americans are to have any say a t all in what their teenagers are
exposed to, he concludes, they will have to take the drug market out of
the hands of the Tijuana Cartel and Gangster Disciples, and put it back
in the hands of doctors and pharmacists where it was before 1914.
(THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, reviewed
by Bob Ramsey)
One of these days
somebody is going to make a lot of money writing a book about the drug
war.
When that happens will depend as much on the public's
readiness as on quality writing. Mike Gray's "Drug Crazy" is good enough
to be the one.
Gray's style is an easy read. It's refreshing
to see someone who has written a successful movie (China Syndrome) take
facts and spin them into an emotive yarn. From the opening chapter "Chicago:
1995/1925", I was taken in by his skillful sequencing. He describes the
present, then goes back to alcohol prohibition and tells the same story
with similar developments based on identical incentives. He ties back with
the 'chilling similarity' of how Chicago's neighborhood character is the
same in both decades, just with different drugs and different (young) faces.
The author almost resists editorializing, but
about three times in the book he inserts a message that prohibition is
destroying our social fabric. In his treatment of present-day Chicago,
he describes frustrated cops returning from a fruitless bust who roust
the first group of black kids they see walking down the street. After insulting
them profusely, knocking them around and strip-searching a few, one policeman
asks a reporter in a tone of mock-academia, "So what do you think the long-term
sociological implications of this shit will be?"
Chapters are devoted to basic elements of the
drug issue- history of U.S. drug laws, the flow of contraband... all revolving
around the overwhelming torrents of money. The alternatives he presents
are focused on cutting off the money, justified with facts like- the rate
of heroin addiction has always been three people per thousand no matter
what the policy toward it.
Gray interweaves self-contained stories illustrating
the progression of the drug business. The downfall of Colombia proceeds
from the kidnapping of a dealer's daughter that united Colombia's traffickers
into a cartel, through thousands of murders including all anti-cartel Supreme
Court members, until the last incorruptible Colombian Justice Minister
gathered her family and disappeared into a U.S. witness protection program.
His account of Mexico drives home the wave of
violence and corruption that is moving north like killer bees. Prospects
for stopping it are grim since "the income of the drug barons is greater
than the American defense budget." Victory is so remote that "After a seventy-year
battle against illegal narcotics, it is now possible to walk out the door
of the White House and do a drug deal across the street."
Gray approaches prohibition's alternatives by
describing what other countries have tried. His centerpiece of the "British
System" is the story of Maureen, an Irish woman in her mid-thirties "who
could easily be taken for a businesswoman or a teacher." Heroin addiction
had cast her and her three children into dire circumstances. The British
practice of heroin maintenance changed her life instantly, and Gray portrays
her experience in terms that ring gut-level true.
When a pharmacist filled her first heroin prescription:
"an odd sensation washed over her.... For the first time in memory, she
had a tiny bit of brain space that wasn't focused on the next fix....
She didn't have to figure out who to con, how
to get the cash, what to do if she got busted....
....as she turned away, she got a glimpse of her
reflection in the glass and for the first time in ten years she stopped
to take a serious look.... Then she glanced down at her children, and she
said, 'Oh, my God.'
The morality that had been instilled in her as
a child suddenly came flooding back."
Gray closes by noting that drug policy is the
first area to be dramatically affected by easy information access on the
internet, and he appends an annotated list of internet addresses. For the
first time in 80 years of drug prohibition, people with access to all sides
of the discussion can inform themselves. Gray's very readable book is a
good start.
Gray brings a filmic sense of drama and action
to a gritty, scorching look at the failure of America's war on drugs."
"Argued eloquently and persuasively deserves a
hearing."
Kirkus Reviews
"A brilliant marriage of the novelist's vision
with the historian's research and documentation."
Eric Sterling, Newsbriefs
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Updated: 8 Apr 2005 |
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