Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: TarcherPerigee; Reprint edition (August 25, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1585422517
ISBN-13: 978-1585422517
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #256,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #42 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Methodology #511 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Consciousness & Thought
What an interesting book.I read it faster than I've read almost any other book - cover to cover in two days. (I'm normally a really slow reader.) Although the middle kind of drags on, with the same thesis repeated in several different forms, it's quite an enlightening read.I've always considered myself well informed and quite liberal on drug issues, but it turns out that I was much more influenced by anti-drug propaganda than I had realized. My mind has been filled with stories that are true, personal experiences, or second-hand accounts of people I trusted, but I was seeing them in the wrong light. I thought of my father performing autopsies on cocaine users whose hearts had stopped with no warning. Someone who tried to kill his roommate with an axe while tweaking on crystal. Lots of perfectly real scare stories, which had caused me to feel chills just thinking about these "hard" drugs.But these were still viewed through the lens of prohibition. Conveniently forgotten in these tales were the many, many more cases my father had seen of alcohol poisoning, a common cause of death among young people in the town where I grew up. Drunken rages in which people were killed - one that killed one of my best friend's bosses just two months ago. Somehow, because of the legality and familarity of alcohol, these were not "scare stories" about drugs. They were, instead, stories about people, and their foolishness; the blame was not transferred to the chemical.The best part of the book is his historical review of alcohol prohibition, and the hype over the evil powers of alcohol at a time when opium and cocaine were not only legal, but popular and commonly used in "patent medicines".
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