A thought-provoking, often disturbing account of drug prohibition that provides context for current debates.
A comprehensive account of the troubled history of drug prohibition.
Cambridge academic Caquet seeks to explain why so many attempts to counter the problem of drugs have failed. He points out that prohibition actually began in China during the colonial era, when Britain developed a lucrative market in opium. The Chinese government did as much as possible to curtail it, but two wars ensured that the business continued. Nevertheless, the seed of prohibition was planted, and it sprouted when transplanted to Europe and, later, America. In the 1950s, prohibition seemed to be working—until the explosion of the counterculture in the 1960s sparked a huge demand for marijuana, LSD, and other illicit substances. The Nixon administration coined the phrase “war on drugs” but failed to distinguish between types of drugs, a crucial mistake. There were a few short-lived successes, but by the time crack and then meth hit the market, it was clear that the long-term battle was being lost. When one source of supply was eradicated, another appeared, with the focus shifting to Mexico and South America. As Caquet shows, the money involved in the drug trade is staggering—so much that the drug cartels can challenge governments. Though the legalization of marijuana has helped in some places, the opioid and fentanyl crises have reached epic proportions. Most of the prohibition laws are still on the books, but Caquet believes that the game is largely over. He does not provide any solutions, but he suggests that the decriminalization of nonaddictive drugs should probably continue. Maybe people should be allowed to take whatever drugs they want as long as they don’t affect anyone else. Of course, there are always collateral effects, some of which are grave. Caquet explains how we got here, but the road ahead is like a dark highway heading into the night.
A thought-provoking, often disturbing account of drug prohibition that provides context for current debates.Pub Date: July 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78914-558-8
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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