Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We can Get Out by Mike Gray |
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About the Author |
Mike Gray, author of The China Syndrome, grew up in Indiana and graduated from Purdue University with a degree in engineering. In 1962, he formed his own film company in Chicago, which produced the award-winning documentaries American Revolution and The Murder of Fred Hampton. Since moving to Los Angeles, he has been writing, directing, and producing feature films and series for television. |
Press Release |
Publication Date: June 15, 1998 |
Blistering New Expose of the "War on Drugs" is Drawing Bipartisan Acclaim |
Drug Crazy, Forthcoming New Book By China Syndrome Writer, Paints a Vivid Portrait of Futility and Failure |
Corruption Now Infecting U.S. Law Enforcement; Worldwide U.N. Conference on Drugs in Early June |
As politicians proclaim their support for an ever-escalating "War on Drugs," the first popularly written book exposing the futility and enormous costs of this losing war is being praised across the political spectrum. |
Drug Crazy: How we Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, [Random House, 240 pages, $23.95; Publication date June 15, 1998] dramatically reveals the violence, corruption and chaos that characterize America's longest-running war. |
The publication of Drug Crazy also coincides with a special session of the United Nations on the worldwide drug problem, which is expected to bring some 25 heads of state, including President Clinton, to New York in early June. |
Author Mike Gray is a prominent journalist, screenwriter, author, producer and documentarian, whose best known work includes the film China Syndrome, which he wrote, and the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, for which he has served as a writer and producer. |
In an era when politicians vie to offer ever more draconian penalties to prove they are "tough on drugs" — and when a marijuana conviction can result in a longer prison sentence than murder — Gray dares to point out that our current policies are an abject failure, despite the world's highest incarceration rates and the expenditure of more than $300 billion in the last fifteen years alone. He eloquently argues for the return of a medical rather than a law enforcement model of drug control. |
Drug Crazy is being praised in advance of publication from across the political spectrum: By two Nobel Prize winners (economist Milton Friedman and physicist Henry Kendall); by former Attorney General Elliott Richardson and former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders; by liberal journalist Daniel Schorr and conservative journalist William F. Buckley; and by other prominent academics, scientists, public policy experts, criminologists and social commentators. |
While many political and sociological treatises have been written on drug policy and reform, Drug Crazy breaks new ground by vividly and dramatically recreating eight decades of ongoing and escalating drug warfare, including: |
The compelling similarities between today's drug scene and the Prohibition era, as seen through the windshield of a police cruiser on the same Chicago streets where today's drug gangs recreate the marketing tactics of a 26-year-old booze "kingpin" named Al Capone. |
The tragicomic political history of U.S. drug wars from their beginning in 1914 to the present day — 85 years of cynical posturing and mindless bungling, manipulation of statistics, ostracism of opponents and falsification of medical and scientific data. |
The inevitable and rampant racism that has always pervaded the War on Drugs. |
The impossibility of "supply side" solutions like border interdiction or eradicating drug crops at their source, vividly demonstrated in Drug Crazy with trips to the US-Mexican border and the Andean jungles of South America. |
The chaos clogging America's court system, where we are taken to new drug courts that run a night shift to keep up with staggering caseloads, and our overstuffed prison system, now one of the nation's fastest growing industries. |
The corrupting power of the "river of money" that flows from drug criminalization, which is increasingly infecting US border control and law enforcement agencies. |
The disproportionate focus of law enforcement on marijuana (more than 600,000 arrests last year) despite its basically benign nature. |
Finally, Drug Crazy points toward possible solutions to the quagmire of our failed drug wars, based on the successful European model of a medically-based system of regulated narcotics prescriptions. Gray contends that the success of such programs in Britain, Holland and elsewhere has been suppressed — and supporters of such programs methodically maligned — by "Drug War" advocates in the United States. |
ATTENTION EDITORS AND PRODUCERS: Advance copies of "Drug Crazy," press kits, and author and other expert interviews may be arranged by contacting Ellen Braune at Fenton Communications/New York, 212-989-3337, fenton@fenton.com |
FENTON COMMUNICATIONS • 2 HORATIO ST, 8P • NEW YORK, NY • 10014 • (212) 989-3337, http://www.fenton.com/ |
Quick Review |
"Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We can Get Out," is a gripping and dramatic review of the drug war over the last 100 years. It is being published by Random House. From the opening scene, a shoot out between police and drug gangs in Chicago, the book draws you in with human stories, amazing revelations and the whole sordid history of the drug war. |
"Drug Crazy" will capture the imagination of the public, convince many that prohibition will never work, and open a dialogue on drug policy at a level we have never seen before. |
The author is Mike Gray, best known as the writer of the screenplay of "The China Syndrone" (Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas) which forever altered the public view concerning nuclear energy. "Drug Crazy" could do the same thing to the war on drugs. |
"Drug Crazy" is fascinating, informative, scary and rewarding. Everyone who has seen an advance copy is enthusiastic about its potential to open people's minds and change opinion. |
You can help spread the word. Ask your local book store manager for "Drug Crazy" by Mike Gray, published by Random House. If they don't have it, ask when they will. |
Comments on Drug Crazy |
"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!"
Elliott Richardson |
"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 Schorr |
"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 drug-free America."
Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate |
"'Drug Crazy' is an oasis of clarity and common sense in a desert of
misinformation and hysteria."
Ira Glasser |
"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 |
This is a book that every American who is concerned about the problem of
drugs in America should read and take seriously. It is 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 |
"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. Joycelyn Elders |
"Drug Crazy dramatically and in stark detail exposes the truths of the
futility of our Nation's self-destructive drug war over the past 80
years -- truths shamefully known by law enforcement officials, judges
and political leaders for almost just as long.
"This book is a must read for as much of the general pubic as possible, for only when democratic government and the quality of life in our country cause by a totally failed criminal drug policy, will our political leaders find the courage to endorse drug sanity."
Samuel Dash |
"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 |
"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."
Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, 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 |
"Drug Crazy provides an incisive historical analysis of America's
ongoing problem with drug control - from alcohol under Prohibition to
heroin and crack today. Gray suggests we're fighting the wrong battle in
the war on drugs, and makes a strong case for refocusing our attention
on the root of the problem, the kingpins behind the drug trade, not the
street players who now crowd our jails."
Randy K. Jones |
Review by Dr. Tom O'Connell |
A long-overdue indictment of a lunatic national policy.
America's War on Drugs, declared originally by Richard Nixon and waged with varying degrees of enthusiasm by every President since, has become a nearly invulnerable monster, thriving on its own failures and seemingly capable of destroying anyone reckless enough to speak out against it. Its simplistic central premise- drugs pose unthinkable dangers to our children, and therefore must be prohibited- has helped elect legions of politicians who then cite the latest drug scare as reason for tougher crack-downs, harsher laws, and more prisons. So completely has this idea of "illicit drugs" become society's default setting, and so beholden are politicians and others to it, the policy itself receives no critical scrutiny from government and little from academics dependent of federal funding. "Legalization" is a deadly brickbat hurled indiscriminately at all critics without thought that in a society based on capitalism, it is the illegal markets which are abnormal. Although several scholarly, historically accurate books have pointed out shortcomings of this policy since the late Sixties, not one author has effectively attacked drug prohibition as a policy based on a completely false premise, incapable of preventing substance abuse problems; indeed, certain to make them worse. None, that is, until Mike Gray. A professional from the film world, Gray may have written the book no one else has yet been able to: a concise, readable, historically accurate, and well documented indictment of our drug policy. Very few reading his book all the way through will see the drug war the same way they did before. A major question then becomes: how many people will read it? Will it sink without a trace, overlooked like so many earlier criticisms of official policy- or will it be discovered by a public growing increasingly disillusioned by a perennial policy failure which is jamming prisons, impoverishing schools and colleges and effectively canceling! many Constitutional guarantees of personal freedom? Read by enough people, "Drug Crazy" could do for drug reform what "Silent Spring" did for the environment in 1962. Like the film maker he is, Gray opens with a tight close up: Chicago police on a drug stake-out. The view quickly expands to the futility of enforcement against Chicago's massive illegal market. first from the perspectives of an elite narcotics detective and then through the eyes of a dedicated public defender. A comparison with Chicago seventy years ago during Prohibition reveals that police and the courts were equally unable to suppress the illegal liquor industry for exactly the same reasons: the overwhelming size and wealth of the criminal market created by prohibition. This beginning leaves the reader intrigued and eager to learn more; he's not disappointed. The rest of the book traces the history of our drug crusade from its idealistic populist origins, starting in 1901 when McKinley's assassination thrust a youthful TR into the White House. The 1914 Harrison Act, purportedly a regulatory and tax law, was transformed by enforcement practice into federal drug prohibition with the assistance of the Supreme Court. Drug prohibition not only survived the demise of Prohibition, but emerged with its bogus mandate strengthened. Thirty years of determined and unscrupulous management by Harry Anslinger, the J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics shaped drug prohibition into what would eventually become a punitive global policy. Anslinger was dismissed by JFK in 1960, but not before politicians had discovered the power of the drug menace to garner both votes and media attention. Illegal drug markets have since thrived on the free advertising of their products which inevitably accompanies intense press coverage of the futile suppression effort and dire official warnings over the latest drug scare. This expansion was accelerated when Nixon declared the drug war in 1972. Gray covers that expansion beyond our borders in Colombia ("River of Money"), in Mexico (Montezuma's Revenge"), and also at home ("Reefer Madness"). He also describes how some European countries have blunted the most destructive effects of our policy forced on them by the UN Single Convention Treaty ("Lessons from the Old Country"). In his final chapter, Gray opines that the push to legitimize marijuana for medical use may have exposed a chink in the heretofore impregnable armor of drug prohibition. Beyond that, he believes that the policy, having thrived on relentless intensification, can't allow relaxation without risking the sort of scrutiny which might reveal its intrinsic lack of substance, therefore, any change must come from outside government. He doesn't offer a detailed recipe for a regulatory policy to replace drug prohibition; rather he suggests that it will be very similar to that which replaced alcohol Prohibition after Repeal in 1933- a collection of state based programs, sensitive to local needs and beliefs. There is a desperate need for this book to be read and discussed by hundreds of thousands of thinking citizens. The pied piper of drug prohibition has beguiled our politicians and led us dangerously close to the edge of an abyss. Mike Gray's warning has hopefully come just in time and could itself be a major factor in initiating needed change of direction toward sanity.
Thomas J. O'Connell, MD, |
DrugSense P. O. Box 651 Porterville, CA 93258 (800) 266-5759 | Contact: | Mark Greer (mgreer@drugsense.org) |
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Webmaster: | Matt Elrod (webmaster@drugsense.org) | |
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Newshawk: gguardia@mindspring.com
Pubdate: Sun, 21 Jun 1998
Source: Savannah Morning News
Section: Top Stories - Accent:
Contact: mswendra@savannahnow.com
Website: http://www.savannahmorningnews.com/
Author: Doug Wyatt, Savannah Morning News
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