This Is Your Country On Drugs Part 10

Leonard Pickard has kept up a correspondence with me for close to five years now, and I hope we can one day continue the conversation in a freer environment.

I had a great deal of help crafting this book every step of the way from researchers and writers who have come before me and continue their work today; I've named them either in the text itself or in the notes on sources.

And my wife, Elizan Garcia, put up with the loss of more than a year of evenings and weekends. It must have seemed to her-as it did to me-that I was trying to fill up a landfill with a spoon, but somehow I finished and couldn't have done it without her love and support. Thank you.

NOTES.

Wherever it didn't totally wreck the flow, I put sourcing directly into the text. But that wasn't always possible.

In chapter 1, the scene of the chase and arrest of Leonard Pickard was pieced together from interviews with and letters from Pickard; interviews with a lead DEA agent on the case, Carl Nichols; and court testimony.

I rely on drug statistics throughout the book, many of them dependent on the honesty of drug users, which makes them necessarily suspect. But they should be just as suspect today as they were in 1975, which should allow the numbers to be used, at the very least, to describe trends. I most heavily used two surveys: the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future survey. The former I often refer to in shorthand as "a federal survey," because it is conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The latter I often refer to as "the Michigan survey"; it has questioned middle- and high-school students since 1975, and shortly after its inception, it expanded its scope to include older people, too.

I also refer to a reliable survey conducted by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which measures the number of times a drug is mentioned by patients admitted to emergency rooms. Note that a drug doesn't need to have caused the trip to the hospital to be included in the survey; the patient merely had to have used it at some recent time before the injury. The global survey on drug use I reference in chapter 1 was conducted in 2008 by the World Health Organization. In helping me pa.r.s.e and understand these piles of numbers, I' m grateful to Peter Reuter and Lloyd Johnston, two of the most knowledgeable academics studying drug trends. Johnston has been running the Michigan survey for decades and knows the numbers cold.

In chapter 2, the story of the founding of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union comes from the group's own literature, bolstered by contemporaneous news accounts. Historian David Musto's collection, Drugs in America: A Doc.u.mentary History (New York: New York University Press, 2002), compiles primary sources stretching back to the European discovery of the continent; it was of invaluable use in researching the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Two other works of research were also useful to both chapters 2 and 3: David Courtwright's Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). My opium-importation statistics, for example, come from Dark Paradise. The accounts of New York City police commissioner Theodore Bingham and other law enforcement officers ' reaction to drugs in the early twentieth century also come from Courtwright, as do the reports by two Chicago doctors who studied more than five thousand narcotics addicts between 1904 and 1924. Much of the rest of the history is drawn from the Congressional Record or contemporaneous news reports. The cannabis-extract numbers come from congressional testimony.

Angela Valdez helped with the research for chapter 4. She won a 2007 AltWeekly Award for media criticism of flawed meth reporting, so there are few reporters out there who could have been a bigger help.

The numbers on Washington, D.C.'s and the nation's number of heroin addicts in the late sixties and early seventies, along with the story of President Richard Nixon's attempts at implementing treatment programs, come from Michael Ma.s.sing's book The Fix (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The DEA's budget and numbers of agents employed throughout its history are available on the Department of Justice's Web site (www.usdoj.gov), as are the agency's estimates of drug imports, seizures, prices, and purity cited in chapter 5.

Elsewhere in chapter 5, the story of Mountain Girl's position as a gourmet-pot pioneer and the tale of the FBI's attempt to set up Jerry Brown using Timothy Leary's wife both come from Martin Torgoff's 2004 book Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). The data about Miami's c.o.ke-boom economy and customs seizures come from Time magazine as well as other contemporaneous reports mentioned in the chapter. The congressional testimony of the Medellin cartel's top accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, appeared in 1999 in Alexander c.o.c.kburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 1999). The background on club owner Peter Gatien comes from Frank Owen's Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). The murder and crime figures come from the Department of Justice.

The record-sales numbers in chapter 6 come from the Recording Industry a.s.sociation of America's Web site (www.riaa.com). The rest of the chapter and much of chapter 7 rest on the stack of journal articles cited in the text. The prescription -drug studies referenced include the 2008 Pew Internet & American Life Project's " Prescription Drugs Online" and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse's 2008 study "You've Got Drugs!: Prescription Drug Pushers on the Internet."

The numbers on salvia mentions in the media in chapter 8 come from a May 2008 Slate piece by Jack Shafer, "Salvia Divinorum Hysteria: The Press Helps Fuel the Next ' Drug Menace.' "

The NAFTA/drug-smuggling connection described in chapter 9 was first made in c.o.c.kburn and St. Clair's Whiteout. The White House report that shows an increase in drug smuggling in the mid- to late nineties was done by the Office of National Drug Control Policy and is called "Estimation of Cocaine Availability: 1996-1999." It includes data dating back to 1991. The prison-population numbers are from the 2008 Pew Center on the States report. The drug-court numbers come from a 2006 Department of Justice special report produced by the National Inst.i.tute of Justice. The cost-benefit numbers come from James L. Nolan Jr.'s Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

The summary of Peter Reuter's a.n.a.lysis of black markets in chapter 10 is drawn from his book Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) and from interviews with him. His other relevant works include Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Places, Times, and Vices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), which he coauth.o.r.ed with Robert J. MacCoun; and Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight against Money Laundering (Washington, DC: Peterson Inst.i.tute (2008), which he coauth.o.r.ed with Edwin Truman.

I couldn't have written chapter 12 without the help of Amanda Reiman, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Social Welfare. The author of an in-depth study of California's medical marijuana clinics, "Cannabis Care: Medical Cannabis Facilities as Health Service Providers," she generously gave me a tour of Bay Area dispensaries. Her introductions made club owners comfortable enough to share with me the details and history of their businesses. Our mutual friend Abby Bair, formerly of Americans for Safe Access, made the connection. Betty Yee, chairwoman of the State Board of Equalization, which collects taxes for the state of California, helped immensely as I tried to divine the tax revenue that the state takes in from its pot clubs.

Chapter 13 benefited greatly from the cooperation of Earth and Fire Erowid, the tireless founders of erowid.org, a must-read Web site for anyone looking for accurate information on drugs. I' m also grateful to Ann and Sasha Shulgin for sharing their wisdom with me regarding the creation of and experimentation with new kinds of drugs. Rebecca Snowden introduced me to the Brooklyn warehouse owner who hosts ayahuasca ceremonies.

Rick Doblin's organization, the Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), compiled the information on current and past psychedelic studies, and Doblin himself was always helpful making connections and giving background information.

For more specific sourcing, check out YourCountryOnDrugs.com, where I' ll post links to all of the relevant information that's available online. If something's still unclear, write to me at , and I' ll dig up the source for you.

end.