Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington's War on Drugs [Paperback]

Mike Gray (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 8, 2002

Thirty years ago Richard Nixon called drugs "the modern curse of youth" and launched the modern "War on Drugs" as we know it. Thirty years later, even the conservative National Review has said, "The War on Drugs has failed." Spanning three decades, Busted tells readers why, charting the violence, chaos, and corruption that the War on Drugs has spawned. It includes frontline reporting from all over the world, literary journalism, public records, and provocative commentary from the left and right. P. J. O'Rourke writes, "Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.... Prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could." And Christopher Hitchens has charged that the drug war involves "a demented overseas entanglement, with off-the-record U.S. military aircraft running shady missions over Colombia and Peru, and high-level collaboration with ruthless and unaccountable ‘Special Forces.' Colombia doesn't look any more like the U.S. as a result, but the U.S. does look a lot more like Colombia." From the crack dens of South Central L.A. to Iran Contra, from Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" to Plan Columbia, here is a collection of the most provocative, dissenting writing on the drug wars. Contributors include Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, William Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman, Gary Webb, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, and a jailhouse interview with General Manuel Noriega by Oliver Stone.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In assessing the famed campaign of the subtitle, Gray (Drug Crazy) has brought together 33 contributors, often journalist-analysts with access to sources that vary from coca farmers in Colombia to former drug czar Barry McCaffrey. The majority agrees that the war on drugs is an exercise in futility. Journalist Ethan Nadelmann believes the policy has failed because U.S. politicians prefer "rhetoric to reality, and moralism to pragmatism." Craig Reinarman and Joshua Wolf Shenk probe the psychology behind Americans' legal, illegal, and prescribed relationships to mind-altering substances, and report that U.S. drug warriors "fear Dutch drug policy like the Catholic Church feared Galileo." Rowena Young considers drug use a false antidote to feelings of purposeless and social isolation. To make the point more concretely, Philippe Bourgois asks a crack dealer in East Harlem how he feels about selling drugs; the man responds: "I hate the people! I hate the environment!...But it's like you get caught up with it....Another day another dollar." Rolling Stone writer T.D. Allman asks a group of Colombian drug farmers whether they want to get out of the coca business, and they answer with a resounding "yes." Roger Hernandez of the Farmers' Association cries out, "We are victims of the drug consumers. We need help to break the circle." Gray, chair of the advocacy group Common Sense for Drug Policy, has collected a vibrant group of thinkers; the opinions are diverse, and the quality of writing consistently high. Most of what they say won't be surprising to critics of U.S. drug policy, but having the arguments in one place and in an accessible format should be a boon to campus and lay readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A collective celebration. The very existence of BUSTED itself ... offers us real hope for change." -- Carlo McCormick, High Times, February 2003

"BUSTED builds an implicit and convincing argument ... Gray has compiled an invaluable and comprehensive reference." -- Judith Lewis, LA Weekly, December 6-12, 2002

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (November 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560254327
• ISBN-13: 978-1560254324
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,860,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Crime & Criminals  > War on Drugs

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative!, January 2, 2003

By 

Virginia R. Warbis "If Jesus is the answer, w... (Into my head) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington's War on Drugs (Paperback)

Many thanks to Mike Gray and Maia Szlavitz for the AlterNet article (included on page 85) on Straight, Incorporated and similarly abusive gulags run by the John Birchers of the drug treatment industry. Thank GOD they're beginning to lose credibility and market share. I'm sure it's due, in part, to investigative reporting over the years by authors and reporters like you. I'll sleep just a little better because a few more poeple are wise to this scam. Again, thanks!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good (but not great) buzz, March 30, 2003

By 

Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington's War on Drugs (Paperback)

Editor Mike Gray has put together a diverse collection of articles in "Busted" that collectively make the argument that the war against illegal drugs has been an absolute failure. The over 33 authors who contributed to this book examine the myriad social, economic and political consequences of our current drug policies. Many of these writers present evidence contending that harm reduction would be far more effective than the punitive strategy our country has favored since Richard Nixon launched the modern drug war in 1968.

The individual articles offer information that might prove very helpful to activists fighting for commonsense policies. Indeed, the "Busted" project itself might represent a personal scrapbook of press clippings collected by Mr. Gray, who chairs just such an organization. Unfortunately, the overly loose organization of material constitutes the book's core weakness.

To begin with, Mr. Gray delivers a scant six-page Introduction for this 280-page book. Although the book is organized into seven sections that are meant to group the articles along themes such as "The View From the Fortieth Floor", we are given no guidance from Mr. Gray as to what we might expect to learn from these sections. Worse, the editor makes little attempt to contextualize these issues nor does he present any analysis of the drug law reform movement with respect to real world policy. On the plus side, Mr. Gray admirably provides a helpful Resouces section at the end of the book, but overall one suspects that this ambitious collection badly needs and deserves a better effort from its editor.

Second, the articles themselves did not always display the characteristics of "consistently high" proofreading, much less writing. Several of the stories were riddled with punctuation and spelling mistakes that make for very distracted reading; it was almost as if a few of the articles were copied from webpages and pasted into the manuscript without anyone bothering to see if the formatting might have been corrupted during the process. One hopes that these easily correctable problems will be fixed before future editions of the book are printed.

Third, the articles, while individually quite good, do tend to overlap and don't always seem to fall in the right sections of the book. For example, I almost lost count of the number of times I had to read about how a recent Washington, D.C. medical marijuana referendum was approved by the voters but subsequently rejected by the federal government. And a lengthy story about a crime-busting federal drug informant was included in the section "South of the Border" but, oddly, not in the section dedicated to "Criminal Justice." The time span of these stories does not help either; some articles date back as far as 1990, which seems odd for a book published in 2002 that is purported to represent current thinking on the subject. The net effect of all this is that it makes it difficult to read the book end-to-end without feeling disoriented; one quickly gets the sense that a logical progression to the arguments might never materialize, and in fact they do not.

Fourth, the reading experience is discontinuous due to the authors' wide variety of styles, tones and subject matter. You get parts investigative journalism, scholarly analysis, medical research, street reporting and more. One minute you might read an article laced with obscenities; the next you are contemplating the nuanced articulations of William F. Buckley, Jr. And in the Noriega interview, you are confounded by the seemingly endless series of conspiracy theory questions a paranoid Oliver Stone floats like so many trial balloons for a prospective Hollywood screenplay. Overall, the juxtaposition of all these stories is interesting, but it seems a little bizarre too.

In my view, you can get a good (but not great) buzz from this book. It has the merit of assembling a pastiche of stories for researchers or others who might not want to do a Google search on the topic, but in my view it also misses a golden opportunity to provide some badly needed analysis on the very important subject of drug prohibition.

3.0 out of 5 stars Maybe., March 9, 2010

By 

James Ashley Shea - See all my reviews

This review is from: Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington's War on Drugs (Paperback)

I'm about halfway finished reading Charles Bowden's "TEACHINGS OF DON FERNANDO: A Life and Death in the Narcotics Trade." Bowden is identified as a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, where the article appeared in June 2002.

The title, alluding to Castenada's Teachings of Don Juan, hints at a spoof. Maybe every word of this tale is true, but Bowden's extravagantly heightened style casts suspicion. Hollywood might buy it, though.