""One of the theses of This Is Your Country on Drugs -- a cornucopia of unconventional wisdom about our relationship to mind-altering substances -- is that the popularity of drugs waxes and wanes according to a complex sum of factors."" (salon.com, July 20, 2009)

""Mark Kleiman calls it ""Atonishingly clear-headed and well-written, as if someone had taken David Courtwright and added just a splash of Hunter Thompson."" (Mark Klieman, TPMCafe)

""A wide-ranging, fascinating romp through the history of America's insatiable appetite for all manner of drugs, from opium to crystal meth, all the way up to the possibly soon-to-be-illegal hallucinogen Salvia divinorum."" (The Philadelphia City Paper)

In This Is Your Country on Drugs, journalist Ryan Grim challenges everything you thought you knew about America's drug culture and how and when it began, who contributed to its growth, who opposed it and why, and what makes one drug surge in popularity and another fade.

You'll get the inside story on the huge DEA bust of an acid lab in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas that may have caused the disappearance of LSD in the early 2000s; find out how the temperance movement of the nineteenth century encouraged the use of opium, cocaine, and other narcotics; and discover the link between drugs and the birth of the modern mass media.

Drawing on many sources, both historic and contemporary, Grim asks penetrating questions about America's drug habit. Has the war on drugs done anything to reduce drug use? If all drugs were made legal, would we end up re-criminalizing them? Did our founding fathers—and especially their wives—get high just as frequently as twenty-first-century Americans? Is the crack epidemic really over, if it ever even existed? Did Ronald Reagan inadvertently cause the cocaine boom of the 1980s by going after pot smokers? Did NAFTA open the door for Mexican meth to take over the Midwest? Why do Americans use drugs at a far higher rate than any other people in the world? Why do we put alcohol in a class different from every other drug? Grim's answers are, to say the least, startling.

He also offers thoughtful insights into why different people and groups use different drugs. In a hilarious anecdote about a concert by Andy Warhol's speed-driven performance-art troop Exploding Plastic Inevitable before an audience of pot-smoking, acid-dropping hippies at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in 1968, Grim reveals the connection between lifestyle and drugs of choice, as well as what happens when drug cultures collide.

Complete with revelations about the role of major pharmaceutical companies in both the introduction and eventual criminalization of such drugs as heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and others, This Is Your Country on Drugs is more than a powerful, fascinating, and often shocking history of one of our knottiest social, cultural, and criminal problems; it is a profound and disturbing exploration of what it means to be an American.