Synopsis
A social history of America's use of drugs journeys from white middle class females of the early 1900s who were given opiates for childbirth, to the spread of marijuana and heroin through the black community via the jazz world, to today's use of crack and Xstacy. 15,000 first printing.
Reviews
At the turn of the century, Jonnes estimates, one American in 200 was a drug addict?and most of these were genteel middle-class women taking cocaine or nostrums laced with opiates. This sweeping, highly colorful, riveting narrative resurrects a largely forgotten history of drug use and abuse in the U.S. Jonnes, who researched this topic extensively while completing her Ph.D. in American history from Johns Hopkins, strongly opposes today's illegal drug culture, arguing that marijuana, hallucinogens, cocaine and heroin are far more dangerous than alcohol and engender crime, violence, personal tragedy and a culture of irresponsibility and instant gratification. Beginning with Chinese opium dens, patent medicines and early, ostensibly antidrug Hollywood movies portraying druggies as glamorous hedonistic rebels, she moves on to jazz-age Harlem, 1950s Beat hipsters and then to the 1960s counterculture, whose gurus, like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, helped spread drug use to the broad middle class. Her entertaining chronicle includes side trips to 1930s Paris, the N.Y.C. mob underworld, Marseille's Corsican, CIA-abetted drug network of the 1950s and '60s and today's Colombian cocaine cartels. It culminates with a compelling argument against legalization or decriminalization, charging that privileged baby boomers forget the financial and educational advantages that allowed them to emerge from 1960s drug use relatively unscathed.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A history detailing how, as a society, we have both used drugs and tried to suppress them. From Jonnes's sometimes numbing welter of facts a two-stranded history emerges. One strand follows major clusters of drug users, from the 19th-century ladies with their spiked elixirs, to impoverished, rootless men who became ``pleasure addicts'' after WW I, to young blacks who, excluded from postWW II, middle-class hopes of getting ahead, turned to drugs as a way to be hip, becoming ``deliberate outsiders''; to middle-class whites who took drugs mainstream in the '60s and '70s, with Hollywood adding an aura of glamour to it all. Another, largely separate narrative strand follows large-scale trafficking and our half- hearted efforts to stop it. Although Jonnes discusses criminals, notably Arnold Rothstein, who in the 1920s established a drug-supply system superseded only by that of the Colombian cartels in the 1970s, more fascinating is our government's ambivalence about trafficking. For years the Bureau of Narcotics was led by Harry J. Anslinger, who was more interested in seeming tough than getting results; he ignored corruption in his agency and discouraged scientific research into addiction. Meanwhile, high-level US cold warriors could overlook drug trafficking provided it was conducted by anti-communists, such as members of French military intelligence in Indochina in the 1950s or, more recently, the Contras in Nicaragua. Oddly, after recounting how governmental unreliability and corruption have compromised efforts to reduce addiction, Jonnes puts her faith in law enforcement to reduce the supply of drugs, a move she sees as crucial to long-term change. But the toughest question remains: Will a law-and-order approach produce results or just more Anslingers? Duller than a book on the ``romance'' of drugs should be; but still better on what has happened than on what to do about it. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Jonnes, a former journalist and consummate researcher, charts the stealthy infiltration of hard drugs into our culture, identifying three "epidemics" over the course of the last 125 years, each more severe and damaging than the last. She chronicles the use of opium, cocaine, and marijuana when they were legal and offers an anecdotal look at the influence of drugs on the heady worlds of Hollywood and jazz. She moves on to scathing accounts of the psychedelic revolution, the cocaine craze of the 1970s, and the diabolical introduction of crack, again combining indelible profiles of individuals with shrewd cultural analysis, but the most valuable aspect of this compelling and invaluable work is her tracking of the federal government's aiding and abetting of drug traffickers, from the Sicilian Mafia to Corsican smugglers (the French connection) and Colombian cartels. Jonnes couldn't cover every facet of this complex subject, but her revelations do illuminate the connection between politics and narcotics and the deep hypocrisy that makes a mockery of our "war" on drugs. Donna Seaman
The result of research conducted while Jonnes was completing her doctorate at Johns Hopkins, this readable, fascinating work covers the ups and downs of drug use and abuse primarily in the United States from the late 19th century to the 20th-century's drug/AIDS connection. Moving from opium through morphine, heroin, psychedelics, and cocaine, the author features the diverse personalities of entertainers, gangsters, politicians, narcotics agents, hepsters, criminals, beatniks, and many others involved in various aspects of drug use, trade, and control. She examines policies of the Federal Narcotics Bureau with its self-promoting commissioner, the State Department's obsessed Cold War focus, the Colombian cartel, the French connection, Charlie Parker, Lucky Luciano, Timothy Leary, Carlos Lehder, and more. Well paced and informative, this book will interest general readers, academics, and politicians. Highly recommended.?Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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