review by Brian Charles Clark
Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to Their History, Chemistry, Use and Abuse
by Paul M. Gahlinger
Publisher: Sagebrush Press, 2001
We live in a funny culture here in the United States—but not funny “ha ha.” We have an almost religious phobia about certain drugs. If you use them, you’re immoral. If you continue to use them, you’re sick—and we prescribe other drugs for you to use. We’ve waged a war on drugs for so long now (the War was started by Richard Nixon in the late 1960s) that we’ve raised a generation of kids so drug-phobic that some of them won’t take antibiotics when they’re sick—because antibiotics are drugs. Meanwhile, the United States has experienced a population boom: more than one percent of adult Americans are in prison (one of the highest incarceration rates in the world), three-quarters of those for drug crimes. One in a hundred citizens doing time for doing what, many anthropologists and biologists would argue, comes naturally to the human animal. Not funny at all. Read the rest of this entry »
