This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

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Synopsis

Seven surprising consequences of the U.S. approach to drugs—find out the facts in THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY ON DRUGS

Past antidrug campaigns actually encouraged drug use.

A few years ago, America stopped dropping acid altogether.

The meth epidemic peaked a long, long time ago.

NAFTA opened the border and created a bonanza for cocaine and meth traffickers—just as President Clinton knew it would.

President Reagan may have inadvertently caused the crack epidemic.

Kids today are doing fewer illegal drugs than kids from any time in the recent past, and for a surprising reason.

The fastest-growing drug in America is a legal hallucinogen you can buy on the Internet.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

Admitting that "so much has been written on drug use and American culture that it would take weeks to roll all of that paper up and smoke it," journalist Grim plunges into the counterculture, the literature, the research, the opposition, the pharmaceutical interests, the media coverage, the kids and users, the heroes and the hypocrites to chart the evolution of drug use in America, covering every illegal high, taking on well-entrenched myths and turning up fascinating stories on current trends-beginning with the end of LSD. Backed by plenty of startling facts (i.e., 1984's drug-related criminal population was 30,000; by 1991 it was more than 150,000), Grim fashions a sharp critique of anti-drug programs ("exposure to anti-drug ads led to higher rates of first-time drug use among certain groups, such as fourteen-to-sixteen year olds and whites") and other policy decisions (President Clinton's approval of NAFTA led to an unprecedented influx of drugs across the Mexican border). Grim isn't all talk, however: he barely survives on-site research during drug riots in Bolivia, goes through a typically fraught trip on ayahuasca, and scouts the battlefields of the fight to legalize cannabis ("In San Francisco, pot clubs quickly outnumbered McDonald's franchises"). This lively, personable history should strike fans of Martin Torgoff's Can't Find My Way Home as a worthy follow-up.
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Biography

Ryan Grim is the Huffington Post's senior congressional correspondent and has written for Slate, Rolling Stone, Harper's, and the Washington Post.