Drugs And Thugs

A sweeping and highly readable work on the evolution of America’s domestic and global drug war How can the United States chart a path forward in the war on drugs? In Drugs and Thugs, Russell Crandall uncovers the full history of this war that has lasted more than a century. As a scholar and a high-level national security advisor to both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, he provides an essential view of the economic, political, and human impacts of U.S. drug policies. Backed by extensive research, lucid and unbiased analysis of policy, and his own personal experiences, Crandall takes readers from Afghanistan to Colombia, to Peru and Mexico, to Miami International Airport and the border crossing between El Paso and Juarez to trace the complex social networks that make up the drug trade and drug consumption. Through historically driven stories, Crandall reveals how the war on drugs has evolved to address mass incarceration, the opioid epidemic, the legalization and medical use of marijuana, and America’s shifting foreign policy.

Johnson, author of the acclaimed Secret Agencies and ""an experienced overseer of intelligence"" (Foreign Affairs), here examines the present state and future challenges of American strategic intelligence.

Soap opera speaks a universal language, presenting characters and plots that resonate far beyond the culture that creates them. Latin American soap operas—telenovelas—have found enthusiastic audiences throughout the Americas and Europe, as well as in Egypt, Russia, and China, while Mexican narco-dramas have become highly popular among Latinos in the United States. In this first comprehensive analysis of telenovelas and narco-dramas, Hugo Benavides assesses the dynamic role of melodrama in creating meaningful cultural images to explain why these genres have become so successful while more elite cultural productions are declining in popularity. Benavides offers close readings of the Colombian telenovelas Betty la fea (along with its Mexican and U.S. reincarnations La fea más bella and Ugly Betty), Adrián está de visita, and Pasión de gavilanes; the Brazilian historical telenovela Xica; and a variety of Mexican narco-drama films. Situating these melodramas within concrete historical developments in Latin America, he shows how telenovelas and narco-dramas serve to unite peoples of various countries and provide a voice of rebellion against often-oppressive governmental systems. Indeed, Benavides concludes that as one of the most effective and lucrative industries in Latin America, telenovelas and narco-dramas play a key role in the ongoing reconfiguration of social identities and popular culture.

In 2000, the U.S. passed a major aid package that was going to help Colombia do it all: cut drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80% of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary forces. Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats examines the U.S. policymaking process in the design, implementation, and consequences of Plan Colombia, as the aid package came to be known. Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.

What is the number one killer in the United States? Medical treatment. Western medicine has cures for surprisingly few diseases and actually causes illness with its drugs for every disease approach. Infectious diseases are making a comeback due to the overuse of antibiotics and our war on germs. We've seen an exponential rise in autism while vaccinating more than any other country. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, properly prescribed medication is the fourth leading cause of death, hospitals are the third, and medical doctors kill more than all other forms of accidental death combined. This first book in the Why We're Sick series exposes the myths, lies, greed, and just plain bungling that is the untold story of Western medicine. Deeply researched, deadly serious, yet often humorous and irreverent, no other work so thoroughly explains how we got into this mess and what we can do to be truly healthy.

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.

A revealing look at the history and legacy of the "War on Drugs" Fifty years after President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs," the United States government has spent over a trillion dollars fighting a losing battle. In recent years, about 1.5 million people have been arrested annually on drug charges—most of them involving cannabis—and nearly 500,000 Americans are currently incarcerated for drug offenses. Today, as a response to the dire human and financial costs, Americans are fast losing their faith that a War on Drugs is fair, moral, or effective. In a rare multi-faceted overview of the underground drug market, featuring historical and ethnographic accounts of illegal drug production, distribution, and sales, The War on Drugs: A History examines how drug war policies contributed to the making of the carceral state, racial injustice, regulatory disasters, and a massive underground economy. At the same time, the collection explores how aggressive anti-drug policies produced a “deviant” form of globalization that offered economically marginalized people an economic life-line as players in a remunerative transnational supply and distribution network of illicit drugs. While several essays demonstrate how government enforcement of drug laws disproportionately punished marginalized suppliers and users, other essays assess how anti-drug warriors denigrated science and medical expertise by encouraging moral panics that contributed to the blanket criminalization of certain drugs. By analyzing the key issues, debates, events, and actors surrounding the War on Drugs, this timely and impressive volume provides a deeper understanding of the role these policies have played in making our current political landscape and how we can find the way forward to a more just and humane drug policy regime.

Mr Nasty charts the rise, fall and ultimate redemption of a wannabe player in the global narcotics business. From humble beginnings on the streets of London's East End, Cameron White rapidly ascended the drug ladder of London's club scene before notorious local criminals forced him to move to the US. There, he soon found himself aboard a cocaine-fuelled roller-coaster ride, transporting him from encounters with psychotic, crack-dealing Jamaicans in New York to luncheons with Hollywood's glitterati. The American adventure was to reach its inevitable conclusion in a drive-by shooting in the barrios of LA.Back in London, a dull nine-to-five existence did nothing to quell White's narco-inclinations. Cue a chemical vacation in Thailand and an effortless metamorphosis from recreational drug user to fully fledged smack addict in Berlin. White's eventual wake-up call came after he robbed some innocent tourists to feed his heroin habit. Stunned to realise how low he had sunk, he was determined to get clean and his gold-star efforts at rehabilitation were rewarded with an opportunity to start again in Australia. Faced with temptation once more, White's good intentions were to prove short-lived and he slid into the murky world of substance abuse in Sydney. But this time things were different and a gradual but life-defining epiphany rescued White from the edge. Mr Nasty is a thrilling yet cautionary tale of a decade lived within the narcotics underworld. Illuminating both the exciting and destructive sides of such an existence, it is ultimately a testament to how a strong will can sometimes overcome the lure of vice and break the chains of addiction.