Cannabis and Coke
Peace,
Here are two great books on two 'illegal' drugs. Educate yourself.
Cannabis: A History by Martin Booth
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this study, Martin Booth crafts a tale of medical advance, religious enlightenment, political subterfuge, and human rights, of law enforcement and custom officers, cunning smugglers, street pushers, gang warfare, writers, artists, musicians, and happy-go-lucky hippies and potheads." Booth chronicles the fascinating and often mystifying process through which cannabis, a relatively harmless substance, became outlawed throughout the Western world, and the devastating effect such legislation has on the global economy. Above all, he demonstrates how the case for decriminalization remains one of the twenty-first century's hottest topics.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Booth, author of a sweeping history of opium, now offers a global history of cannabis, especially its production and uses as hashish and marijuana. In doing so, he tracks the plant's biological, pharmaceutical, medicinal, religious, cultural, literary, social, and regulatory history from ancient China and India, through the Middle East and Africa, into Europe and the Americas, and finally to middle-class American suburbs, Amsterdam coffee shops, and recording studios everywhere today. Cannabis has proved a versatile and variable plant, spreading on the trade winds and through commerce, conquest, and countercultures. Booth does much to debunk the many myths surrounding cannabis and the onus as a supposed stimulant for violent, antisocial, Communist, and other disruptive behavior with which antidrug forces sought to link it, instead pointing out its often beneficial effects in art, literature, music, and pain relief and its benign effect on human relations. Booth tips his hand for the decriminalization of marijuana but otherwise gives a remarkably "cool" account of a plant that people round the world, to paraphrase the Beatles, had to get into their lives. Get this book instead.--Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An investigation of the culture of hemp, the most widely distributed hallucinogenic on Earth. The cannabis industry is huge, certainly. It is a major crop worldwide, surpassing, for example, logging in British Columbia. It is farmed in basements everywhere. Hemp regularly makes the happy trek from Tangier and Nepal, Kabul and Amsterdam, Jamaica, Bombay and Brooklyn in the forms of marijuana and hashish. Hemp can be used for food, fuel, and fiber, but novelist Booth's (A Very Private Gentleman, Jan. 2004, etc.) wide-ranging report concentrates on the fun many derived from Mary Jane and hash. It can be traced back in the day of our Neolithic forbears, the classical civilizations of Greece, Rome, and China. Indians and Arabs used cannabis in one form or another and the eating or smoking of it blossomed in England and America. Thomas Wedgwood tried it and Louisa May Alcott featured the stuff in a story. It was used, notes Booth, by Satchmo, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Keith Richards, Robert Crumb, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and many, many others, including the fictional Dr. Fu Manchu. Difficulties increased a couple of generations ago with the onslaughts of head federal narc Harry J. Anslinger. The 20th-century war on drugs seems to be a loser, possibly because usage does not seem to be all that harmful. While he doesn't deny some possibly allied ill effects (like crashes involving a stoned "train driver" and a high pilot), Booth tells of the scientific exaggerations repeated by the press without basis: "The war on cannabis is being fought from a concern not for public health or order . . . but for public morality." Before reaching that conclusion, the indefatigable author presents much of theliterature, mythology, horticultural science, pharmacology, political and social history, the uses and misuses of the vegetation so friendly to mankind as balm and analgesic. Along with Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness (2003), this could become a staple at neighborhood head shops. Readable and comprehensive, loaded as fudge: the only hash book you'll ever need.
Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild
FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Last year, Discover selected a biography of a talented but unlikely champion: a racehorse. Seabiscuit charmed readers everywhere and continues to ride bestseller lists in its paperback incarnation. This season we've again made a discovery that readers might, at first glance, think peculiar: an "unauthorized biography" of a powdery white substance. No, not salt, that's been done before. No, not snow -- at least not as it's properly defined. Our unusual choice is Dominic Streatfeild's biography of a substance that continues to enchant many and leaves a wake of casualties wherever it goes -- cocaine.
A London-based documentary film producer, Streatfeild interviewed nearly 150 subjects to assemble his compendium, including scientists, traffickers, academics, crackheads, and customs and drug enforcement agents. While others have tackled various aspects of drug use and the role cocaine has played in the growth of cartels and crime rings, no one has previously explored cocaine and its history so comprehensively or engagingly. From Freud and Conan Doyle to Richard Pryor and Pablo Escobar, Streatfeild has drawn a skilled and controversial portrait of a substance whose botanical origins reach back 40 centuries to the pre-Incan tribes who first discovered it. On the cocaine trail, in a voice wholly his own, Streatfeild details the evolution of cocaine use and addiction, the rise of crack and crack-related violence, and more. Unafraid to tackle stereotypes, Streatfeild's history is sure to raise some hackles. But then, would you expect anything else on a subject that has crossed so many different lines? (Summer 2002 Selection)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
On May 16, 1499, Amerigo Vespucci set sail for the New World. Three months later, having navigated his way along the coastline of Brazil, he washed up on an idyllic desert island fifteen leagues from the mainland. There he was appalled to discover a tribe of hideous Indians, their mouths stuffed full of leaves "like beasts." The leaves were coca, the source of the drug cocaine.
Five hundred years later, the effects of the discovery are still felt. In 1999, South America produced 613,400 tons of coca, with a potential yield of 765 tons of cocaine. Last year a United Nations report estimated that the global cocaine trade generated $92 billion per year - $20 billion more than the combined revenues of Microsoft, Kellogg's, and McDonald's.
SYNOPSIS
Over the course of two years, London-based documentary film maker and writer Streatfeild interviewed some 150 traffickers, scientists, academics, journalists, officials of the US customs and drug agencies; he talked to people in the US, Bolivia, Columbia, and Peru. His book is an engaging account of the drugs' history and ongoing impact. This is a paperbound reprint of a 2001 book. Distributed in the US by Palgrave. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Boil off Streatfeild's informal tone a mix of self-deprecation and gonzo-journalist swagger and what's left is a fascinating and richly detailed story of the world's most notorious drug and an illicit $92-billion-a-year industry. Streatfeild, a British documentary film producer, visits its every outpost, from Bronx crack houses and Amazonian coca plantations to Bolivian prisons and the compounds of South American drug lords. He launches the story with a history of the coca leaf and its prominent place in both ancient and contemporary consciousness, tackling race, poverty, class, violence, mythology and xenophobia as seen through the prism of cocaine. There are countless strands to the story, and Streatfeild follows every one: the rise of the Colombian cartels, government collusion with traffickers, the crack phenomenon, media hype, the U.S. war on drugs and the legalization debate. The author lights up the myriad figures who feature in cocaine's history: Columbus, Freud, Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noriega, George Jung, even Richard Pryor and the late basketball star Len Bias. He picks the brains of botanists and economists, lawmen and guerrillas, addicts and kingpins, and travels extensively throughout the Americas. The main drawback: Streatfeild's insistence that the reader be privy to superfluous research details such as fizzled leads, false starts, wrong turns and boring authors. In the end, though, Streatfeild delivers a straight tale about a world where nothing is as it seems. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Originally published in Great Britain in 2001, this book by documentary film producer Streatfeild offers a fast but uneven ride through the history of cocaine. Streatfeild combines interviews with drug dealers, users, scientists, law officers, and others involved in the commerce and culture of cocaine with readings of various popular and scientific accounts. He tracks the adaptations and spread of cocaine from its earliest religious and medicinal uses among people in the Andes to its modern incarnations as both part of the "hip" culture and as a supposed cause of criminality in the form of "crack cocaine." Streatfeild also shows how much cocaine figured in American policy in Panama, Mexico, and the Iran-Contra episode and how it affects the Colombian civil war today. But he disrupts his work with a highly personalized narrative that constantly interrupts his argument and undercuts his credibility with errors in fact, overstatements, and uncritical readings of limited sources. The result is a riff rather than a rumination on an important subject. Absent any other work of similar scope, Cocaine is worth acquiring but with a warning label that it's not all it's cracked up to be. Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Here are two great books on two 'illegal' drugs. Educate yourself.
Cannabis: A History by Martin Booth
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this study, Martin Booth crafts a tale of medical advance, religious enlightenment, political subterfuge, and human rights, of law enforcement and custom officers, cunning smugglers, street pushers, gang warfare, writers, artists, musicians, and happy-go-lucky hippies and potheads." Booth chronicles the fascinating and often mystifying process through which cannabis, a relatively harmless substance, became outlawed throughout the Western world, and the devastating effect such legislation has on the global economy. Above all, he demonstrates how the case for decriminalization remains one of the twenty-first century's hottest topics.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Booth, author of a sweeping history of opium, now offers a global history of cannabis, especially its production and uses as hashish and marijuana. In doing so, he tracks the plant's biological, pharmaceutical, medicinal, religious, cultural, literary, social, and regulatory history from ancient China and India, through the Middle East and Africa, into Europe and the Americas, and finally to middle-class American suburbs, Amsterdam coffee shops, and recording studios everywhere today. Cannabis has proved a versatile and variable plant, spreading on the trade winds and through commerce, conquest, and countercultures. Booth does much to debunk the many myths surrounding cannabis and the onus as a supposed stimulant for violent, antisocial, Communist, and other disruptive behavior with which antidrug forces sought to link it, instead pointing out its often beneficial effects in art, literature, music, and pain relief and its benign effect on human relations. Booth tips his hand for the decriminalization of marijuana but otherwise gives a remarkably "cool" account of a plant that people round the world, to paraphrase the Beatles, had to get into their lives. Get this book instead.--Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An investigation of the culture of hemp, the most widely distributed hallucinogenic on Earth. The cannabis industry is huge, certainly. It is a major crop worldwide, surpassing, for example, logging in British Columbia. It is farmed in basements everywhere. Hemp regularly makes the happy trek from Tangier and Nepal, Kabul and Amsterdam, Jamaica, Bombay and Brooklyn in the forms of marijuana and hashish. Hemp can be used for food, fuel, and fiber, but novelist Booth's (A Very Private Gentleman, Jan. 2004, etc.) wide-ranging report concentrates on the fun many derived from Mary Jane and hash. It can be traced back in the day of our Neolithic forbears, the classical civilizations of Greece, Rome, and China. Indians and Arabs used cannabis in one form or another and the eating or smoking of it blossomed in England and America. Thomas Wedgwood tried it and Louisa May Alcott featured the stuff in a story. It was used, notes Booth, by Satchmo, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Keith Richards, Robert Crumb, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and many, many others, including the fictional Dr. Fu Manchu. Difficulties increased a couple of generations ago with the onslaughts of head federal narc Harry J. Anslinger. The 20th-century war on drugs seems to be a loser, possibly because usage does not seem to be all that harmful. While he doesn't deny some possibly allied ill effects (like crashes involving a stoned "train driver" and a high pilot), Booth tells of the scientific exaggerations repeated by the press without basis: "The war on cannabis is being fought from a concern not for public health or order . . . but for public morality." Before reaching that conclusion, the indefatigable author presents much of theliterature, mythology, horticultural science, pharmacology, political and social history, the uses and misuses of the vegetation so friendly to mankind as balm and analgesic. Along with Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness (2003), this could become a staple at neighborhood head shops. Readable and comprehensive, loaded as fudge: the only hash book you'll ever need.
Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild
FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Last year, Discover selected a biography of a talented but unlikely champion: a racehorse. Seabiscuit charmed readers everywhere and continues to ride bestseller lists in its paperback incarnation. This season we've again made a discovery that readers might, at first glance, think peculiar: an "unauthorized biography" of a powdery white substance. No, not salt, that's been done before. No, not snow -- at least not as it's properly defined. Our unusual choice is Dominic Streatfeild's biography of a substance that continues to enchant many and leaves a wake of casualties wherever it goes -- cocaine.
A London-based documentary film producer, Streatfeild interviewed nearly 150 subjects to assemble his compendium, including scientists, traffickers, academics, crackheads, and customs and drug enforcement agents. While others have tackled various aspects of drug use and the role cocaine has played in the growth of cartels and crime rings, no one has previously explored cocaine and its history so comprehensively or engagingly. From Freud and Conan Doyle to Richard Pryor and Pablo Escobar, Streatfeild has drawn a skilled and controversial portrait of a substance whose botanical origins reach back 40 centuries to the pre-Incan tribes who first discovered it. On the cocaine trail, in a voice wholly his own, Streatfeild details the evolution of cocaine use and addiction, the rise of crack and crack-related violence, and more. Unafraid to tackle stereotypes, Streatfeild's history is sure to raise some hackles. But then, would you expect anything else on a subject that has crossed so many different lines? (Summer 2002 Selection)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
On May 16, 1499, Amerigo Vespucci set sail for the New World. Three months later, having navigated his way along the coastline of Brazil, he washed up on an idyllic desert island fifteen leagues from the mainland. There he was appalled to discover a tribe of hideous Indians, their mouths stuffed full of leaves "like beasts." The leaves were coca, the source of the drug cocaine.
Five hundred years later, the effects of the discovery are still felt. In 1999, South America produced 613,400 tons of coca, with a potential yield of 765 tons of cocaine. Last year a United Nations report estimated that the global cocaine trade generated $92 billion per year - $20 billion more than the combined revenues of Microsoft, Kellogg's, and McDonald's.
SYNOPSIS
Over the course of two years, London-based documentary film maker and writer Streatfeild interviewed some 150 traffickers, scientists, academics, journalists, officials of the US customs and drug agencies; he talked to people in the US, Bolivia, Columbia, and Peru. His book is an engaging account of the drugs' history and ongoing impact. This is a paperbound reprint of a 2001 book. Distributed in the US by Palgrave. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Boil off Streatfeild's informal tone a mix of self-deprecation and gonzo-journalist swagger and what's left is a fascinating and richly detailed story of the world's most notorious drug and an illicit $92-billion-a-year industry. Streatfeild, a British documentary film producer, visits its every outpost, from Bronx crack houses and Amazonian coca plantations to Bolivian prisons and the compounds of South American drug lords. He launches the story with a history of the coca leaf and its prominent place in both ancient and contemporary consciousness, tackling race, poverty, class, violence, mythology and xenophobia as seen through the prism of cocaine. There are countless strands to the story, and Streatfeild follows every one: the rise of the Colombian cartels, government collusion with traffickers, the crack phenomenon, media hype, the U.S. war on drugs and the legalization debate. The author lights up the myriad figures who feature in cocaine's history: Columbus, Freud, Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noriega, George Jung, even Richard Pryor and the late basketball star Len Bias. He picks the brains of botanists and economists, lawmen and guerrillas, addicts and kingpins, and travels extensively throughout the Americas. The main drawback: Streatfeild's insistence that the reader be privy to superfluous research details such as fizzled leads, false starts, wrong turns and boring authors. In the end, though, Streatfeild delivers a straight tale about a world where nothing is as it seems. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Originally published in Great Britain in 2001, this book by documentary film producer Streatfeild offers a fast but uneven ride through the history of cocaine. Streatfeild combines interviews with drug dealers, users, scientists, law officers, and others involved in the commerce and culture of cocaine with readings of various popular and scientific accounts. He tracks the adaptations and spread of cocaine from its earliest religious and medicinal uses among people in the Andes to its modern incarnations as both part of the "hip" culture and as a supposed cause of criminality in the form of "crack cocaine." Streatfeild also shows how much cocaine figured in American policy in Panama, Mexico, and the Iran-Contra episode and how it affects the Colombian civil war today. But he disrupts his work with a highly personalized narrative that constantly interrupts his argument and undercuts his credibility with errors in fact, overstatements, and uncritical readings of limited sources. The result is a riff rather than a rumination on an important subject. Absent any other work of similar scope, Cocaine is worth acquiring but with a warning label that it's not all it's cracked up to be. Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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