Cocaine is one of those drugs that waxes and wanes in popularity among teens but never really goes away. New research indicates that cocaine is particularly harmful to young and still developing brains. This, coupled with the many other harmful physical and emotional repercussions of even casual cocaine use, make it all the more important to get the message across that this is one very dangerous and destructive drug. That is exactly what this text achieves, using vivid real-life vignettes, the latest scientific research, and law enforcement statistics and reports from the frontlines of policing. Any teen who reads this will be sobered by what he or she confronts here, and, hopefully, scared completely straight.
Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.
Cocaine is one of those drugs that waxes and wanes in popularity among teens but never really goes away. New research indicates that cocaine is particularly harmful to young and still developing brains. This, coupled with the many other harmful physical and emotional repercussions of even casual cocaine use, make it all the more important to get the message across that this is one very dangerous and destructive drug. That is exactly what this text achieves, using vivid real-life vignettes, the latest scientific research, and law enforcement statistics and reports from the frontlines of policing. Any teen who reads this will be sobered by what he or she confronts here, and, hopefully, scared completely straight.
Cocaine has been on the American scene for more than a century. This book traces cocaine's long history and demystifies its effects, focusing on psychological and biochemical evidence. A fascinating scientific journey, COCAINE details how the drug activates the human brain and hooks its users. The book also examines current approaches to the drug problem, including socio-economic factors.
Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine. Gootenberg traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well--for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers. Andean Cocaine proves indispensable to understanding one of the most vexing social dilemmas of the late twentieth-century Americas: the American cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and, in its wake, the seemingly endless U.S. drug war in the Andes.
