Drug Crazy - Mike Gray

Drug Crazy

How We Got INTO THIS MESS & How We Can GET OUT

- Mike Gray

Random House, New York, 1998

Drug Crazy : How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out

By erecting an artificial barrier between alcohol producers and consumers, the government had created a potential bonanza that can only be likened to the Gold Rush.

As historian Andrew Sinclair put it, “National prohibition transferred $2 billion a year from the hands of brewers, distillers, and shareholders to the hands of murderers, crooks, and illiterates.”


“We had not realized that the moment restrictive legislation made these drugs difficult to secure legitimately, the drugs would also be made profitable to illicit traffickers.”


Since the speakeasy had no liquor license to lose, there was no need to check ID.


In a vote they didn’t bother to record, on a matter of little interest, a handful of congressmen forwarded a bill that would one day help fill the nation’s prisons to the roof beams.


The drug agency, responding instantly to this shift in the wind, cut the number of junkies to 150,000 in the next report, and the administration was able to take credit for the overnight cure of some 400,000 addicts.


It would be tough to come up with a better system for teaching hatred of the law.


Peruvian officials estimated they were losing half a million acres of rain forest a year to these ad hoc plantations.


After a seventy-year battle against illegal narcotics, it was now possible to walk out the front door of the White House and do a drug deal across the street.


If the drug lords are spending tens of millions a week on their friends in government south of the border, how much are they spending in the North?


Lee Brown, first drug czar of the Clinton administration, was speaking to a Los Angeles town hall meeting about the disaster in Holland when a gentleman in the audience stood up and introduced himself as the consul general of the Netherlands and politely refuted everything Brown had just said.


The hardest drug to get say the kids, is not reefer, but alcohol.


There are no beer pushers hanging around the playground.  You can’t make a living at it.


Prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act, if people wanted drugs they at least had to go to the drugstore.  Now they can get anything they want from the neighbor’s kid.


Drug Crazy : How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out