Sources
In chapter 1, the scene of the chase and arrest of Leonard Pickard was pieced together from interviews with and letters from Pickard; interviews with a lead DEA agent on the case, Carl Nichols; and court testimony.
I rely on drug statistics throughout the book, many of them dependent on the honesty of drug users, which makes them necessarily suspect. But they should be just as suspect today as they were in 1975, which should allow the numbers to be used, at the very least, to describe trends. I most heavily used two surveys: the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey. The former I often refer to in shorthand as “a federal survey,” because it’s conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The latter I often refer to as “the Michigan survey”; it has questioned middle- and high-school students since 1975, and shortly after its inception, it expanded its scope to include older people, too.
I also refer to a reliable survey conducted by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which measures the number of times a drug is mentioned by patients admitted to emergency rooms. Note that a drug doesn’t need to have caused the trip to the hospital to be included in the survey; the patient merely had to have used it at some recent time before the injury. The global survey on drug use I reference in chapter 1 was conducted in 2008 by the World Health Organization. In helping me parse and understand these piles of numbers, I’m grateful to Peter Reuter and Lloyd Johnston, two of the most knowledgeable academics studying drug trends. Johnston has been running the Michigan survey for decades and knows the numbers cold. [***AU: The Torgoff book Can’t Find My Way Home is first mentioned in chapter 1. You refer to it in the context of chapter 5, but perhaps it should be mentioned here as well.]
In chapter 2, the story of the founding of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union comes from the group’s own literature, bolstered by contemporaneous news accounts. Historian David Musto’s collection, Drugs in America: A Documentary History, compiles primary sources stretching back to the European discovery of the continent; it was of invaluable use in researching the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Two other works of research were also useful to both chapters 2 and 3: David Courtwright’s Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940 (1982) and Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (2002). My opium-importation statistics, for example, come from Dark Paradise. The accounts of New York City police commissioner Theodore Bingham and other law enforcement officers’ reaction to drugs in the early twentieth century also come from Courtwright, as do the reports by two Chicago doctors who studied more than five thousand narcotics addicts between 1904 and 1924. Much of the rest of the history is drawn from the Congressional Record or contemporaneous news reports. The cannabis-extract numbers come from congressional testimony.
Angela Valdez, a friend who writes—or did write, depending what the future holds for alternative journalism—for the Washington City Paper, helped with the research for chapter 4. She won a 2007 AltWeekly Award for media criticism of flawed meth reporting, so there are few reporters out there who could have been a bigger help.
The numbers on Washington, D.C.’s and the nation’s number of heroin addicts in the late sixties and early seventies, along with the story of President Richard Nixon’s attempts at implementing treatment programs, come from Michael Massing’s book The Fix (2000). The DEA’s budget and numbers of agents employed throughout its history are available on the Department of Justice’s Web site, as are the agency’s estimates of drug imports, seizures, prices, and purity cited in chapter 5.
Elsewhere in chapter 5, the story of Mountain Girl’s position as a gourmet-pot pioneer and the tale of the FBI’s attempt to set up Jerry Brown using Timothy Leary’s wife both come from Martin Torgoff’s 2004 book Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000. The data about Miami’s coke-boom economy and customs seizures come from Time magazine as well as other contemporaneous reports mentioned in the chapter. The congressional testimony of the Medellín cartel’s top accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, appeared in 1999 in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. The background on club owner Peter Gatien comes from Frank Owen’s Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture (2003). The murder and crime figures come from the Department of Justice.