Drug Crazy Essay

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Political Science Drug Crazy Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, by Mike Gray, is a concise, readable, and historically accurate book revealing the violence, corruption and chaos that characterizes America’s longest-running war. The book traces the history of our drug crusade starting in 1901, and dramatically recreates eight decades of ongoing and escalating drug warfare. Throughout the book Gray systematically tells a story, awakens awareness through hard facts, and integrates concerns. These concerns provide the book with resounding themes of which the pain and clarity can only be described as a good knocking over the head of paperbound words. Firstly, why do people use drugs, who is providing them, and why? Secondly, has the affair with hard drugs corrupted the legal system? Is skin color and ethnicity a factor in our judging? Lastly, will America ever find a successful solution to its nation’s drug problem? The book begins in 1995 during a stake-out on the streets of Chicago where detective Frank Goff is sitting in a police cruiser. He is waiting to see a drug deal. The people he sees are young teenagers, mothers, and sad souls starving for their fix. It was difficult to find the source of the deal; the ones handling the drug were never the ones behind the scene. Goff sat a distance back and watched a child outside a school. The child was the middleman, and his customer was arriving. The sad truth was revealed when the buyer was not a scraggly man, or a husky brood- it was a woman. The woman had a baby, and she was there to buy cocaine from a child on the street. Since the early 1900s the streets of Chicago have been run by bootleggers and dealers. The United States is familiar with infamous mobs such as Al Capone and the Obanion gang; today we know of them as the Latin Kings or the Gangster Disciples. Frank Goff
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