The crack cocaine years: from deviant globalization to the 'get money' culture of late twentieth-century America.

Discusses how cocaine and crack affect the mind and body and presents a brief history of cocaine use.

This book provides information on the dangers of cocaine and crack cocaine, a stimulant drug that affects the central nervous system. Use of the drug can result in sudden death, even upon first time use. Within this book, readers will learn about the long and short-term effects of cocaine and crack cocaine which include physical addiction, emotional addiction, expense, health problems, arrest for drug possession, and for other drug-related crime and overdose. Personal stories of teens who used drugs and the realities they faced invite the reader to understand the effects of the drug on a personal level. These stories seamlessly unfold along with advice on how to deal with peer pressure when choosing to say no. Most importantly, there is an entire chapter devoted to getting help. This book is an essential resource and provides concise information about a difficult topic.

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.

Uses real life stories to show that cocaine use can lead to arrests and even death.

Providing insight into drug use from the point of view of female users, this book tells of the complex lives, challenges, and choices of women who use crack cocaine. While popular images of these women present them simply as unreliable individuals, unfit mothers, and women who will do almost anything for crack, Claire Sterk's years of ethnographic research reveal the nature and meaning of crack cocaine use in the larger context of their lives -- including the impact of such issues as gender, class, and race. Focusing on active crack users, Fast Lives compiles information from participant observation, informal conversations, individual interviews, and group discussions. Sterk details the ways in which use affects the lives of these crack users. She captures how these women arrived at their use; how they survive under current circumstances, such as the constant threat of HIV/AIDS and violence; how they combine the multiple social roles of mother and drug user; and how -- as they share their aspirations and expectations for the future -- their stories underscore the effects of poverty, sexism, and racism on their lives. Many of these women recognize their own responsibility for ensuring positive change. Sterk's book, which includes an argument for a harm reduction approach, reminds us that their strength and courage will too often be futile without social policies that are realistic and appropriate for women. Fast Lives will engage readers interested in social problems as well as students of cultural anthropology, sociology, criminology, public health, ethnography, substance abuse, and women's health.

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of “simply” possessing five grams of crack—the equivalent of a few sugar packets—had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. In this highly original work, Dimitri A. Bogazianos draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America’s War on Drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, Bogazianos shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the “rap game” and the “crack game." He argues that the symbolism of crack in rap’s stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine—although a drug long in decline—has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the U.S. today.

This book presents an historical overview of heroin use in the USA, as well as articles by experts in the field which focus on current developments and emerging trends in prevention, treatment, distribution and consumption. Filling a void in the literature on what is known about the `new' heroin users, this volume also updates the reader on the status of ageing heroin-addicted populations who initiated use of the drug prior to the `age of cocaine'.

A team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack cocaine problem in America to date. Helps readers understand why the United States has the most repressive, expensive, yet least effective drug policy in the Western world.

Based on ethnographic research of street crack cocaine users, this book unpacks the myths and stigma of their drug use and their fragile position in society in an effort to better understand them.