make sure we have a more rational system. government can be a force for good and it has been a force for good and i tried to point* out how congress often does the right thing that you do not hear about as opposed to hearing about the negative side. . .

how do we make the idea and author taught or reading sound less boring and the issue is so few of us have the time in the day to piece this together succinctly and brilliantly and watching ryan talk about something as boring as government policy but how it represented something on a map, a shift how drugs move from this country and with the related to in terms of what we need and what we hughes, we desire and how we try to get it is a truly brilliant thing. it does change the way you view the country and the geography and how we deal with people. so this is an honor to mind. it's an important book and necessary. "this is your country on drugs" is something everybody can read so there's not a reason to try

not to read it and without further ado, join me in welcoming ryan grim. [applause] -- before, thanks, alex, that was kind. and thank you to ever believe it came to light. i appreciate this. this book gets complex at times the start of a very simply about eight years ago i realized i hadn't seen lsd and probably three years. i started looking for it. i started asking friends who go to fish shows or burning man or rainbow gathering, places where you really would expect to find lsd just as much as you would expect to find your walking into a bar and they kept reporting back to me know, i haven't seen it. and the years went on and it

became something that was entirely unexpected. how can this drug that had been such a prominent part of our culture be on available to 22-years-old hippies all of a sudden? and so that's what in the up launching this book and it also -- i will start right here with the disappearance of lsd. so i went to see a professor in my department, peter reuter, one of the most well-respected drug researchers in the nation. acid is gone, i told him. how did you come to this theory, he asked. i can't find it, i said, and none of my friends can either. i knew i sounded like a fool but that's all i have. that's not how we do things in this field, he said. drug availability goes in cycles. it's not a trend, that is how it is. he pointed to a book behind me. hand me that. he opened the 2002 monitoring

the future report published by the university of michigan and tracks drugs used by teams. as you will see comegys said, running his fingers across the lsd table, use has been over the last -- he paused and looked up and said, looking at the data for high school seniors, lsd use is at a historic low, 3.5%. he then continued with his lector telling me about supply and demand in peaks and values and he was certain the member for acid would rise in 2003 survey. drugs cycles are widely presumed to be the result of a combination of cultural shifts and effectiveness of drug interdiction but they are generally not well understood. supply and demand, however, and arguably play a larger role. when the drug becomes scarce it is increased enticing producers and distributors to invest more heavily which increases supply, writer explained. i told him i wasn't so sure. they're simply was no acid out there and hadn't been for several years. i rambled on about the end of

the grateful dead and collapse of giant raves. he wasn't moved. check the 2003 numbers, he said. they may be on line buy now. if levels remain the same then you've got something. the to sell some three numbers -- i checked the years, it was 1.9%. nearly 50% drop. i checked a few other sources. evidence about said equine could be found practically everywhere. in the following statistics an ongoing federal survey drug use, in a number of emergency room cases involving the drug, in a huge dropoff a federal arrest for lsd i took the numbers back to reuter. this isn't a trend, he said. this is an event. like all drugs, acid is a bellwether of american society. its effect on our cultures in the 60's and 70's was a measurable and its disappearance in the early years of the 21st century was limited to the united states. cultural commentators to look for trends and unemployment numbers, presidential approval ratings or housing and car purchases are missing something

fundamental if they don't consider statistics on drug use. little tells more about the state of america than what americans are doing to get high. life in the united states of course a similar in many ways to live anywhere in the developed world. but our nation diverges sharply from the rest of the world in a few crucial ways. americans work hard. 135 hours a year more than the average briton, 240 hours more than the typical french worker and 370 hours, nine weeks, more than the average german. we also play hard. a global survey released in 2008 found americans are more than twice as likely to smoke pot as europeans. 42% of americans have puffed at one point, citizens from various nations were all under 20. we are also four times as likely as spaniards to have done coke and roughly ten times more likely than the rest of europe. quote, we are just a different kind of country, said the u.s. drugs are spokesman tom riley when asked about the survey. quote, we have how your drug use

rates, higher crime, many things that with a free and mobile society. different, indeed. there may be no people on earth with a more twisted complex relationship to drugs. much of our preconceived self-image turns out to be wrong. libertine continental's have nothing of us in terms of drug use and american piety has presented us from indulging in fact sometimes encouraged it. much of our conventional wisdom about american drug use that the puritans and members of our founding generation were teetotalers or mild drinkers, the drug trade is dominated by criminal organizations such as the mafia and the bloods, that crack use declined significantly since the 80's turns out to be wrong, too. if there is one certainty about american drug use, it is this, we are always looking for a better way to feed our appetite for getting high. for something cheaper, faster, less addictive or more powerful. drug can feed themselves as word spread about the amazing new high that is safe and not

addictive thing we discovered otherwise and go searching for the next great high. we circled back to the original drug for getting why we quit in the first place. so what happened to acid? that was -- i originally wrote about this in 2004, and i had a few theories, but the purpose of the book was to actually go out and find out what -- what happened to lsd. i came up with four theories, and one of the point of this book is that there is no one factor that leads to a drug trend either going on or going down. it's always a coincidence of a variety of different factors happening uniquely in that time period. so the first thing and most important thing in this case was an arrest. there was a kansas, there was a kansas missile silo that was acting as the central production facility for almost all of the lsd all across the country.

that was taken down in november of 2000. and the supply was in the pipeline, so that explains why by the end of 2000 or so you stop seeing -- and of 2001 to stop seeing it. number two, the delivery system was disrupted. in the mid-90s, grateful dead stop touring. in 2000, fish took a break. i found the department of justice field report that showed that when the grateful dead would come through a city, availability of psychedelic drugs in that area would increase over the next two to three months. everybody -- think of it as like a psychedelic postal service that advertising when it's coming to town. which brings us to the third thing, which is the collapse of try and raise. as people who were over 30 here, i see a couple of you, might remember in the nineties there was this explosion of field

parties, where house parties, where you would have thousands and thousands of kids, as young as 14 sometimes up into their twenties, who would meet in these long sanctioned parties and the acid and other psychedelic drugs were everywhere so the kids would go to the parking lot of the grateful dead or fish show even if they didn't go to the show they would get a couple sheets of acid, take it to the array of and acid is not the kind of drug that you need to buy every weekend or every day or 40 times a day like most other drugs. you're not going to go down to the street corner and say hey, buddy, you holding any acid? you're going to go where you know it is and people knew where it was. some people had those three things. now, why didn't somebody stepped into the breach? part of it, and this brings us to the fourth thing, part of it is that the production of lsd is extremely difficult, and it's also not very profitable.

if you're going to be an illegal drug dealer and you are in it for the money, you're going to do something that has the least amount of risk and most amount of profit. because we always are stricter, lsd will land you in prison possibly the rest of your life. the guy dustin kansas currently serving two consecutive life sentences. and he is into,, so the second -- i've been corresponding with him for five years -- the second life sentence really bothers him. it really does. [laughter] the first one bothers him a lot, too, of course. but so, you had to be in the business almost as a charitable gesture because you're not making a lot of money because it is not a commodity that moves while. it was -- it's five bucks for a hit and the kind of thing after you do it, you know, most people don't want to touch it again for months on end and maybe the rest of their life. they say that's good enough for

me. i've been out there. i don't need to see that again. think about it compared to say cocaine or ecstasy, drugs either easier to get or with ecstasy easier to make. you can get $25 for uphill of ecstasy, and when the person is finished that they are very likely to be like hey, you know what, i might have another one. they can blow through hundreds of dollars in a weekend where as that is certainly not the case with lsd so there is little incentive to get into it but it also became more difficult for this strange geopolitical reason to get the precursor. throughout the 80's and 90's according to psychodelic community people i spoke one of the key pipelines for the precursor for lsd or dining titrate, was coming from the eastern european soviet bloc, and in the late 80's -- so they

shot this down. so the late 80's when the soviet union collapses it comes back together and it starts flooding -- starts flowing out of eastern europe because it is a completely unregulated capitalistic society and the governments are not going in and checking what kind of chemicals these factories are making and certainly they don't care. they are making some precursor of the united states doesn't want shipped in. that doesn't matter. it was only until the u.n. came together with this global treaty and 99 the day finally started shipping the was down. and there are some press reports that people sent me that show me that this r colton terrorist group in japan that let off some stink bomb in the subway also was involved in lsd and was proved that lsd had russian origins.

so the supply was cut off in the late nineties. so you have a collection of factors working together, and it almost vanishes. so i wanted to look at well, is that the first time that's happened in american society, and also in american history? and what happens to the people who use two or still have an appetite, still have a demand for the drug what are they doing instead? so, i also wanted to make this a good little bit of a different drug book. most drug books start in about 1965 and they've run through american history sort of like it is a vh1 rockumentary. there's the rise in the 60's, everything is great, the party is raging in the 70's. in the 80's things get a little out of control, then they go to aa and then there's wisdom, maturity, recovery and the book will have an interview with jerry garcia or hunter thompson or something like that and that's the picture that you get

of american drug use. i wanted to stretch it further back and figure out what real people were doing. not that jerry garcia is not a real guy that people other than him have been doing. so, one of the most surprising things to me is what i found about the relationship between the temperance movement in the 19th century and the rise of opium smoking and other forms of opium throughout the 1830's so we move to that. at the time, and we are talking 1830's, at the time there was little research on exploring the relationship between opium use and drinking but there was at least one noteworthy study coming in 1870 to look at the opium by the massachusetts state board of health. the reason for the dramatic upswing had concluded wasn't the chinese or the civil war, it was the temperance movement. this unintended consequence of the call for sobriety wasn't

unique to the united states, the board found. quote, it is a significant fact both in england and this country the total abstinence movement was almost immediately followed by an increased consumption of opium. the study suggested easy accessibility to the job throughout pharmacies was part of the reason for the increase but many other sources existed as well. one official referred to as a state say your reported to the board opium has been recently made from white poppy cultivated for the purpose in vermont, new hampshire and connecticut. the annual production been estimated by hundreds of pounds and this has generally been absorbed in the communities where it is made. it has also been brought here from florida and louisiana while comparatively large quantities are regularly sent east from california and arizona where its cultivation is becoming an important branch of industry. 10 acres of poppies being set to yield an arizona, 1200 pounds of opium. although this description of a

thriving domestic opium problem might not sound surprising today, the board's characterization of the crops consumers certainly doesn't. quote from the opium habit is especially common among them in effect repasses it asserts, or to act to live regardless of all hygienic laws. it puts some of the blame for such lower class use on doctors as we still do today, who are, quote, in no small measure responsible for the moral as well as physical welfare of their patience and shouldn't be allowed to get away with the, quote, in judicious and often unnecessary prescription of opium. america's better have made up, quote, so large a proportion of opium takers the study suggests because women were, quote, doomed often to a life of disappointment of the physical and mental inaction and the smaller and more remote towns not on frequently to under seclusion. the, quote, most important cause of opium taking was the simple desire for stimulation. and urged other to satisfy by alcohol consumption. opium, the report noted, was

both more available and more socially acceptable than alcohol. the narcotic, quote come can be procured and taken without endangering reputation for sobriety. one town mentioned it was thought more genteel than alcohol. the report went on to say that it was, quote, between the wing on to say it was between 1840 and 1850 soon after teetotalism had become a fixed fact hour own importation of opium swelled, citing a rise of 350%. in england, one doctor noted opium shooting has become prevalent especially since the use of alcoholic drinks has been to such great extent abandoned under the influence of the fashion introduced by a total abstinence societies. the board also found, quote, curious and interesting as wine drinking advanced in turkey, opium retreated. as always in america, the limit of what exactly is moral behavior depends on what the meaning is. by following their version of god's code to the letter teetotaling americans of the 19th century freely violated its

spirit. and we see this than pretty much all throughout american history. the massachusetts board of health put it perfectly the desire for stimulation. that's what was driving people to use opium. one drug becomes a stigmatized, or less available, but the desire to get high or to get any brigade on some type of something doesn't go away. so, americans go searching for something else if they can't find either what is acceptable or what is available. if you look at the late 70's, the exact thing happens again with the decline of marijuana and lies of cocaine. we are making no excuses for drugs. hard, soft or otherwise, pronounced ronald reagan on june 24, 1982. a veteran of many pitched pacing contests with the counterculture while governor of california in the late 60's he was eager to

take it on again when he became president. drugs are bad and we are going after them as i've said before, we are taking on the surrender flags and running up the battle flag. we're going to win the war on drugs. regan redoubled efforts and curbing imports for the immelt jul straub policy and brought about mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. in 1980 the fbi uniform crime report listed to within 100,000 arrests for heroin and cocaine tabulated together. by 1989 the figure jumped to more than 700,000. but the first battle creek and would fight in the war was against marijuana, which required leading siege to the once ignored basic liberal resistance northern california. his campaign against marijuana production, camp, began in the harvest season of 1983. u-2 spy planes and military copters flight over the golden state looking for grain crops. but the fall, corn and wheat and soybeans turned brown making cannabis easy to spot from the

sky. the d.a. reported seizing 64,000 plants with an estimated value of $130 million. federal law enforcement or to the streets chanting war on drugs, war on drugs. the opposition printed bumper stickers demanding u.s. out of humboldt county. the 1984 cult was three times larger. nationally, pot plants seizures rose from 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million in 1987 and announced that rivals the government's previous estimate of the entire domestic crop. reagan even began to go after, quote college we'd come a wild variety of hemp that has no potential to get a user high. the first year the white house kept the effort to ditch the eradication it claimed to approve about 9 million plants. that number was up to more than 120 million by 1989 and reached i serious about this, half a billion in 2001.

unsurprisingly, such sustained effort drove up the price of marijuana. the d.a. closely tracks drug prices and the purity of the although it doesn't make the data available publicly it did most recently in 2004 and the numbers include a startling if misunderstood observation. quote, the marijuana price trends are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time, the report reads. one of the price of power, herron and to a lesser extent crack or falling during the 1980's, the average price of marijuana generally rose. and eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 and in $2,002 was going for $25. est. roughly the same in 1982. by 86 it was at $53, and it hit a high of $62.91. a 50% rise over ten years. coke meanwhile became much more affordable. the cost nearly $600 a gram in '82. as reconstructed resources toward the pot battle coke's

price began to tumble. by 80 negative was down to $200 a gram cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last coke a binge earlier. at the same time average pay levels nearly doubled. clearly the price trends are highly correlated the correlation is in negative one. in the 80's price increases in their on drove the demand to other drugs. the war on drugs hard, soft or otherwise, helped persuade paul smokers to put down the ball in and pick up the needle. i began seeking any job trend is the result of a bunch of different colin factors. so, riggins's war of marijuana can't be said to be the sole cause for the wives of cocaine pops response for bringing cocaine into america in the 80's, and i said not quite, but

certainly he was investing billions of dollars of resources going after marijuana which drove, and that does help to drive people towards the tropics where the prices are going down. the explicit policy of the dea is to influence the price of drugs. they are not trying to get rid of drugs to their stated goal is to increase the price of drugs which they say will then reduce demand. so by their own theory the impact of their policy in the late 70's and most especially in the early 80's coming after marijuana drove people towards cocaine. cocaine also fit with the 80's times and that's another theme of the but then you can tell of about america by what people are giving to get high and you have these cultural moments and moods that mesh and a drug comes in and it's the appropriate one for

the time. so the 80's were a good example of that so let me read a little bit of that. and part of the reason is i argue in the pitch before this the collapse of the manufacturing economy. the collapse of american manufacturing left more than a psychic need, however. it also left a vacuum in the economy which the non-good producing service industry rushed to fill. according to a 1992 "new york times" story, quote, there were more jobs created in new york city than the 1980's overwhelmingly high skilled high-paying there are people in buffalo, the state's largest city. we became a nation of middle managers of bankers and bureaucrats, of adjustors, counters and waitpersons and drug dealers. from the importer to the distributor to the guy on the corner. peter reuter who helped me with

my article has made a career out of examining economics of the local businesses. one of his most startling observations is the coke trade indeed in the entire drug trade is essentially a service industry because the street price of a dose of cocaine is many times higher than the cost of nearly manufacturing. as with any detail good some of the excess covers the seller's profit. some covers what accountants call transportation costs which much more goes to the disking product seizure and employee unrest the principal perils of providing an illegal service. those panels become less significant the more the south florida coast industry became entrenched as cocaine's price fell through the decade it became available to consumers of more moderate means. it trickled down so to speak spreading across the country in both powder and crack form. during its high-priced haiti, however, coke was known as a professional drug. employees of the legal service industry benefited from this

product of the illegal service industry as they worked long hours in their sector of the economy. it's exclusivity but with awkwardly mobile and the severely impoverished dreamed of being part of. on and plowman had claimed in the late 70's as plants shut down and american cities crumbled. stagflation and wages and job growth were falling oil prices were rising. a phenomenon some economists had thought impossible. by the close of the decade inflation was approaching 15% and interest rates had risen above 20%. to lasso the peace reagan tightened monetary policy cutting the money supply intentionally driving the country into recession. the reagan recession as it became known hit hard in the summer of 1981 and persisted the next year and a half. the president's approval rating bottomed out and in the 1982 midterm elections democrats picked up more than two dozen congressional seats.

america was no longer a place where things were made. it was a place where things were shuffled or not. cocaine slotted nicely into the new economy. the reagan recession affected urban blacks and latinos and american cities a living. the economy needed to pick me up selling coke provided. the banking industry had ending up by the recession and was glad to have the influx of capital brought by the cocaine business. the economists reported 44 miami banks were given international charters in 1982 compared to the tannin 1978. another 36 foreign banks opened branches in miami during the period. at least 40 banks refuse to report cash deposits of more than $10,000 as required by law throughout the 70's and in the 80's. and i least four banks authorities estimated were bought and controlled by drug dealers. as the trade spread across the country, dealers found still

other banks eager to deal in cocaine cash. much of the money that went to farm producers ended up in the american economy through the panamanian branches of u.s. banks. by the late 80's a few banks had begun to come under suspicion as money laundering became too blatant. but the penalties were laughably small even when the banks did get caught the often still benefit from the transaction. in beverly hills branch of the american express bank was caught laundering $150 million belonging to an operator of an uproarious cartel with close connections to the than mexican government. in a 1994 congressional hearing, chairman henry gonzalez, texas democrat, noted that the 950,000-dollar fine, less than 1% of the laundered cash meant the bank still profited from the exchange. citibank, which since the 1950's had been the most active u.s. financial institution in mexico was a perfect position when cocaine trafficking moved from the caribbean west.

mexican playboy raul was discovered to have laundered hundreds of millions to pursue the bank. his brother, president carlos, a prominent ally in the u.s. drug war was estimated to make some 7 billion himself. and to handle half years of investigation beginning in 1986 senator john kerry's committee looking at links between the cia and contras turned up ties between drug cartels and banking industry. one hearing and walt the cartel's top accountant, ramon, who had been busted laundering billions through the new york based bank of boston. a committee member suggested he, quote, must be very clever to have cleaned up so much, to have cleaned up so much cash. bill, first boston paid the fine of $25,000, during 42 years, he responded, who do you think is clever? so i don't know how our time is but if anybody has questions, i found at these readings there often are a lot of them.

>> you talked earlier about a precursor from russia and i didn't understand what you meant by precursor. >> lsd basically comes from morning glory seeds, but the morning glory seeds are turned into a precursor of the call e.t.. without this is effectively impossible -- right, to make lsd, and i don't know of anybody that can on an industrial level that can be remotely profitable in the morning glory seeds. if you're not doing that in a trailer or whatever like missile silo that he might be operating out of, you need this titrate which makes lsd a vulnerable child because if you can find the titrate producers and shut them down then you can do what is very hard to do in the drug world which is to use an

enforcement mechanism to reduce supply. because it is so hard to make it and underground it makes that much more vulnerable. it is similar to cui leads. these require a certain precursor that a bunch of german companies were making and it took the u.s. like ten years to persuade them to shut down and when they shut down that was it. they are not that much fun or else somebody would have figured out how to do it. they must not be that radically different than some other kind of donner you can get. right. i don't want to spoil the book, but the chinese have gotten into the psychedelic business in recent years and not only can you find the titrate or lsd. you can find all of these drugs

which rose after lsd disappeared they are called research chemicals. the existed before lsd but the internet and disappearance of acid increased the use of these things called research chemicals. the reason they are called research chemicals is that it's difficult to outlaw a chemical substance. so what the government has to do is say this kunkel substance -- chemical substances illegal if it is used for recreational purposes, if it is used for a good time. so in other words, if you are making a drug that is for a mood disorder or for the flu or whatever else and you can do research but if the purpose is for a good time than it is illegal because lsd, and you can tweak the molecular structure of it and make a psychedelic drug

that does something slightly different. it might last a little longer, it might be less or more powerful, it might give you a different kind of trip. now there is a guy out in california who has been doing this for decades, alexander shelepin, and he -- if you look at the scheduled one list of drugs which is the most illegal drugs it is like the who's who of drugs that he's created. what he does is he works with the molecules of some psychedelic and then he figures out a way to make it slightly different. and he publishes his results online and then he never does it again. the d.a. then sees he's published and make that one illegal. the way that he gets away with it is he says i am making a chemical substance that has never existed before in the world. i don't know that is going to be psychedelic. it might be. it might not be. and so he says of himself and it

turns out it is a psychedelic. sometimes it is total garbage. he writes about it and that's a. he still has not been posted. and he won't be because it would be a tough case to make. >> have you seen any studies incurring the trucks today with that of ten, 20, 30 years ago? >> yeah, he asked about the drug use today compared to ten, 20, 30 years ago and there are a couple of good surveys. there's one that's conducted by the university of michigan that goes back to 75 that it started out tracking high schoolers, and it's followed a lot of the high schoolers and now it attracts people of all ages and another one is the national survey on drug use and health which is the federal survey. the problem with that one is they changed the name. it used to be something like

this survey on drug abuse and they didn't like the name of that. they thought it was persuading people to give negative answers. in a survey people are already persuaded to give because it is the federal government coming to the door and asking if you do with illegal drugs. so you always have to adjust for the factor in these surveys. but might working theory in the book was that you do have to adjust for the factor so you can't really take these surveys as good absolute numbers by you can take them as far as trends are concerned and unless someone can argue -- and it's possible to make the argument someone was lying more, people were lying more in 1978 and today. that might be possible but in general, people have probably lied about the same the last 30 years or so. so the numbers were much higher

in the mid 70's. you see a decline starting around 79 drug use comes down through the 80's when we are waging -- it's one of the many ironies of american drug history when we are fiercely waging the drug war at a time drugs were receding so you see the numbers coming down through the 80's and then and 91 you see what some people call a relapse until about in 2000 and then back down again. but never in the mid nineties did reach the mid-70s. that is still the peak of drug use if you don't count alcohol. >> given the current economy and the ties you said between drug use and the economy and culture what is your ha to pick for 2010 frogs? [laughter] my day job is a reporter for the huffingtonpost.com and the story that i was working on today is

about the 2010 initiative that may or may not happen in california to tax, regulate, legalize marijuana out there. i am hearing the people behind it are going to go forward with it. there's a lot of debate in the marijuana world if they should do that or not and there are big organizations funded by big donors say in 2010 is in the right time. might be a reactionary period if the economy still stinks and it might be like a 94 time, you don't want a liberal position on the ballot, but the people pushing it are saying it's different with marijuana this time around because if the economy still stinks and if california is on the verge of collapse or biden has collapsed then it's going to be awfully hard for people to say no i would rather not have this

$2 billion in tax revenue over something that is already effectively legal. you can get recommendation for medical marijuana in california -- i heard about this in the book there was one that said in l.a. weekly that said anxiety, insomnia listed three or four other things, etc.. [laughter] so $100 you have a medical marijuana card. so this would tightly regulate and say dispense with this medical marijuana requirement and the estimate is between 1.2 or $2 billion annually which there is a commercial running now the system would be 20,000 teachers salaries in a year. so it is a persuasive argument whether or not it prevails remains to be seen but more

broadly what i learned by studying the history of drug use and policy is that it will come from the states if marijuana does become legalized that is the way it's going to happen. it's not going to come from congress. san francisco was the first place to ever prohibit a drug and was 1878 the past and opium wall where they said you can't run an opium den if you are chinese. they were very explicit about. today we are much more sophisticated and our law making but back then they just wrote right in there. so other states saw other states and cities saw that and passed it and 50 years later use got marijuana becomes illegal. but first had become illegal in most states and most towns and counties. and it will go the same way in reverse i think. the way that medical marijuana start in san francisco in the

early 90's with an initiative there and it went from there to the state level and then went to other states. eventually you will have members of congress who represent a majority of americans where medical marijuana is illegal. that's very soon. if illinois and new york go which could happen very soon then you will have majority of congressional representatives representing medical paul states. and if you look at their voting medical marijuana comes up every year. at present it is more likely to vote for medical marijuana if his state has already approved it rather than his party identification. so it really does come from the bottom of pressure. >> i am curious if you see any correlation between drug use, the types of drugs to stand the point in time when the fcc allowed truck commercials on television. and have you looked at the whole drug commercials on television and how we are being proceeded

with this whole "do this doggett will make you feel better." well, pharmaceutical drug use did go up, pharmaceutical drug abuse has been going up since the early part of the decade. i have read some pretty convincing studies that have argued that's not the reason why it went up and the rise in prescription drug abuse isn't as large as it is made out to be in the press, but like i said throughout my book all these different drug to trends are the variety of different factors and i think that is certainly one, and a lot of the time you don't know until a decade later until you can look back and see everything that was going on at the time and actually have some decent numbers to go by. the most recent numbers like

could get from this book went back to 2006 for the one federal study in 2007 for the other one because they are so slow and analyzing and bringing the data. they are years behind understanding what goes on. now, the other television ad also write about and it is the one parody on the cover here i think it also have an impact on drug use, but lifting it. [laughter] and this is framed by -- actually before i put this on the cover i asked a 22-year-old co-worker, just showed it to him and asked him you know, what is this and he said it's the drug ad. i said how did you know that? you were born and like 1987 or something. he said i don't know. dustin part of our culture. i know that ad.

so i went back and watched while writing this book. it's only a 102nd ad which i hadn't remembered. shows the frying pan, shows the fleeing egg and says this is your brain on drugs and it ends with this contemptuous rhetorical question that says any questions. and they mean it rhetorically like of course you don't have questions. we just explained everything you need to know. this is going to fry your brain. >> [inaudible] -- your family and -- >> goes through the whole question to the kitchen in question and bricks of plates. >> i like the new one where it's like drugs won't do anything, you go down to the basement and the brother is still living there with his family. >> they have gone a complete new 180. this is just a year after they were saying marijuana would make you run over a child on a bicycle if you've seen that ad.

a year later they are sinking it will only make you go down on a couch and you will be a loser. but the broad point was any questions. yes actually i do have questions. what is that, why does it try my brain? how does this work? are some different than others? and so people went searching for answers elsewhere, dr. jury and people like that were happy to provide answers. two things. one when you ask a question if he can wait for them to get over to with a microphone that we it picks things up and also jumping off of tom's point about last week on cnn you mentioned something about through the ease of access being part of the shift in drug use, you know, kids tom cahal versus out in the field, we'd versus pharmaceuticals and i don't know if you can discuss that a little bit as well. >> it is a really obvious point

but one that struck me throughout american history that people do the drugs most available to them and the easiest to get. that and also the drug's most acceptable and so if your policy is to reduce the amount of harm associated with drugs you want to encourage people to not have access to the really lousy drugs that have more access to the ones less harmful. the point alex is talking about goes back to one of the sort of intended or sort of the intended consequences of nafta and this is where we get into the motion put forward there is no such thing the way we implement there is no such thing as drug policy because all of our other policies, economic policy, trade policy, healthcare policy

especially foreign policy trump. whenever drug policy is a concern there is nothing else we feel like dealing with. nafta is a perfect example of this. the clinton administration knew that opening up the border would be a boon to the drug cartels. one of his drug policy officials later called it a deal made in norco have in and he said to his dea and to his drug czar until nafta passes i don't want to hear a peep from you guys and that may or may not be a good thing it's just the fact how drug policy is treated in the united states. it was a very tight vote. he couldn't afford to lose a couple of folks concerned about the increased drug traffic that might come from nafta. i found a department of justice study that found that the biggest increase in overland drug trafficking in the history

of the time they've been mentioning it was the year 1994 nafta went into effect january 1st, 1994. it was a perfect time to be a mexican drug cartel leader. we had just smashed the caribbean triet, the caribbean to miami trade route, and that pushed the coke trade over to mexico. we have also decapitated a couple of colombian drug cartels which decreased their power in relation to the mexican cartels. and at the same time, we had on hard after the domestic neff industry in the 80's which is a bunch of bikers making a form of speed that is much less potent than the one leader made by the mexican car cartel so we pushed meth to mexico, to back. simultaneously for immigration purposes, california starts making its border much more of a hassle to get over.

so, the drug cartels are kind of just pushed by economic and other political forces eastward in texas, arizona, new mexico, which sends them directly out into the midwest. and you know, it's not like the drug cartels are thinking like how can we crack this market. that is what became available to them. that's where they went and then meth becomes available to people in missouri and you have what's going on now. i interviewed a bunch of iowa copps about all the united states passed about sudafed and ephedrine precursors and they said they were extremely happy. it shot down most of the little tiny labs people were making in their trailers.

they liked it because it stopped this terrible problem they have people blogging up their trailers and blowing themselves up and making these toxic waste sites where toddlers were eating the precursors and meth itself. it was a disaster and so when the federal government finally passed a strict pseudo veteran wall the one copps said it was like a light switch, the labs almost disappeared and i said so the meth problem is going down? he was like no, no, our meth has always come from mexico or at least since he had been doing it it was an important thing. this was just a couple of guys cooking up some stuff causing huge problems, you know, health problems for themselves but not really impacting the supply of the drugs. >> we hear often now that kids take the medicine from their

home and go to parties and use whatever it is. is that true? >> i think that this will be bogus. you're talking about what they call pharm parties with a "p-h" and it's great to write about if you are a journalist. the theory is that all these kids need their garrisons that is in cabinet and go to the party and they dump their pill into a big jar and people dip their hands in and pop them. i think for a number of reasons that is crazy. one is that no one in any of the reporting has actually found an example of that happening. you will get treatment people saying it is a problem or you might get cops saying it's a problem, but no reporter has ever found an actual case of actually happening, which ought to be a prerequisite for reporting it is not when it comes to drug reporting.

jack shaffer slate.com has done terrific work on this particular issue and you can actually google his name and pharm parties and find that no one has found this. but logically, too. these parties wouldn't last long for a couple of reasons. one, most kids would bring tick-tocks. you know, like why bring your good stuff if you're just going to dump it into the bowl and then did your hands in there and take something else? or you have no idea what you're going to bring. people would be a daunting. this is not the kind of thing that you could conceal from reporters who would love to write the story of this actually happening. now, i do write about the rise of teen drug use since 2001 in this book and i have kind of an awful here i can't prove it, but i think it makes sense to me and since this is the closest to today it is one of the harder trends to examine, which is

ironic, but around 2000, 2001 joost or to see marijuana use decline and it's something like 30% since 2000. team marijuana use coming down. the same time you have team prescription drug abuse coming up by about 10%. so, what happened? between 1990 and now for 2,000 to cause that? a couple trends working together. one of them is over scheduling i think. starting in the 80's and then accelerating through the 90's, kids have much less free time. free time is something that you need if -- generally if you're going to be smoking marijuana. it's the kind of drug where five kids get together, go out behind a shed, the alley, the woods. one person has it come to pass it around to each other and then -- so if that one kid who has it doesn't have the free time

anymore all five of those kids that day are not going to be doing anything. but more importantly, i feel there has been the role of the internet. when you have did you games, social and working, twitter, facebook, et cetera, et cetera, and kids are coming home from school and instead of hanging out with each other they are hanging out with each other but online, you know, through a computer. [laughter] i'm sure there is a facebook at like johnny cingular joint. but that isn't going to show up on the survey data. laughter comes a kid sitting at home like that might still have this appetite for stimulation as the massachusetts board put it. and they will use the f-ing most braudy in hand and i would be the medicine cap nearby. it makes sense to me, i can't use that comes a that is my take on that part.

anybody? >> i was just wondering what is the president and the government and what is being drawn to end the war on drugs? >> we rhetorically ended when obama took over the drug czar said that he was no longer going to use the phrase war on drugs. which is nice but probably little solace to a lot of the people buying or in prison as a result the most immediate direction that the white house can go is probably in its funding, and its funding decisions. you have it broken down by enforcement and treatment or supply and demand. bush was very much and so was clinton, very heavy into spending money on enforcement, money on the supply side.

that is completely wasteful. there is a rand corporation study from -- that the clinton commissioned the showed it was something like 172 times more wasteful to spend money on the supply side because it is so hard. you know, wrapping up some coca grower's plant does nothing for addiction rates in the united states because there's so many ways that could be adapted. you get one addict to stop being an addict and you have reduced drug use by, you know, and non-trivial amount because it is the addicts who were doing such a percentage of the drugs. now, the first step for obama would be to honestly budget that, and he ran on transparency and honest accounting, so that is hopefully something that he will do. right now, he doesn't because i'm not going to bring him up for it yet, but he adopted the

bush administration policy of not counting prison costs as part of enforcement. which would be like, you know, not counting the treatment center costs in the treatment center site. so is his goal is to get to something balanced like a 5050 spending ratio, and he does it honestly, and counts prison costs, then he would have to spend a lot more money on drug court and treatment and other ways to approach. so that's probably the best direction he can go. there is some good news i reported the other day. a bill that just came out of the house, basically it eliminates this campaign, this anti-drug media campaign that's been running for decades now. there has been a bunch of studies that have shown that it isn't effective and there have been some studies that actually inclined some kids to actually

try drugs after they see the ad and that's what the committee report wrote when they were cutting it like why are we spending millions of dollars on this campaign that can't prove its effectiveness? i asked the drug czar for comment and the comment was accurate. they said this is one of the most well-known, most well known ad campaign brands in the country. it's one of the best known brands in the entire country and i do not argue with that. but if that is the best that can be said that it's very well-known, then i don't see the point of it. the second point is the game isn't over. we have faith in the senate they will restore this money. so it is a push and pull all the way through. >> the last question i asked as every author comes through, i've done this a couple of years, but my favorite book you have read wrote the last year, it doesn't

matter if you just read half of it, a quarter of it, if you're looking at right now. >> some people might make fun of me for this, but i read toward the end of writing this i read the bought me a desire and i know some people pete batt book -- people hate that book, but the chapter he wrote on canvas, michael pollan book, was excellent. he describes -- from a journalistic approach, he calls all kind of researchers bureau scientists, etc., and says why do people get high? and he calls philosophers, too, and he comes up with what i think is the best explanation anybody so far has. it's very straightforward. you can see it, you can see the way it unfolds and so i almost wish