Licit and Illicit Drugs; The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens and Marijuana-Including Caffeine, Nicotine and Alcohol

by Edward M. Brecher

Licit and Illicit Drugs -- five years in preparation -- is a massive study of the pharmacology, sociology, and history of mind-affecting drugs in our society, and of our social and legal responses to these drugs and their users. It devotes a section to each common drug, including caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, delineating its origin, patterns of use, pharmacology, cultural traditions, its licit and illicit use by Americans today, and its legal history. Consumers Union then takes these findings, and out of an integrated review of social, legal, and pharmacological effects, presents a series of specific recommendations aimed at both legislators and the community -- including drug users. Meticulously documented and researched, this compendium of accurate and complete information is unparalleled in dispelling rumors and misrepresentations that have so long affeted our policies towards drugs.

Genres: Drugs, Health, Nonfiction, Politics

623 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was published in 1972, before AIDS, before Oxycodone, before Methamphetamine, and long before the decades-long campaign to curb smoking in nearly every place possible. But history does not change, people remain the same, and people will continue to find drugs to use and abuse; and I found this book to be very fascinating reading, and also found the conclusions of this book to be eminently reasonable. (As a personal caveat: I take prescription antidepressants, and use caffeine (in the form of Diet Coke) to excess and beyond. They gave me morphine in the hospital after surgery in 2001, and I felt then (and still feel) that if they sold it in vending machines I would instantly go broke. Burning down a house – not my house – while experimenting with cigarettes as a teenager quite cured me of any urge to smoke tobacco. I have smoked marijuana on occasion, but do so no longer (they have random drug testing at my place of employment). And I do use alcohol some, but mostly in the form of beer when at a party or concert, or while eating boiled crawfish.)


The author (who is, alas, no longer with us) takes us through each class of drug or drugs in order, and telling us how the drug has been used (or abused). He pulls no punches: the opiates are addictive, and with rare exceptions, the addiction lasts for life, which means that making opiates unavailable except through criminal activity turns opiate addicts into criminals, because an opiate addict cannot choose to not get his or her opiate fix. There is no real difference between barbiturates and alcohol – one is in liquid form, and one in pill form. The criminalizing of marijuana was basically the work of one man, Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics. And the usual effect of scary newspaper (or now, Internet) stories and government anti-drug campaigns is usually to cause more people to try whatever drug is the drug menace du jour. The government’s Schedule of what drugs are in what category (and the appropriate criminal penalties to apply to each), can only be changed, not by the Surgeon General, but by the Attorney General. And modern society tends to view some drugs as Licit, even though they can cause addiction and eventual death (such as alcohol and nicotine), and other drugs as Illicit, and to regard all Illicit drugs in the same light. (Given the choice of whether I would want someone I care for to be using marijuana or heroin, both of which are illegal, I would choose marijuana, every time.)

With most illicit drugs, some form of prohibition has been tried at various points in history; the United States the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, went into effect in 1920, and the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, just thirteen years later, repealed the Eighteenth Amendment (and this when alcoholism was felt to be a moral failing, not a biochemical addition problem). Prohibition does not work; when the drug in question becomes unavailable or too expensive, those who would have used the drug in question usually start using another (illicit) drug to achieve more or less the same effects (illustrating the Law of Unintended Consequences). What would work better would be some more intelligent system of regulation and quality control by the government, such as is done in the alcohol and tobacco industries.

I very much enjoyed reading this book, and I really did not find it to be far out of date. Yes, some states have legalized simple possession of marijuana, and some states allow for the medical use of marijuana, but the Federal Government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug (along with heroin and LSD). And I can hope that even at this late date Government would take a considered look at the recommendations of this Report.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A total must read if you are interested in the drug war at all. The conclusions made in this book more than three decades ago are still relevant today, and should have been taken seriously immediately. We would have saved trillions of dollars and lots of pain.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book ever written on the subject. Written in 1972, it gave recommendations that, if followed, would likely have prevented or minimized current drug problems.

[Willy Boy · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Guest review by Jello Viagra)

Not the exhaustive encyclopedia you think it is. Instead a series of informative essays as per the subtitle.

I hoped for something like the CIA World Fact Book, with much cold hard info, skads of facts on everything from coffee to paracetamol! What a picture of this planet of yours that would paint.

Editorial is moderate, humanistic. In the concise language of an encyclopedia, entries could feature analytical reports: 'grown in humid environs, harvested may-june, leading to a glut of product in autumn months ... allergic reaction detected in approx 1/230,000 subjects etc., ... derivative of custard powder ... used by Amazonian tribe as aphrodisiac and ritual intoxicant, adapted by Unispool for use in soap powder as bleaching agent ...'

Picture these dry reports as being read by sober, bespectacled businessmen, to President Nixon (contemporaneous to 1972), dressed as Liberace, reclining on a Chaise-longue, fancifully styed after a pair of sumptuous lips.

Yes, something liek a circus in a sewer, entertain the possibility* that you, yes you, fight to live on The Planet Of the Apes, impersonal factories from science fiction spewing in all directions all manner of pills and products designed to preoccupy and stimulate your squishiest tissues. Slaves to squishy tissues. Ah, Kamandi or Doc Moreau (the real personage of whom was a pioneering stoner) might fit the allegorical bill better than Charlton Heston, the menagerie of creatures more fitting than a chauvanistic Primate-only fantasy, since we are much like the mice in the laboratory ...

Perhaps? Who knows? Ha ha ha ha, etc. See God in the desert or the ruined Statue Of Liberty - it seemed so real, touched the soul at core, but with passing years faded, receded so far into the past that imagination and actuality became difficult to distinguish. Feel foolish - kidding ourselves? Fell for a trick a child could see through. Now we can get it from bubblegum dispensers. It doesn't actually do anything anymore - but I don't feel right without it.

Pop the viagra, take the blue pill, mein fuhrer, I can walk. I can walk!

(Excerpted by permission of the New York Review Of Books)

*Jello Viagra is a promising young man. His collection of essays 'Entertain the Possibility' will be published in 2023, from Brain rot LLC. Writing on everything from Punk Rock, Starbucks, the foibles of love in the age of Grindr, he has acquired a devoted following of lunatics in the saddest frontiers of the meta-forque (NO ONE says 'internet' anymore). He lives in New York with his collection of old shoes, cat and wife, and pretends to be gay in an effort to appear interesting.

[David Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Licit & Illicit Drugs: The Consumer's Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens, & Marijuana – Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports (Little, Brown and Co. 1972) (362.2) (3438).

This is the bible – and the manual - about the history of drug use and abuse in America. It is unquestionably the greatest book ever penned on the subject. On this incendiary issue, this is the only book published by an unbiased source with no political axe to grind.

Most readers will be familiar with the unimpeachable product testing conducted by “Consumer's Union.” The magazine “Consumer Reports” is one of the communication tools employed by the Consumer's Union organization. As set forth in the title, this report covers most of the commonly used psychoactive substances including caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol.

The report also contains recommendations for moving forward from the year of publication. You'll be surprised how prescient and on-point the Consumer's Union's 1972 recommendations for the future are from a remove of almost fifty years.

My rating: 9/10, finished 4/15/20 (3438). Although I owned a copy of this is 1978 and read it many times before that copy disappeared, I purchased my presently-owned used PB copy from an Amazon bookseller on 4/8/20 for $11.00. PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

[Nicolas S Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rational view of drugs, untainted by drug war hysteria. Still worth reading.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

at the time I read this, in the early 80s, it was an extremely comprehensive examination of many drugs, particularly those illicit drugs such as Stimulants, Hallucinogens, and Marijuana. It has since become outdated in a variety of ways as laws have changed and as new knowledge has been uncovered.

[Jerry Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so good - I stole it from my High School library back in the late 70s. Highly recommended.