BACK COVER #
While well over one million small-time drug users languish in overcrowded prisons because of nonviolent drug offenses, tens of thousands of others get rich from legal and illegal drugs. Drug company representatives persuade doctors to prescribe inferior products; children as young as tow are routinely given powerful drugs; legal drugs, taken exactly as prescribed are a leading cause of illness and death; and scientists beholden to drug companies fabricate and misrepresent data. This eye-opening book richly documents disturbing trends in Western medicine and urges readers toward a broader understanding of drug use and abuse. Fred Leavitt shows how and why American society must change its medical and policy approaches to drugs and reorient medical practice to new ways of thinking.BLURBS #
"By juxtaposing the many ills of the war on drugs with the corruption of the medical-pharmaceutical establishment, Leavitt expertly diagnoses our systemic national pathology concerning drugs-both illegal and legal."-- Ethan Nadelmann, executive director, Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation
"The dichotomy that Fred Leavitt highlights demonstrates a need to rethink how we deal with all drugs while we dismantle the damaging war on drugs."
-- Kevin B. Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy
"The Real Drug Abusers is a devastating presentation of the propaganda and deceit that define the pharmaceutical industry. This book presents a fascinating glimpse of the academic, economic, and medical abuses that are associated with legal drugs."
-- Alexander Shulgin
"This is one of the most important contributions to the field of drug research of the last decade. It is authoritative in its rendering of the complexities of drug-interaction effects, yet written in a straightforward and available style."
-- Troy Duster, University of California, Berkeley