This Is Your Country on Drugs by Ryan Grim

The Moment: You can't find your stash

by Isaiah Thompson

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Published: Jun 10, 2009

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This Is Your Country on Drugs
by Ryan Grim

In college, Ryan Grim tried to answer a question that had nagged at him for years: Where did all the acid go? LSD, which in the mid- to late '90s had seemed plentiful in his Maryland hometown, had vanished. No one he knew did acid anymore, and no one knew where to get it. With the help of a professor, Grim began poring over federal drug use statistics and discovered something rather startling: In the span of just a few years, acid had gone from abundance to near-extinction in the United States.

The project eventually turned into his newly released book, This is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America,a wide-ranging, fascinating romp through the history of America's insatiable appetite for all manner of drugs, from opium to crystal meth, all the way up to the possibly soon-to-be-illegal hallucinogen Salvia divinorum.

But Grim does more than rattle off drug fads. His book explores the intersecting patterns of drug use and drug enforcement, and the ways that efforts against one drug coming from one place have inevitably led to a rise in another drug or a new source for the same drug. And next to his portraits of one fumble after another by various presidents and Congresses, Grim takes a look at people everywhere else in the world whose lives are, in one way or another, profoundly affected by American overseas drug policies.

Grim, who has written for Politico and the Washington City Paper (where we became acquainted), and now covers drugs full-time for the Huffington Post, is a smart guy, with an expansive knowledge of the politics and history of drugs; he's also a fun guy, who writes with a sense of adventure. His book is a history of drug use, but it's also a history of America unlike any you've likely seen.

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