It's time to stock up on munchies, twist the caps off your water bottles, and get on the bus You're about to embark on a cross-country tour of the complex, bizarre, and surprising history of drug use in America, a history that takes you from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, through New York's nineteenth-century opium dens, on to the Summer of Love, into the Midwestern methedemic, and right up to today-where California has effectively legalized marijuana and the rest of the country is thinking of doing the same.

In This Is Your Country on Drugs, journalist Ryan Grim challenges everything you thought you knew about America's drug culture and how and when it began, who contributed to its growth, who opposed it and why, and what makes one drug surge in popularity and another fade.

You'll get the inside story on the huge DEA bust of an acid lab in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas that may have caused the disappearance of LSD in the early 2000s; find out how the temperance movement of the nineteenth century encouraged the use of opium, cocaine, and other narcotics; and discover the link between drugs and the birth of the modern mass media.

Drawing on many sources, both historic and contemporary, Grim asks penetrating questions about America's drug habit. Has the war on drugs done anything to reduce drug use? If all drugs were made legal, would we end up re-criminalizing them? Did our founding fathers-and especially their wives-get high just as frequently as twenty-first-century Americans? Is the crack epidemic really over, if it ever even existed? Did Ronald Reagan inadvertently cause the cocaine boom of the 1980s by going after pot smokers? Did NAFTA open the door for Mexican meth to take over the Midwest? Why do Americans use drugs at a far higher rate than any other people in the world? Why do we put alcohol in a class different from every other drug? Grim's answers are, to say the least, startling.

He also offers thoughtful insights into why different people and groups use different drugs. In a hilarious anecdote about a concert by Andy Warhol's speed-driven performance-art troop Exploding Plastic Inevitable before an audience of pot-smoking, acid-dropping hippies at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in 1968, Grim reveals the connection between lifestyle and drugs of choice, as well as what happens when drug cultures collide.

Complete with revelations about the role of major pharmaceutical companies in both the introduction and eventual criminalization of such drugs as heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and others, This Is Your Country on Drugs is more than a powerful, fascinating, and often shocking history of one of our knottiest social, cultural, and criminal problems; it is a profound and disturbing exploration of what it means to be an American.

"Admitting that 'so much has been written on drug use and American culture that it would take weeks to roll all of that paper up and smoke it,' journalist Grim plunges into the counterculture, the literature, the research, the opposition, the pharmaceutical interests, the media coverage, the kids and users, the heroes and the hypocrites to chart the evolution of drug use in America, covering every illegal high, taking on well-entrenched myths and turning up fascinating stories on current trends-beginning with the end of LSD. Backed by plenty of startling facts (i.e., 1984's drug-related criminal population was 30,000; by 1991 it was more than 150,000), Grim fashions a sharp critique of anti-drug programs ('exposure to anti-drug ads led to higher rates of first-time drug use among certain groups, such as fourteen-to-sixteen year olds and whites') and other policy decisions (President Clinton's approval of NAFTA led to an unprecedented influx of drugs across the Mexican border). Grim isn't all talk, however: he barely survives on-site research during drug riots in Bolivia, goes through a typically fraught trip on ayahuasca, and scouts the battlefields of the fight to legalize cannabis ('In San Francisco, pot clubs quickly outnumbered McDonald's franchises'). This lively, personable history should strike fans of Martin Torgoff's Can't Find My Way Home as a worthy follow-up." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Grim, senior congressional correspondent for Huffington Post, provides an informative, well-written, and sometimes startling overview of the misinformation fed to the American people regarding the use, sale, and distribution of drugs in the United States. The author makes several assertions that many readers will find controversial: previous anti-drug campaigns encouraged drug use, President Reagan may have inadvertently caused the crack epidemic, and the fastest-growing drug in the country is a legal hallucinogen that can be bought on the Internet. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Seven surprising consequences of the U.S. approach to drugs--find out the facts in THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY ON DRUGS

Past antidrug campaigns actually encouraged drug use.

A few years ago, America stopped dropping acid altogether.

The meth epidemic peaked a long, long time ago.

NAFTA opened the border and created a bonanza for cocaine and meth traffickers--just as President Clinton knew it would.

President Reagan may have inadvertently caused the crack epidemic.

Kids today are doing fewer illegal drugs than kids from any time in the recent past, and for a surprising reason.

The fastest-growing drug in America is a legal hallucinogen you can buy on the Internet.

Everything we know about drugs–from acid to epidemics to DARE and salvia–turns out to be wrong

Stock up on munchies and line up your water bottles: journalist Ryan Grim will take you on a cross-country tour of illicit drug use in the U.S.–from the agony (the huge DEA bust of an acid lab in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas) to the ecstasy (hallucinogens at raves and music festivals). Along the way, Grim discovers some surprising truths. Did anti-drug campaigns actually encourage more drug use? Did acid really disappear in the early 2000s? And did meth peak years ago? Did our Founding Fathers–or, better yet, their wives–get high just as much as we do? Not since Eric Schlosser took readers underground to marijuana's black market in Reefer Madness has a reporter trained such a keen eye on drugs and culture. Grim weaves a story based on solid reporting and wide-ranging research. This Is Your Country on Drugs explores our country's long and twisted relationship with drugs–but also asks readers to reflect on what it means to be an American.

Ryan Grim (Washington, DC) covers Congress for Politico and has written for Slate, Rolling Stone, Harper's, and the Washington Post.