Preston Peet - Under the Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs

Introduction

Some people say we should write what we know. In my own case, it's excellent advice that has served me well.

In 1996, I reached a major intersection in my life when I decided I was tired of living the life of a street-bound junkie, and needed drastic change. After some initial stumbling and lurching, I finally got my act together, ending my decade and a half long love/hate relationship with hard, illegal street drugs.

Having seen and lived the using side of the equation (see ), coming into repeated contact with prohibitionist policies and the police who enforce them, I wanted to know what was driving the War on Some Drugs and Users and why, no matter how many times I and my drug using friends and the dealers we bought from were getting arrested, there were always others on the streets to whom I could go to buy the drugs I'd wanted and needed.

I began coming across disturbing stories about CIA-connected drug trafficking, first reading Alexander Cockburn's allegations in the New York Press, then Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series, first published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. I was appalled to discover that the joking around we would do while getting highabout how the low-level streets dealers were not the ones who owned the airplanes that brought the drugs into the country, or the corporations that ship precursor chemicals needed to produce the cocaine and heroin we were doing, or the banks that launder the billions of money made each year in the international illegal drug trade, that our government had to be involved in some way in the traffickingwas truer than I'd ever seriously imagined. Why was I getting arrested for buying and using the very drugs that my government and its allies were both producing and bringing across the border?

By 1998, I had begun to write about this and other drug war related topics, pitching articles to any and all publications I thought might be interested in helping expose the hypocrisy and propaganda I was finding everywhere I looked concerning the War on Drugs. I sold my first article to High Times magazine in 1999, and was soon contributing regularly to the magazine and its website.

To help me get through the stresses and joys of life without hard street drugs, I reaffirmed my love and respect for marijuana, which got me through the hardest days and nights. This lead me one day proudly to tell a friend who'd brought me an eighth of pot that I was now regularly writing and publishing articles about the War on Drugs for High Times. He asked me if I'd heard of Disinformation's website, Disinfo.com. He typed it up on my computer to see if any of my work was linked there, to no avail. After he left, I wrote the publisher of the Disinformation website an email, pitching a dossier about CIA-Drug running. I got a reply from co-founder and publisher Gary Baddeley within twenty minutes, saying it was a topic right up their alley and that they'd be glad to take a look.

Needless to say, they published the finished dossier, leading to my publishing more than 60 articles for Disinformation, on many diverse topics but mostly about drugs and prohibition. When Disinformation had the idea in 2003 of publishing a book about drugs, they turned to me, and I gladly accepted the challenge. You are holding the results in your hands.

This book covers many different views of many different drugs and the fashion in which society deals with those drugs. Some of these essays are scholarly examinations of the deep politics and covert actions behind and justifying the War. Some of the contributors dissect the overt politics and history of the War. Some examine enforcement policies and some focus on what happens when one ingests any number of drugs, legal and illegal both. You will find discussions about what exactly constitutes a drug, why society deals with drugs and those who use them the way we do, and where we might be going in terms of attitudes and policies.