High time for reading

By Joel Miller

What kind of periodicals and books would you expect to litter the library shelves and bathroom stalls at the Drug Enforcement Administration?

Apparently to keep a finger on the pulse (or, more likely, thrust a thumb in the eye) of the drug culture, the DEA regularly forks over taxpayer money for High Times – multiple copies according to a report obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information request, filed by the guys at the Smoking Gun.

“The narcs must have been fighting over each month’s copy,” Smoking Gun opined, “because the Drug Enforcement Administration’s in-house library is shelling out for three copies a month of the drug bible. …”

Smoking Gun got its hands on the DEA’s official library acquisition reports, which keep record of the publications to which the agency subscribes, along with the books it purchases.

Some of the 2000 DEA library acquisitions include riveting legal scholarship, such as Vincent Johnson’s book, “Mastering Torts: A Student’s Guide to the Law of Torts” (Academic Press, 1999), which I understand reads a lot like John Grisham – only with characters slightly more believable and three-dimensional.

Should DEA staff tire of reading industry publications like the International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, they can always thumb through the library’s copy of Michael Gross’ 2000 tome, “My Generation: Fifty Years of Sex, Drugs, Rock, Revolution, Glamour, Greed, Valor, Faith, and Silicon Chips” (Cliff Street Books) and maybe head down to the lunchroom to whip up a recipe or two from Todd Dalotto’s “The Hemp Cookbook: From Seed to Shining Seed” (Healing Arts Press, 2000). Mmm.

Reading some of these books, however, must be less fun than breaking your toes. Though I haven’t looked at it myself, Tom Andrews’ “Codeine Diary: Confessions of a Reckless Hemophiliac” (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999) probably requires an unhealthy dose of the junk just to make it through.

And you might want to double the dose for this one: “Handbook of Chemical and Biological Warfare Agents” by D. Hank Ellison (CRC Press, 2000). Either somebody over at the DEA has a pretty sadistic idea about bathroom reading, or we should start biting our nails. Drug warriors studying biochem warfare is not an encouraging sort of thing to find out. What, no-knock raids weren’t lethal enough with conventional weapons?

There was, interestingly enough, no mention of why it’s fine for the DEA to subscribe to High Times, while simply owning a magazine that looked like High Times was used as pretext to search a woman’s car in Davidson, N.C., last year.

No drugs were found in the search, but the Davidson police maintained that the magazine cover photo seen in the car was probable cause for a rummage and rumple session through the vehicle.

“He acted properly,” said Assistant Police Chief Butch Parker about the officer. “He thinks he had reasonable suspicion, and we do too.” (I wonder if the founders would agree that an image of a marijuana leaf – which, according to Jack Herer, Ronald Reagan once mistook for the Canadian maple leaf – is all that’s needed to satisfy the demands of the Fourth Amendment.)

I suppose this means Parker should be heading to Virginia to search the cars of DEA library staff.

Possibly the most interesting purchase, however, was this: a copy of Herbert N. Foerstel’s “Freedom of Information and the Right to Know: The Origins and Applications of the Freedom of Information Act” (Greenwood Press, 1999). Maybe someone at DEA wanted to find out if he could tell Smoking Gun to stuff a sock in its FOIA request.

Better luck next time.


Related offer:

“God Gave Wine,” a book by Kenneth Gentry and published by Joel Miller’s Oakdown Books, details what the Bible really says about alcohol. Get it at GodGaveWine.com.


Related columns:

Joel Miller’s entire drug-war archive