MAD MEN MEETS THE WIRE IN THIS GRIPPING TRUE-CRIME MEMOIR BY A FORMER AGENT AT THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF NARCOTICS IN 1960s NEW YORK Before Nixon famously declared a "war on drugs," there was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. New York City in the mid-1960s: The war in Vietnam was on the nation's tongue-but so is something else. Clandestine and chaotic, but equally ruthless, the agents of the Bureau were feared by the Mafia, dealers, pimps, prostitutes-anyone...

"January, 2015 will mark a century of the war on drugs in the United States: one hundred years since the first arrests under the Harrison Act. Facing down this anniversary, Johann Hari was witnessing a close relative and an ex-boyfriend bottoming out on cocaine and heroin. But what was the big picture in the war on drugs? Why does it continue, when most people now think it has failed? The reporter set out on a two-year, 20,000-mile journey through...

"Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly...