About book The Strength Of The Wolf: The Secret History Of America's War On Drugs (2006)
The jacket blurb from counterpunch says that "Valentine's book... reads like a coherent speed freak's monologue": this is very true, and while at first a bit annoying, since the book is constructed as a recitation of the schemes and busts and malfeasances of various agents of the FBN between the 1920s and the 1970s, it does work (through the sheer accumulation of repeated detail) to enforce its basic thesis, which is that the US federal drug enforcement has from the get-go been compromised by (if not completely in hock to) a racist, sexist, heteronormative, and above all anticommunist political agenda. The effect (and indeed arguably the purpose) of the agency was therefore really always more about enforcing the social controls desired by the Establishment than about reducing social harm to drug users in the United States. With that said, Valentine recognizes that the people who were busted on the trafficking side were almost all amoral bad guys, albeit some worse than others, and some scarcely worse than the corrupt agents who were busting them.
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