The drug story; a factological history of America's 10,000,000,000 [dollars] drug cartel

I am going to be "speaking to" the author in this review, though I don't know if he's still with us (probably not). So if your name is Morris Bealle, or even just Morris, don't take any of this the wrong way; it's not directed at you. :-)

Overall, the book has a lot of hard facts. However, because of Morris Bealle's extremely poor writing style, what should have been a pleasure became a chore, a slog. In fact, the last 40 pages alone took me about an hour and a half—much longer than that number of pages would take me in most other books.

I'd be lying if I denied taking my rating down a peg for the book's age. There's a lot of information in it, but everything is from at least 60 years ago. A compelling story of government corruption is presented using evidence from the first 49 years of the 20th century, but how much of it is still true today? There's no way to know, so I'm certainly not going to mark this as a "must-read".

There's also the matter of the final chapter. I mean, WTF? What a great idea, Morris, to just go off into the future, past your own publication date, past the most recent printing, to bona fide fiction without telling anyone. That last chapter is a big example of what I mean when I say "poor writing style". It's fine to fictionalize, as long as the reader is aware of it. Use future tense or something. This isn't Star Trek; you don't have a "future history"; you're presenting what could happen, and/or what you hope will happen. Make it clearer.

All told, I had this book checked out from the library for six weeks. I almost never keep books that long, because I read them and return them. Style, style, style—that's pretty much all that slowed me down. And speaking of style, I have one more bone to pick.

Morris, your book reads like a rant. My dad paged through it and declared it "a rant." I got through the first few chapters and began to think of it as "a rant." Now, there's not really anything wrong with that, but it would have been nice to hear more opinions from the other side of the fence. You have plenty of examples from your own opinions and people who side with you, but I can't recall any significant presentation of the opposite viewpoint. What would it have taken to get more information from the AMA, FDA, and BBBs? How about a statement from the "Medical Mussolini", "Fuehrer [sic:] Fishbein", attempting to refute your arguments? That would have made some interesting reading, he countering your arguments and you countering his counterarguments.

Anyway, in summary, this book is a sixty-year-old, poorly-written, one-sided rant. I'm not sure who I'd recommend it for; maybe fundamentalist anti-drug movement leaders. Not casual readers. I tried to read it casually, and it didn't really work for that purpose.