MixedThe Washington PostQuinones’s greatest accomplishment is to understand these newly dangerous drug markets as just one more consequence of a disastrously under-regulated corporate capitalism in the 2000s ... Quinones is anything but boring. He is a fluent storyteller who delivers his argument through a palette of affecting stories about people and communities torn apart, and about the small, step-by-step reclamations earned through patient, daily, humble work. Few readers will keep dry eyes through the entire book ... This poignant appeal is also where The Least of Us goes awry, unfortunately. To amp up the emotional wallop, Quinones leans on the hoariest myths that have long marred drug journalism: that once-proud if scrappy White communities are being destroyed by foreign traffickers selling a new generation of super-drugs that turn consumers into subhuman zombies. This sensationalist story is depressingly familiar to me as a historian of drugs, and it stands in stark conflict with Quinones’s brilliant analysis of America’s malfunctioning drug markets. The \'super drug\' myth is the true unkillable zombie, surviving a century of repeated debunking and wreaking its own distinctive political harm ... The new \'super drug\' story, combined with an oversimplified version of addiction neuroscience, leads Quinones to a dark vision of people with addiction ... On this front The Least of Us seems divided: sometimes romanticizing an implicitly White past, and sometimes providing the foundations for a broader vision of how to protect all communities from the excesses of corporate capitalism. I hope that readers will see beyond the former to learn from the latter.
Michael Pollan
PositiveThe Washington PostWhile not as revelatory as Pollan’s major works, this is a wonderful and compelling read that will leave you thinking long after you set it down ... Pollan is an astonishingly good writer, at times intimate and vulnerable, at times curious and expository, always compelling and credible. Reading his writing can be kind of like taking a psychedelic—a literary onomatopoeia. When I put the book down I felt temporarily smarter, more capable of deeper perception of myself and the world around me. It’s a wonderful and important gift ... After coming down from my reading high, though, I have a couple of reservations. First, Pollan’s interests are wide-ranging, but he seems most taken with brain sciences and sometimes flirts with a soft form of pharmacological essentialism—that is, a tendency to reduce drugs’ social and political complexities to the interactions between chemicals and brains ... I also have concerns about Pollan’s drug policy critiques. He can be effective here, skewering the absurdities produced by an irrational and arbitrary war against plant drugs ... When Pollan bridles that drug laws limit his freedom, and when he ridicules the foolishness of lumping him and his cozy garden with fearsome \'addicts\' and criminals, he unintentionally reinforces this pernicious drug war logic ... These political qualms didn’t keep me from enjoying This Is Your Mind on Plants. It’s a lovely book by a deep thinker and a masterful storyteller. I can’t help but hope that such a powerful ally will wade as deeply into drug politics as he does drug neuroscience.
