Negative Space: Thomas Szasz
- Beyond the War on Drugs: Overcoming a Failed Public Policy
- Steven Wisotsky’s 1990 book is subtitled “Breaking the Impasse in the War on Drugs”. It comes with an introduction by Thomas Szasz and in many ways is a repeat of so many books that have come before, chronicling the failures of the war on drugs but it also quantifies the “successes”: how the war on drugs energizes crime and corruption. “The law can imprison a black marketeer, but not the market itself.”
- Ceremonial Chemistry
- Thomas Szasz subtitled this “The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers”. It’s a brilliant piece of work drawing on history from as far back as the witch trials and persecution of Jews. His thesis is that mankind requires scapegoats on a ritual scale. While hardly a ground-breaking idea, the depth of his examination is.
- Our Right to Drugs
- What is it about drugs that make us more scared about them than chainsaws, bleach, and gasoline? Thomas Szasz writes, with a historical and psychiatric perspective, about what can produce a holy utopia where parents will send their children to prison, and children their parents.