Baum, Dan, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, Little, Brown, 1997.

This retrospective look at the United States' war on drugs deviates from other books in this genre that tend to use anecdotes to depict the government as deliberate participants in the spread of drugs. Instead, Baum, a journalist, provides balanced criticism about why the war on drugs has failed, using facts to back up his assertions.

Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, Routledge, 2001.

This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of the major cultural issues in the 1960s and 1970s. Topics include Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture, Insurgent Youth and the Sixties Culture of Rejuvenation, Film and the Counterculture, and Media and Pop Culture.

Holmes, Ann, The Mental Effects of Heroin, The Encyclopedia of Psychological Disorders, Little...