Global Ganja Report

Further adventures of Peter Gorman are chronicled in this quasi-memoir, Magic Mushrooms in India & Other Fantastic Tales. Gorman's best known for his work in the Peruvian Amazon, where he's spent the good part of the last three decades hunting for rare flora and connecting with curanderos who turned him on to ayahuasca and other exotic hallucinogens.

Gorman was a contributing editor at High Times in the '90s, where many of these stories first appeared—visits to India seeking mushrooms and bhang, and to Morocco on the kif trail.

Veteran war photographer Teun Voeten has worked in conflict zones from Afghanistan and Iraq to Rwanda and Sierra Leone, to Haiti, Nicaragua and Colombia. Now he makes the leap into academia, with his newly published doctoral thesis, Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty. Voeten attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the unrelenting cartel wars that may now threaten an actual collapse of the government in the United States' southern neighbor.

Hardcore Tuna-heads aren't going to be able to resist this one. They already know the basic outline of Jorma Kaukonen's life: an authenticity-obsessed student of traditional finger-picking country blues in the folk revival of the early '60s (Harlem legend Blind Gary Davis was his special inspiration), he was catapulted to stardom when he went electric as the lead guitarist for the Jefferson Airplane, flagship band of the San Francisco sound.

In his new memoir True Stories: Tales from the Generation of a New World Culture, Garrick Beck spans a personal journey through radical bohemia in the 1950s, hippie utopianism in the 1960s, back-to-the-land communalism in the 1970s, to applying those ethics today through community work and urban land-reclamation back in the New York City of his youth.

He was born into artistic activism as the offspring of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the leading figures of the Living Theatre.

It takes a strong stomach to wade through the relentless parade of horror that is A Narco History. But if you really want to grasp "How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the 'Mexican Drug War'," as the subtitle promises—this is the book to read...

Co-authors Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace open with a chillingly detailed depiction of the grisly end met by 43 student protesters in Guerrero state, who were in September 2014 abducted by police and turned over to a mass-murdering narco-gang. What authorities believe to be their burnt remains were left in garbage bags at the bottom of a canyon.

There have been quite a few histories of cannabis culture and politics, but Bruce Barcott's Weed The People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America is the first to examine the cannabis industry and its future prospects at a moment when it is taking flight. His opening overview of how we got to this point is engaging if not always strictly accurate (he loans too much credence to the '70s paraquat scare). He notes the litany of US government reports back to the 1920s exculpating cannabis of the calumnies against it—all ignored by the very government that commissioned them. He details the bureaucratic obstacles that have been raised to research on cannabis' medical benefits. And he relates the passing of the torch (or, more literally, the joint) from the jazz scene to the beatniks to the hippies to the mainstream.

Dawn Paley is one courageous journalist. Her travels through Mexico, Colombia and Central America have brought her to the frontlines of "drug war" danger and militarization, producing first-hand reportage from communities terrorized by narco-gangs, paramilitaries and "official" security forces alike. In Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, Oakland, 2015) Paley portrays these forces as constituting a single nexus of terror, thoroughly integrated into the structures of the "legal" economy.

Dean Becker, a former reporter at non-commercial KPFT in Houston, has produced a worthwhile if deceptively named book in To End the War on Drugs: A Guide for Politicians, the Press and Public. Rather than the activist how-to manual promised in the subtitle, it is a series of interviews with leading lights in the drug policy reform movement. And rather than explaining how, they are mostly making the case as to why the "drug war" must end.