Reveals how pharmaceutical companies have used slick marketing techniques to promote dangerous medications to American physicians and consumers, examining how the industry has transformed the practice of medicine and damaged American life.

" There is growing alarm over how drugs increasingly empower terrorists, insurgents, traffickers, and gangs. But by looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries. In his path-breaking Killer High, Andreas shows how six psychoactive drugs--ranging from old to relatively new, mild to potent, licit to illicit,...

Successful web designer Wilson Joel's life spirals out of control after the sudden suicide of his wife. Unable to read the note she left him, Wilson forges new, unpredictable relationships with friends, co-workers and his stunned mother-in-law. But when he starts taking a dangerous drug, it could take what's left of his blown-apart life and extinguish it completely.