Excerpt from introduction:
"I'm confident our healing community can come up with sound, workable strategies for all who need help, not just those who can afford it. However, I'm pessimistic about the chance that sane reasoning has against fundamentalist blind faith. Our scientific knowledge has increased dramatically in the past decades, but unfortunately the power brokers ignore this evidence, preferring to keep society as a whole in the dark ages. They offer stiffer punishments as the only solution.On the one hand, this book is meant to be philisopical about drugs. On the other, it is meant to be precise, political, and activist on urine testing. this is a call to arms against a ritual that has nothing to do with drug abuse and a lot to do with controlling citizens.
My suspicions were aroused in 1982, when on a prison work release program I was subjected to constant, random urin testing. Because of actual drug use and/or faulty tests, a lot of inmates regularly flunked. The guards used the test results as blackmail, judging social behavior to be more important than actual drug use.
Those who conformed to the warden's image of the model prisoner were not punished for positive results, while those whose spirit of resistance had not been broken were.
My own case was unique. I was the most famous inmate on a work-release program in New York's history, and an unrepentant troublemaker to boot. The press had drawn incredible attention to my case and conservative legislators were using it as an excuse to abolish the entire work-release program. The Daily News front page screamed "ABBIE WALKS!" noting parenthetically "The Pope Goes Home." (This was the biggest free job-wanted ad imaginable.) I saw it as my activist duty to defend this humane prison program with every act.
Offered several high-priced jobs, which under the rules I could have taken, I chose instead to work on a near-voluntary level as a drug-abuse counselor, returning to prison after each work day. I was meticulous about obeying the no drugs or alcohol rule, but on two occasions I flunked the urine test anyway. I refused to buckle under the lies. Threats of court suits, extensive publicity and a demand for conformatory testing were sufficient to scare the guards into ignoring the results.
Beyond this, I began a campaign to enlist inmates, cheated out of privileges by a bogus test, in a court challenge against the screening process. I had lined up two f the best lawyers in the country (Gerry Lefcourt and Michael Kennedy) and felt a dozen plaintiffs were needed to make the proper challenge...
This book, of all Hoffman works, is no longer in print.
For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
-- Johnny Carson
-- holds a peaceful protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention that unexpectedly leads to violence.