Independent Publishers Group Logo

Sign up today...
for featured titles, special offers, bestsellers, and more, in your inbox!

Subscribe to receive special offers, monthly books suggestions, seasonal selections, and more!

Close
The Strength of the Pack
The Strength of the Pack

The Strength of the Pack

The Personalities, Politics, and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA

POLITICAL SCIENCE

588 Pages, 6 x 9

Formats: Trade Paper, EPUB

Trade Paper, $19.99 (CA $26.99) (US $19.99)

Publication Date: September 2019

ISBN 9781625361479

Rights: WOR

Douglas Valentine (Sep 2019)

eBook

eBook Editions Available

Will it work on my eReader?
Out of Stock. E-book edition is available.
 

Overview

The Strength of the Pack documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 through the early years of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Picking up where The Strength of the Wolf left off, the book shows how successive administrations expanded federal drug law enforcement operations under the pervasive but hidden influence of the CIA. The “wolf pack” is a metaphor for the multitude of agencies and their offshoots that comprise the labyrinth system currently waging the eternal war on drugs. Once upon a time, the “lone wolf” federal narcotics agent, last of the noir detectives, hard-boiled and streetwise, stalked his prey: vicious Mafia drug dealers and their international connections. But the rise of the American Superpower and the opium-infused Vietnam War saw the lone wolf replaced by a dehumanized bureaucratic system more suitable to empire: the wolf pack, secretly led by the CIA and designed specifically for using the war on drugs as a covert means of advancing the interests of the U.S. ruling class at home and abroad. Based largely on interviews with former federal narcotics agents and CIA officers, as well as the influential politicians and government bureaucrats they worked with, The Strength of the Pack focuses on the CIA’s steady infiltration and corruption of federal drug law enforcement for the purpose of waging political and psychological warfare against the American public. Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law enforcement, but no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.

Author Biography

Douglas Valentine is the author of five non-fiction books: The Hotel Tacloban (1984), The Phoenix Program (1990), The Strength of the Wolf (2004), The Strength of the Pack (2009), and the CIA as Organized Crime (2017). He is the author of the novella TDY (2000) and a book of poems, A Crow's Dream (2011). He also created and edited the poetry anthology With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (2012). Valentine has testified as an expert witness, served as a documentary film consultant, and worked as a private investigator.