Active Radio: Pacifica's Brash Experiment

It has been more than twenty years since President Nixon declared the War on Drugs. In On Drugs, David Lenson delivers a scathing indictment of this war as an effort based, like all attempts to eradicate "getting high", on an incomplete understanding of human nature. From lotus-eaters to hippies to crackheads, he contends, history has shown the state's inability to legislate the bloodstreams of its citizens. Lenson ventures beyond conventional genres to view the drug debate from the largely forgotten perspective of those who use drugs. In successfully walking the fine line between the antidrug hysteria of the 1980s and an advocacy of drug use, Lenson shatters the ban on debate regarding drugs enforced in the "Just Say No" campaign and reveals the myriad ways "straight society" demonizes the drug user. After considering several specific issues associated with drug use - including sex, violence, and money - Lenson concludes with his vision of the end of the Drug War by questioning the sense in condemning millions of Americans to lives of concealment and deceit.

Publishers Weekly

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the independent Pacifica Radio Network, Land, a media critic and activist, recounts the network's history in a tight, accessible narrative. Land details how Lewis Hill and other pacifist conscientious objectors formed the Pacifica Foundation in 1946 to take their agenda beyond "ivory towerism" and to resist the "mediocrity and exploitation" that they believed defined commercial radio. After the FCC, in an era of intensified regulation, denied their idealistic AM application, Pacifica began to broadcast on FM via KPFA in the California Bay Area. Despite the network's populist intent, the station initially merited the sobriquet "Highbrow's Delight," offering classical music, intellectual roundtables and poetry alongside controversial politics. After its first decade, Pacifica expanded to New York and L.A., and as the countercultural movement gained momentum, the young network embraced the folk revival and became embroiled in a series of censorship trials over broadcasts of Ginsberg's Howl and George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." In 1962, the year longtime commentator Pauline Kael resigned in protest of Hill's domineering management of KPFA, Pacifica's New York outlet, WBAI, aired a former agent's then-shocking expose of illegal FBI activities, a story no other network would touch. WBAI was also a leader in Vietnam coverage, sending one of the first American correspondents to Hanoi and broadcasting Seymour Hersh breaking the My Lai incident. Land acknowledges that Pacifica, like most progressive organizations, endured passionate disagreements about everything from socialist theory to air time for classical music. But unlike Matthew Lasar's Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Forecasts, Nov. 23), Land is less concerned with such internal divisions than with Pacifica's larger role in American culture. For Land, Pacifica embodies the power of the First Amendment, exemplifying the salutary effects of the "disruption of convention encouraged by vigorous public dissent." (Apr.)