Abandoned this for a while--returned it to library--but I will definitely pick it up again. Like Simon's work on The Wire, it flashes a bright and blank light on the hidden and buried world of the drug trade, but this format allows him to mount the pulpit and deliver more direct polemic against our war on drugs, to excoriate the perpetrators of that war, and to brandish a full portrait of a neighborhood filled with victims of that war as proof of its failure.