How To Get The Most Out Of My American Drug War Journal Project

ADWJ posting and editing policies

I’m preparing to begin intensive Content Provision in this sub-section of Iconoclasms. My editing policies will be somewhat different for Drug War Journal than it is for the general run of my posts. In particular, when I post under a given story headline, I’m leaving it open for editing revisions, additions, and corrections for an indefinite time. Readers should consider these posts to be open-ended works in progress, which means that readers will benefit from revisiting them occasionally, in order to check on what I might have added. Sometimes I’ll just be adding a few extra reference details, doing edits to improve clarity, winnow out typos, etc. When I add a significant amount of additional information, I’ll post the update and the date of the edit in the post subhead. I have no way to tell how much more a given post might expand after its first publication, but some of them should fill out to the length of a book chapter by the time they’re completed (or nearly completed.)

I’m doing it this way because I have a lot on my mind; a nonlinear style; and a lot of references that I have yet to retrieve and organize. In some cases, I’ll be excepting passages of those references- always with proper attribution and within the limits of fair use, of couse. I happen to find typing out quoted passages to be a much more dreary than using my own words, but whan it comes to authoritative observations, it’s hard to beat a good source. Even bad, wrong, inaccurate, or misleading passages are worth quoting, in order for me to show readers that I’m not just arguing against a straw man. I also need to excerpt statistical data- lists, charts, graphs, etc.- and some legwork is required to do screen grabs, proper formatting, etc. in order to present that information in the most readable way I can manage. If I’m going to interpret data findings and critique study conclusions, readers need to see what it is that I’m interpreting- metrics, chronology, survey samplings, numbers, be they soft or hard.

Amazing how much hard information on the subject is available nowadays; 25 years ago, when I first began researching the Drug War, there wasn’t nearly as much of it to review. Then the Internet happened, along with successive waves of published surveys, studies, and research projects related to user populations of illicit drugs and studies of the dynamics of the clandestine marketplace for forbidden mind-altering substances. Where once I felt that I didn’t have enough material to answer specific questions on many of my avenues of inquiry, now there’s often so much available that the task of analysis has become a bit daunting. But, this is not my first paper chase.

That said, as a rule the first published draft of any of my new posts in ADWJ should be read as an introduction to the subject in the header- an incomplete introduction, at that. As with the reader comments I post in the Substack pages of other folks, I have a tendency to revisit and revise my words, and those edited posts have a way of accumulating and sprawling. Just offering some advance warning, here. If you’re still wondering what I’m talking about, you’ll find out soon enough. Whatever my flaws as a writer, there’s no danger of my running out of things to say. Not on this topic.