Crackdown
Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs
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Crackdown
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Narrated by:
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Garth Mullins
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By:
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Garth Mullins
About this listen
Part memoir, part manifesto, Crackdown is a story of the drug war, told from the frontlines.
Garth Mullins was born into a world too bright for him to fully see, and too unforgiving to fully accept him. Bullied by both kids and adults, who mocked his albinism and trivialized his blindness, Garth turned to activism and punk rock, seeking escape, and discovered a scene that embraced him for who he was. And yet he still couldn't quell a haunting pain that had overwhelmed him since he was a child, a deep need to "blank it all out." Until he tried heroin.
Garth's experience as a heroin user—including dopesickness, incarceration and overdose—is an all-too-common story for those struggling with drug addiction. And for Garth, it was this revelation that propelled him to the forefront of drug user activism. He was witnessing firsthand the failure of abstinence-based recovery programs; the ceaseless deaths of friends and community members from unregulated, toxic drug supply and a lack of safer alternatives; the over-representation of drug users, particularly Indigenous and Black users, in jails and prisons. And he saw that far from the decades-long war on drugs being a success, it had been a deadly failure.
Crackdown is an intimate portrait of Garth's relationship with opioids, and a searing indictment of a broken system that is failing drug users and non-users alike. With street drugs getting more toxic by the day, drug users and their families, friends and communities are left to pay the price. Crackdown asks us to radically reimagine our approach to drug use, and to envisage a system that helps rather than harms.©2025 Garth Mullins (P)2025 Doubleday Canada
Critic reviews
"Garth Mullins writes like a dream about nightmares. Instead of tired cartoon sketches of alleyways full of criminal junkies, Crackdown introduces us to a world rich in relationships, love, pain and legitimate rage at a rapacious system that has made peace with mass death. Mullins is a rare mix of fighter and artist, and we are all better for the fact that he has survived to share his extraordinary journey with us." —Naomi Klein, internationally bestselling author of Doppelganger and This Changes Everything
"The whole passion play of 'public safety' that rages across our screens is missing the main character. This book puts the drug user back in the picture—full of agency, complexity and heartbreak. Crackdown is an utterly gripping read: an electric memoir, brimming with the shock of the real, revealed." —Avi Lewis, documentary filmmaker, journalist and former host of CBC Newsworld’s counterSpin
"This book, like punk rock, can barely contain its power. Crackdown is an extraordinary work of unflinching courage and compassion. I couldn't put it down." —Ryan Knighton, author of Cockeyed
Thank you Garth
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