Can Anyone Recommend Some Light Reading?

I finished Ioan Grillo's book El Narco, which is a portrait of the Mexican drug cartels and the damage they have wrought in both their home country and our own; it works like this: the United States provides many of the guns for the drug warfare . . . and of course we provide the insatiable need for illegal drugs (especially New York City) and the Mexicans-- who used to be middlemen smugglers for Columbian cocaine, until the Miami Vice squad made it too tough to come through Florida-- have taken over as the main producers, shippers, smugglers, and distributors . . . and moved into many other organized crime rackets such as shakedowns, protection money, and kidnapping . . . and because the stakes are so high and there is so much money involved and there are so many poor folk willing to risk it all, things have gotten incredibly brutal, both as the drug gangs fight each other, and as they fight the often corrupt police for a slice of the pie . . . the violence is heinous and terroristic and the trade is global and difficult to trace-- as the drug lords rely on lots of freelance help for assassinations and transport and smuggling and raw materials-- and while good intelligence can help to bring down big players, there is always someone else ready to step in and make the big money, if only for a limited time (the days of Pablo Escobar are over) and Grillo makes the typical case for legalization of drugs-- at least marijuana, but also perhaps cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, and whatever else is coming across the border-- because that is the only way to limit the power of these very organized paramilitary economic insurrectionists who are essentially psychotic . . . there was a time in the '70's when it looked like legalization would happen, but then we "just said no," but perhaps it's time to review drug possession policy again-- considering the mounting death toll and the fact that some of the cartel drug violence violence is creeping across the border (but not much because the Mexicans know what is good for business) may lead to a viable debate about drug legalization . . . anyway, the book is a good read if you want to know the ins and outs of this atrocious situation just South of us: nine Zetas out of ten.

Non-Fiction/Fiction/Non-fiction Drug War Sandwich

I was so enthralled by Don Winslow's brutal and intense semi-fictional account of America's war on drugs (Power of the Dog) that I decided to read some non-fiction on the subject; after a bit of research I decided to purchase the Kindle version of Ioan Grillo's El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency . . . and a few pages into it, one of the anecdotes sounded familiar, and so I checked this blog and it turns out I read Grillo's book exactly two years ago . . . but even though I felt like an idiot for purchasing a book that I once borrowed from the library, now the story makes a lot more sense -- I know which characters are real, which are fictional, and which are fictionalized versions of real people: I highly recommend both of these books, and there is one more book on this topic that I want to tackle-- because I've heard such great things about it-- a non-fiction account by Elaine Shannon called Desperados: Latin Druglords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win.