Jerry Mandel is a leading historian, social researcher, and statistician of the War on Drugs. Mandel's collection of drug arrest and imprisonment statistics is probably the largest in the world. The past decade, he wrote two major historical articles: Soldier's Disease (a study of modern "experts" who falsely attributed the origins of a U.S. opiate use problem to Civil War conditions and medical ignorance); and Opening Shots in the War on Drugs (which describes the trademark aspects of the War on Drugs - huge profits, massive corruption, brutalization of large segments of the poorest minority groups, sensationalistic mass media reports, and shifts from mild to concentrated forms of a drug, following imposition of extremely high tariffs on opium smoking).Recently, Mandel has studied Cannabis Buyers Clubs in San Francisco and Oakland. In a forthcoming article, Harvey Feldman and he report that not only is cannabis an extraordinary medicine, but the clubs, themselves, serve a variety of medical functions which the medical professions probably could not provide even if marijuana was legalized.Currently, Mandel teaches at the University of California, Extension program in Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Sociology in 1969.

(1998). Opening shots in the war on drugs. In J. Fish (Ed.) How to Legalize Drugs. New York: Jason Aronson, Inc. Publishers.(1991). A racist elephant in the living room: Noticing the disproportionate consequences of U.S. drug policy. In A. Trebach & K. Zeese (Eds.) New Frontiers in Drug Policy. Washington, DC: Drug Policy Foundation.