Pamphlet Grows Into Popular Textbook

Greg Stiles

What began as a simple pamphlet for a small Medford company has turned into a juggernaut in the textbook world.

"Uppers, Downers, All Arounders" by Darryl Inaba and William Cohen has gone through six editions, with a seventh in the works, and is available in English, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and Czech.

More than 15,000 copies of the 600-page book, addressing psychoactive drugs and compulsive behaviors, are printed annually and used by more than 500 colleges and universities as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

All told, 200,000 copies have been printed, with the latest edition selling for $63 wholesale and available on Amazon.com for $78.

"It started as a support for a film we were doing back in 1989," says CNS Productions President Bill Cohen from his house in Medford. "It was originally going to be a 16- or 32-page pamphlet and just kept growing with each edition."

The book is consumed by aspiring law enforcement, counseling and teaching students as well as those who have grappled with addictions in the past.

"We've been very successful due to the fact we really try to give our teachers something more than just the book," says Ellen Cholewa, CNS general manager. "We provide them with a lot of teaching support materials."

The CNS Web site offers drug-related blogs, links to related sites, podcasts and a whole series of online videos -- ranging from 20 minutes to an hour -- for each chapter. A PowerPoint slide show covers each chapter of the book as well.

Publisher Paul Steinbroner, who now works out of Washington state, says the principals were attempting to sell rights overseas when a representative of Blackwell Publishing in England noted the work "read like a textbook."

After mulling over the comment, the principals took the idea to heart.

"It was the best rejection anyone could have," Steinbroner says. "We started hitting every school we could. We got orders and then repeat orders."

The DEA bought in, purchasing mass quantities; Sacramento State was the first college to sign on.

"By the fall, colleges were ordering 200 to 500 and by then we were feeling pretty comfortable," Steinbroner says. "Surviving the first printing is always a big thing."

CNS has seven employees, including the three principals. All but Steinbroner are based in Medford, where the staff handles management and marketing duties. Production work is done in Iowa.

Steinbroner and Cohen's association goes back 35 years. In 1984, they collaborated on a film project when Cohen was communications director for the Haight-Ashbury Drug Detoxification, Rehabilitation and Aftercare Project, which Inaba oversaw.

"We reviewed 300 drug films available at the time and really couldn't recommend a one of them," Cohen says.

Inaba, an associate clinical professor of pharmacy at the University of California School of Pharmacy, says his goal was to make the information understandable to a wide range people and not just scientists involved in the field.

"What we saw was so woefully inadequate and that was the stimulus for me to put together a piece that was more factual and a much wider breadth of information," Inaba says. "We were sure we were accurate in our thinking, but it was surprising people picked it up so quickly and recommended it. It filled a very wide hole in what was needed."

Pitted against McGraw Hill's "Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior" by Oakley Stern Ray and Charles Ksir, "Uppers, Downers, All Arounders" established a beachhead with its first edition and has continued to gobble up territory ever since.

The competing text, Inaba says, "is kind of boring."

The biggest change came in preparing the third edition, Steinbroner says.

"We shot a lot of photographs in big museums in France and became more visual," Steinbroner says. "We started getting into the footnotes and academic citations; prior to that it was like 'Darryl said."

Later editions, he says, keep instructors up to speed in a rapidly developing field.

"We're working with at-risk populations, seeing the new drugs on the street and the treatments when we do research," Inaba says. "That's kept us on top of things."

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