Donald Chapin started practicing medicine in 1973. Many of his patients over the years have had serious problems with a variety of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs. He received his board certification by both the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Plastic Surgery and has been a longtime fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. His varied career has spanned many areas of medicine including general, thoracic, and cardiovascular surgery, trauma surgery, plastic surgery, and emergency medicine. He was a former staff surgeon at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla and an assistant clinical professor of surgery at UCSD Medical Center in San Diego. He worked for a few years as a jail doctor where his skills across all areas of medicine were tested. It was during that time that he gained his greatest insight into the use and abuse of mind-altering drugs, motivating him to subsequently intensively investigate that field for a number of years. His newly released book "I've Got the Blues" deals in depth with exactly what the subtitle says. It is an unbiased guide to the use, abuse, and potential dangers of psychoactive drugs. Several things make it different from other books dealing with this subject. First is the author's extensive experience as a surgeon and emergency physician providing care to thousands of patients taking illegal psychoactive drugs as well as many on psychiatric medication. Secondly he covers the entire spectrum of drugs that interact with the brain from the well-known illegal ones such as marijuana and cocaine to the widely prescribed medications such as benzodiazepines and antidepressants. With each group of drugs, he goes into a detailed discussion of their history, pharmacology, and how and why they are used. He cuts through many widely held beliefs that are based on disinformation and propaganda. He has no hidden agenda and simply wants to get to the truth of what all of these drugs do to the human brain, whether they are legal or illegal. Much of what people believe to be true about many of these drugs is often inaccurate and sometimes completely false. His goal is to expose the big lies and pervasive mythology such as the myth of biochemical imbalance as the cause of depression and other psychiatric disorders and the belief that prescription drugs such as antidepressants can cure mental disorders by correcting such a chemical imbalance. He wants to make