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Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
In a blistering expose based on interviews with policy makers and a catalog of damning statistics, journalist Dan Baum shows how America's war on drugs went from a politically potent campaign play to today's multibillion-dollar government boondoggle--a "war" that's run roughshod over Constitutional rights and put a quarter of young black men behind bars without so much as denting the demand for drugs.
In a retrospective look at the war on drugs in the United States, journalist Dan Baum calls the nation's drug policy "as expensive, ineffective, delusional and destructive as government gets." He examines the Nixon White House's effort to turn the drug war to political advantage and the Carter Administration's brief flirtation with decriminalizing marijuana. He also details the cover-ups and blunders of some of the biggest drug busts in the country's history. Yet despite the policy's ineffectiveness, at least 85 percent of Americans oppose legalization. Baum sheds light on the reasons for this issue and calls for radical compromise.
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| Amazing information; well researched. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I heard about this book about 7 years ago. Reading it has given me more historical facts on why the drug war failed!
As a cop, it did not take long for me to see that in my everyday work.
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| the real dope, and some real dopes |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Not often does a book manage to be thoroughly depressing, and irresistibly gripping at the same time. Dan Baum pulls it off with style here.
In the face of Baum's soberly marshaled evidence the core thesis of the book becomes indisputable: the never-ending War on Drugs is a political ploy both parties are wedded to because fear gets votes, and makes a marvelous rationale for bigger bureaucracies, more government spending and deeper intrusion into the lives of the usual suspects.
Baum shows that nobody running this "war" could imagine drugs will disappear from American life, but pretending to hold off hordes of pop-eyed, drooling perverts has morphed from a good scare tactic for the Silent Majority to an absolute requirement for anybody who aspires to elective office.
He debunks claims that outlawing marijuana keeps kids away from heroin and cocaine so thoroughly you can't escape sharing his conclusion: marijuana's illegal because there are a lot of voters who'd like to outlaw being weird, lazy or unkempt; because catching pot growers, dealers and smokers creates a lot of jobs; and (he doesn't say outright, but you can't help figuring) because legalizing marijuana would be the thin end of the wedge that might take all the profit out of the cocaine and heroin industries.
What I found much more disturbing than the cynical futility of our drug laws--which hasn't really been news for decades--was the catalog of Constitutional rights we've lost to make things easier for the lawmen.
By the end of this book, it's hard to resist the conclusion that the '60s not only failed to revolutionize American politics, but provoked a current of revulsion against the supposed abuse of Constitutional protections--especially the Fourth Amendment--that has segued seamlessly into the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. Anybody for a police state?
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| AWSOME! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The most comprehensive book I've read on how our drug policy got to where it is now. Very helpful to read index of character to keep track of whose who.
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| A great book!! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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This book was a complete and thorough account of the history of US drug war. I loved it.... it was unbiased and covered all the facts.
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| The War on Drugs? An Abysmal Failure |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Each year illicit drugs claim the lives of at least 450 Australians. In WA alone, heroin overdoses have cost more than one life per week so far this year. Politicians, health officials, the police and community in general are struggling to devise a solution to this drug menace.
American journalist, Dan Baum, in 'Smoke and Mirrors', has convincingly shown how NOT to approach the problem. Drawing on extensive research in the US, he begins his account after President's Nixon's election in 1968 and traces the ultimately futile War on Drugs through to the early phases of the Clinton Administration. Baum takes the reader through a series of case studies, anecdotes and interviews with key players in the drug war, and repeatedly exposes the cynicism, folly, ineptitude and sometimes racism of politicians and bureaucrats in trying to cope with drug use and abuse in society. Always in the background and, for Baum, at the heart of the problem, is the hitherto unchallenged policy of prohibition which Baum makes clear is seriously flawed in both practice and principle.
The cost of this unswerving campaign is staggering by any account. During the Bush years alone, $120 billion was spent on the Drug War. In addition, there has been the enormous cost in terms of human rights violations and crushed civil liberties, best documented by Baum in the harassment, imprisonment and occasionally shooting, of "harmless potheads and the generally peaceful growers who supply them".
The much-vaunted War on Drugs had its genesis in the turbulent 1960s when the counter-culture - as manifested in the massive Vietnam War protests, rock music and alternative lifestyles - reached its zenith. For Nixon, marijuana was a potent symbol of such "decadence" and its use was vigorously opposed primarily for this reason - not because of its pharmacological properties. Indeed, Baum makes clear that the Drug War has generally had little to do with drugs per se and a lot to do with crude political opportunism.
Seizing upon the issue of drugs to target political opponents, the Nixon White House went as far as to enlist television producers in the anti-drug fight through popular cop shows and sitcoms such as Mannix, Mod Squad, Hawaii-Five-O, Mission Impossible and My Three Sons. What they didn't expect, from another quarter in the entertainment industry, was Elvis Presley's unsolicited arrival at the White House in 1971 complete with a nickel-plated .45 automatic as a gift for the President. Elvis virtually begged to be co-opted into the White House's anti-drug campaign but seemed just as keen to souvenir another police badge of which he was an avid collector. The supreme irony, noted by Baum, is that the "King", a legendary dopehound, was a credentialed Special Assistant in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs when he died in 1977 of what was essentially a drug overdose.
By the mid-1970s when Jimmy Carter was elected President, drugs had all but disappeared from the political radar. A more enlightened drug policy was adopted even if it was orchestrated by politically naive advisers. A Presidential Commission on Marijuana, stacked with conservatives, made the embarrassing recommendation in 1970 that marijuana be decriminalised, a step which Nixon refused to consider. In fact, he blamed the Jews for wanting to liberalise America's drug laws.
However, the War on Drugs was resurrected with a vengeance when Ronald Reagan took office in 1982. Within a short space of time there were savage cuts to drug prevention and treatment, and a boost to "hard" drug enforcement bodies, eg. the Coast Guard, FBI and the increasingly powerful Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). More significantly, draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws were passed leading to a doubling of the prison population during the Reagan years. The ideological shift saw the leadership of drug policy taken away from doctors and scientists, and passed to untrained, inexperienced and emotionally motivated parents. As a consequence, the drug war was sharply directed at teenagers and those who allegedly fostered their habits such as makers of drug paraphernalia. It was hardly surprising then, that a full 83% of Americans surveyed in 1986 believed it was proper to "dob-in" to the police family members who consumed drugs. One teenage girl in California who did so, soon afterwards found herself placed in foster care as a ward of the state while her parents faced 3 years in gaol.
The arrival of cocaine then its derivative, crack into the drug mainstream in the 1980s - both largely media beat-ups according to Baum - fueled wild speculation. By then, anti-drug rhetoric was reaching fever-pitch as evidenced by bizarre and hysterical pronouncements from those in the forefront of the drug debate. One prominent Congressman wanted to exile drug offenders to remote Pacific islands. William Bennett, Reagan's top drug czar and himself a chain-smoker, suggested beheading drug dealers while one of his high-ranking colleagues ventured the opinion that "homosexuality seems to be something that follows from marijuana use". Former LAPD chief, Darryl Gates, proclaimed that "casual drug users should be taken out and shot ...". Even Nancy Reagan, who framed the naive slogan of "Just Say No" to drugs, weighed in to the debate on recreational drug use. Brimming with indignation, she declared that the casual drug user is an "accomplice to murder".
Meanwhile, those dissenting voices critical of the War on Drugs often remained one step ahead of drug enforcement authorities. Baum recounts several amusing instances of citizens who turned the tables on officious bureaucrats and ridiculed the po-faced anti-drug zealots. For example, when urine-testing became widespread in American workplaces, wily entrepreneurs started selling pre-bottled, drug-free urine through mail-order catalogues. A drug legalisation advocate embarrassed the McDonald's hamburger chain by pointing out that its plastic coffee stirrers were being used as cocaine spoons. McDonald's promptly recalled the offending items amidst great embarrassment. And when drug-sniffing dogs at airports were nabbing traveller's with large cash deposits, procedures had to be re-evaluated when it was discovered that minute traces of cocaine are present on up to 96% of all US currency bills.
In the concluding stages of Baum's account of the unwinnable War on Drugs, he points to the growing chorus of law enforcement agents, public health experts, judges, academics, influential newspaper editors and a few brave politicians who have begun to question the cost-effectiveness of prohibition and unswerving commitment to zero tolerance of drug use. Although he doesn't flag any alternatives to these failed policies, Baum makes it clear that the longstanding taboo of discussing any policy other than total prohibition, needs to be lifted.
Baum ends his highly readable and entertaining book with a telling quote from (non-inhaler) President Bill Clinton who stated in 1992 that, "The definition of insanity is doing the same old thing over and over again and expecting a different result". All politicians, please take note.
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