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-Caveat Lector-
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/03/books-lewis.php
DECEMBER 6 - 12, 2002
Drugs, Guns and Money
Busted, a new anthology, and the case for legalization
by Judith Lewis
(Illustration by Tavis Coburn)
JUST ABOUT EVERYONE HATES THE WAR ON Drugs. Public
officials and pundits at every point along the
political spectrum, from the governors of New Mexico
and Minnesota to the former mayor of Baltimore, have
railed against its wastefulness; Detroit Police Chief
Jerry Oliver blames it for exacerbating inner-city
crime. William F. Buckley calls it a "plague that
consumes an estimated $75 billion per year in public
money"; Christopher Hitchens has labeled it
"grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering." According
to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last
year, three-quarters of the country believes the drug
war is failing. Enter the words "end the war on drugs"
into Google, and you'll get some 2,400 links, leading
to the Web sites of religious groups, corporate-media
sources and drug-legalization advocacy groups.
You might also get a couple of "sponsored links" --
paid advertisements Google coughs up when you search
for certain keywords. One evening I got two: an ad for
Questia.com, where you can "research the War on Drugs
at the world's largest online library," and another
for www.mymeds.org, advertising "Xanax, Valium,
Lortab, etc. (Import a 90-day personal supply)." The
irony is obvious, and clichéd enough to be comical: As
Mike Gray points out in the introduction to his new
anthology, Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and
Washington's War on Drugs, the U.S. government spends
over $40 billion annually to promote the cause of a
drug-free America, while Bob Dole appears on national
television shilling for Viagra. Marijuana is
non-lethal and non-addictive, but you can't talk about
it on the phone; Xanax is known to be dangerously
addictive and Valium is responsible for thousands of
deaths by overdose every year, but both are readily
available with the click of a mouse.
"There has never been a drug-free society anywhere,"
argues Gray, also author of the 1998 Drug Crazy: How
We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, "least
of all in the United States where the dividing line
between legal and illegal seems almost whimsical."
This deep societal muddle-mindedness finds a parallel
in public attitudes toward the control of illegal
substances. Despite a majority vote of non-confidence
for the drug war, the Pew study found that most
Americans still defend its tactics. Over half of the
people interviewed believed that arresting and locking
up both drug users and dealers were the best solutions
to our drug problems, even while our prisons fill to
bursting with nonviolent offenders. Just as many poll
participants agreed that more needed to be done to
halt the importation of illegal substances, even
though attempts to shut down the international market
have only contributed to a more sophisticated network
of international criminals willing to risk their lives
to satisfy the lucrative American market. And so the
drug war continues unabated, with the Bush
administration -- for which legalization proponents
once held out hope -- amping up spending on
interdiction and enforcement and aiming to expand
punishable offenses to include driving while under the
influence of yesterday's marijuana. The DEA, in an
effort to make wayward states comply with the federal
ban on any kind of marijuana use, has stooped so low
that it's raiding California hospices and carting away
the terminally ill. "The War on Drugs," says Ethan
Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a think tank
advocating drug-law reform, "just keeps getting bigger
and meaner."
BUSTED BEGINS WITH AN ESSAY BY T.D. ALLMAN called
"Blow Back," an earlier version of which ran in
Rolling Stone last spring, just as the billion-dollar
defoliation and harassment effort known as "Plan
Colombia" was found to have resulted in a 25 percent
increase in coca production. It's an apt beginning:
Allman uses the blunders of Colombia as a metaphor for
U.S. drug policy, which "trundles along, divorced from
reality." The War on Drugs has become, he argues, an
institutionalized arm of the federal government, "much
like the Department of the Interior." Among the
salaried careerists who stroll the manicured lawns of
Arlington, Virginia, where the DEA is headquartered,
Allman detected "no real sense that the War on Drugs
was something that might actually be lost or won, and
end someday."
Most of the articles that follow in Busted, such as
Joshua Wolf Shenk's 1999 Harper's magazine piece
"America's Altered States: When Does Legal Relief of
Pain Become Illegal Pursuit of Pleasure?," will be
familiar to anyone who's been casually tracking U.S.
drug policy. Oliver Stone's legendary, heartbreaking
interview with the seemingly gracious Manuel Noriega
("I understand that the nature of your profession is
sensationalist . . .," the general tells the director,
"but I want to tell you there is another truth in this
situation"), which ran in The Nation in 1994, is
reprinted here. So is New York Times columnist A.M.
Rosenthal's coffee-klatch phone call with Clinton's
drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, which was picked up by
Harper's after California voters approved the
distribution of medical marijuana with Proposition
215. ("Where do we go from now?" pleads the perplexed
and sympathetic journalist.) Gray's genius is not that
he's dug up much new material, but that he's spliced
the familiar information with lesser-known texts in a
way that puts the issues in a persuasive context.
Cast in the light of Allman's "Blow Back," for
example, it's much easier to absorb Craig Reinarman's
argument, from a 1998 issue of Het Parool, that the
U.S. fears Dutch drug policy because the Dutch have
demonstrated, with significant drops in both
drug-related crime and drug use, that legalization
works. After reading the accounts of European
countries that treat heroin addiction as a health
issue in Adam J. Smith's "America's Lonely Drug War,"
from Mother Jones magazine, the "Commonsense Drug
Policy" of Ethan Nadelmann, with its calls for clean
needles and methadone clinics, seems altogether
moderate and wholesome. In the shadow of Shenk's
treatise on the politics of pharmaceuticals, Dr.
Charles Grob's "Politics of Ecstasy," written by one
of the bravest and most outspoken proponents of
clinical MDMA in the medical establishment, rings
axiomatically true.
In fact, by the end of Busted, which concludes with
Lester Grinspoon, M.D., reminding us that, among other
things, if cannabis could be patented and profited
from, it would be legal by now, it seems clear that
the solution to both the drug war and our national
drug problem is, ironically, to legalize all drugs --
from heroin to methamphetamine to LSD. Let
injection-drug users shoot up in clinics until they're
ready to quit; let coffeehouses sell hash and
therapists treat their posttraumatic stress survivors
with MDMA-guided sessions. We could not be worse off
than we are now, with the highest rates of drug abuse,
drug-related violence and incarcerated drug offenders
in the world -- not to mention severely abridged civil
liberties. As Buckley himself once sagely observed,
"Marijuana has never kicked down anyone's door in the
middle of the night."
And so Busted does what more political anthologies
should -- it builds an implicit and convincing
argument, not simply and straightforwardly, but by
layering case after case until the evidence is
irrefutable. It may not have a profound impact on
government policy -- Busted is, after all, a book
aimed at the believers. It's not likely that someone
like Senator Orrin Hatch, who gets a half a million
dollars every campaign season from the same
pharmaceutical industry that bankrolled the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America, is going to pick
up Busted and experience some sort of lightning-bolt
flash of sagacity that will induce him to stop
sponsoring bills that extend the draconian provisions
of the crack-house law to raves. But as a source of
ammunition for opponents of the drug war, a manifesto
of reason, and a document of where our drug policy
stands now, Gray has compiled an invaluable and
comprehensive reference.
BUSTED: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington's
War on Drugs | Edited by Mike Gray | Thunder's Mouth
Press/ Nation Books | 350 pages| $18 paperback
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