HIGH ANXIETY

Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, by Mike Gray,
New York: Random House, 251 pages, $23.95

Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, by Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan, New
York: Lindesmith Center, 241 pages, $13.95 paper

Toward the end of Drug Crazy, Mike Gray takes us to the port of Los
Angeles, where shipping containers from all over the world, carrying
car parts, compact disc players, rattan furniture, and who knows what
else, are transferred from enormous vessels to trucks. This is one of
more than 300 ports of entry into the United States. "Los Angeles
alone will land 130,000 containers this month," Gray writes. "Customs
inspectors will examine 400. The other 129,600 will pass through
without so much as a tip of the hat....The entire annual cocaine
supply for the United States would fit in just thirteen of those steel
boxes. A year's supply of heroin could be shipped in a single container."

The image is worth remembering the next time a politician talks about
"cutting off the flow of drugs," as if the only obstacle were a lack
of resolve. The chief virtue of Gray's book, which includes some
firsthand reporting but relies heavily on secondary material and does
not offer much in the way of fresh analysis, is his ability to
succinctly and vividly communicate the futility of prohibition. A
screenwriter and director by trade, Gray has an eye for dramatic
juxtapositions and telling details, along with a smooth narrative
style that is rarely found in books about drug policy. As a result,
Drug Crazy is more accessible, though less rigorous and thorough, than
the scholarly work on which Gray draws. For a general audience, it is
probably also much more persuasive.

Say you want to convince someone that "source control"--a euphemism
for destroying drug crops and encouraging farmers to grow something
else--will never have a substantial or lasting impact on the supply of
cocaine. You could cite reports from the RAND Corporation, the General
Accounting Office, and congressional subcommittees. Or you could
recommend Gray's sixth chapter, "The River of Money," where he
observes: "The coca plant...is almost indestructible. It will grow
anywhere, including the sheer face of a cliff, and it will flourish in
soil too poor to support anything else. It has built-in resistance to
local bugs, and unlike tomatoes, rice, or beans--which have to be
reseeded each season--a single coca plant can last forty years.
Instead of one or two crops a year, you can harvest coca leaves every
ninety days. As a farmer-friendly shrub, about the only thing that
could beat Erythroxylon coca would be a money tree."

Similarly, Gray drives home the enormous profits created by
prohibition: "From farm to lab, it takes about 250 pounds of leaves,
worth say $150, to make a pound of cocaine you can sell in the
provincial capital for $1,500. But it is in the next step--getting it
from the jungle to the streets of Cleveland--that the price takes a
spectacular leap from $1,500 a pound to $15,000. This staggering
profit reflects the risk involved in moving the product from factory
to market." The profit margin for heroin is even bigger: "A kilo of
coke worth $2,000 in Bogota might bring $30,000 in Los Angeles, but
the identical block of heroin--only $6,000 in Colombia--could go for
$100,000 up north." It is hard to see how law enforcement agencies can
stand between determined criminals and this kind of business
opportunity.

Gray notes the temptations they face when they try. A Chicago
detective asks him to ponder a scenario: "You walk in a room--you're
making forty-five thousand a year--and there's a million dollars in
cash, and the guy jumps out the window. Do you chase him? Or do you
figure this is far enough?"

Prohibition breeds other kinds of corruption as well. Gray rides with
a group of cops who stop six black teenagers for no particular reason,
verbally abuse them, search them for drugs, find nothing, and let them
go. After this episode, one of the cops turns to him and asks, "So
what do you think the long-term sociological implications of this shit
will be?"

Gray observes assembly-line justice on the night shift at the Cook
County Courthouse, where he finds that police often misrepresent the
circumstances in which they find drugs so the evidence will be
admitted. "They lie, so we lie," one cop tells him. A public defender
notes that most of these cases involve simple possession, "so you have
a cop committing a greater felony [perjury] to convict a lesser
felony. It's gotta have an impact on a cop to stand up and lie on a
regular basis and think nothing of it."

Gray perceptively connects these routine violations to the motivation
behind the Fourth Amendment, which grew largely out of anger at
heavy-handed British efforts to locate smuggled goods. "In the drug
war," he writes, "we have discovered what King George understood so
clearly in the 1770s: it's practically impossible to catch buyers and
sellers of contraband if you stick to the rules. The illegal transfer
of goods between two people who are in agreement is a tough act to
interrupt."

By exploring how drug law enforcement actually works, Gray
demonstrates that prohibition is self-defeating, that it cannot
achieve its official goal of "a drug-free America." He also shows that
many people get trampled on the road to that ever-receding utopia. But
this is not enough to persuade the public that we would be better off
without prohibition. To do that, you have to assuage people's fears
about what the world would be like if the government stopped trying to
dictate the contents of our bloodstreams.

In this task, Gray is only partly successful. He highlights the
bigoted hysteria underlying the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 and the
Marihuana Tax Act of 1937: the talk of "numberless dope fiends,"
"cocaine niggers," marijuana-crazed Mexicans, and sinister Chinese
luring white women into their opium dens. He shows how drug users were
dehumanized, depicted as vampires who "infected everything they
touched." Heroin was said to "transform the addict into a monster who
has no control over himself and is compelled to spread his disease
like Count Dracula."

Gray contrasts this image with a 1914 report from the city health
officer of Jacksonville, Florida, who found that "a very large
proportion of the users of opiate drugs"--more than 80 percent--"were
respectable hard-working individuals in all walks of life." Gray
observes: "While it may seem bizarre to read that narcotics addicts
can hold down jobs and be useful, productive citizens, it turns out
there is no scientific evidence to the contrary. In fact, the medical
literature is filled with thoroughly documented records of addicts who
functioned normally throughout their lives."

On the same page, however, Gray asserts that "a junkie, though
starving, will trade food for dope." Later he uncritically repeats
another prohibitionist article of faith: "Crack cocaine, of course, is
an unparalleled menace." Since he does not bother to explain why,
readers are left to imagine the worst.

More fundamentally, Gray seems to endorse the disease model of
addiction, which says drug abuse is a disorder that should be treated
by medical professionals. The idea that heavy drug users suffer from a
compulsive illness may encourage compassion rather than hostility, but
it is not likely to reassure people who worry about the consequences
of repealing prohibition. Although less sinister, the drug user as
patient shares with the drug user as vampire one important
characteristic: Neither can be expected to control his impulses. This
assumed lack of responsibility is especially troubling when linked to
Gray's suggestion that heroin "be given away to serious addicts."

Gray is more persuasive when he talks about marijuana, which he
identifies as the "linchpin" of prohibition. "Take reefer out of the
equation," he writes, "and the number of illegal drug users instantly
drops from thirteen million to three million, and the drug war shrinks
from a national crusade to a sideshow." People are often surprised to
hear that marijuana is the main target of the war on drugs, accounting
for more than two-fifths of drug arrests, but it could hardly be
otherwise. Cannabis is by far the most widely used illegal drug: more
than four times as popular as cocaine, more than 40 times as popular
as heroin. Survey data indicate that about 70 million Americans,
one-quarter of the population, have tried it.

The fact that so many of today's voters smoked pot when they were in
high school or college creates a serious credibility problem for the
government. "When they failed to experience the instant insanity that
the authorities had promised," writes Gray, "it was for many an
epiphany more powerful than the drug itself--the realization that the
government makes stuff up....To bring these skeptics on board the war
on drugs, it was necessary to convince them that the basic facts about
marijuana had changed dramatically." Hence the ongoing propaganda
campaign warning us that marijuana is 1) more dangerous than we used
to think, or 2) more dangerous than it used to be.

In Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan
carefully refute both of these claims. The book is divided into 20
chapters, each addressing a particular belief about marijuana
illustrated by quotations from public officials or other sources
sympathetic to prohibition. Zimmer, a sociologist at the City
University of New York, and Morgan, a physician and professor of
pharmacology at the CUNY Medical School, provide extensive references
on topics such as addiction, brain function, pulmonary effects,
highway safety, and marijuana use during pregnancy. Their meticulous,
dispassionate, and concise summaries of the scientific literature make
the book a useful primer and a valuable research guide.

Despite decades of research, Zimmer and Morgan show, there is still
little evidence of significant hazards associated with moderate
marijuana use. The most serious health risk of heavy marijuana smoking
is probably bronchitis. Lung cancer is possible in theory, but you'd
have to smoke a hell of a lot to approximate the risk faced by the
typical tobacco smoker.

Zimmer and Morgan also demolish claims about marijuana's psychological
effects, including "amotivational syndrome." Their critique of the
"gateway theory"--the idea that marijuana use leads to the use of more
dangerous drugs--is particularly incisive. Prohibitionists are fond of
saying that people who smoke pot are 85 times as likely to use cocaine
as people who never try marijuana, which sounds like strong evidence
for the gateway theory. But as Zimmer and Morgan note, "The `risk
factor' is large not because so many marijuana users experiment with
cocaine, but because very few people try cocaine without trying
marijuana first."

To show why it does not necessarily follow that smoking pot makes you
more likely to snort cocaine, they offer an analogy: "Most people who
ride a motorcycle (a fairly rare activity) have ridden a bicycle (a
fairly common activity). Indeed, the prevalence of motorcycle riding
among people who have never ridden a bicycle is probably extremely
low. However, bicycle riding does not cause motorcycle riding, and
increases in the former will not lead automatically to increases in
the latter."

The book likewise makes short work of the argument that pot is more
hazardous nowadays because it's much more potent than it was when Bill
Clinton and Al Gore were toking up. First, claims of dramatic
increases in THC content are based on faulty sampling and invalid
comparisons. Second, even if average potency has risen, that would
tend to reduce health risks, since people would smoke less to achieve
the same effect.

Perhaps it's encouraging that defenders of prohibition are resorting
to such easily refuted arguments, which are so clearly aimed at
explaining away the hypocrisy of politicians who want to arrest people
for doing something those lawmakers once did with impunity. The heated
reaction of drug czar Barry McCaffrey and other federal officials to
the medical marijuana movement--which threatens to undermine just one
of the 20 myths that Zimmer and Morgan dissect--also suggests a
certain desperation.

The Clinton administration's official justification for the marijuana
status quo, as summed up by Secretary of Health and Human Services
Donna Shalala, goes like this: "Marijuana is illegal, dangerous,
unhealthy, and wrong." There's no denying that first part, and Zimmer
and Morgan do an admirable job of discussing just how "dangerous" and
"unhealthy" marijuana really is. But what does it mean to say that a
plant is "wrong"? It seems to mean that no good can possibly come of
it. To admit that anyone--even a cancer patient undergoing
chemotherapy--could smoke pot and be better off as a result would be
to admit that the federal government has been lying to the American
people about marijuana for more than 60 years.

Like McCaffrey and Shalala, Gray sees medical marijuana as a grave
threat to the war on drugs. "Prohibition, as a policy, can only
ratchet in one direction," he writes. "Each failure must be met with
more repression. Any step backward calls into question the fundamental
assumption that repression is the solution....Marijuana is the pawl on
the ratchet, the little catch that keeps the drum from unwinding....If
somebody jiggles that pawl and the drum slips, support for the current
policy will plummet like a loose cage in a mineshaft, because it
cannot sustain a serious evaluation." I'm not sure he's right, but I
like the metaphor.