LOOKING FOR A FIX

WEBS OF SMOKE

Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade

By Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen

Rowman & Littlefield. 313 pp. $29.95

DRUG CRAZY

How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out

By Mike Gray

Random House. 251 pp. $23.95

The war on drugs is not succeeding, and both of these compact,
well-documented books help to explain why. To start with, the drug
traffickers have adapted rapidly to each new assault launched by the
government's anti-drug warriors. Now, aided by mobile phones,
communications jammers and other high-tech equipment, the traffickers have
become an ever more formidable enemy. According to a State Department
report, the smugglers have replaced the straightforward trafficking routes
of a decade ago with "a complex web of nodes and lines linking virtually
every country in the world to the main drug production and trafficking
centers." In the United States, a new generation of users is giving heroin
a new life, and the Colombian drug syndicates have decided to invest
heavily in the production of that drug.

How did this seemingly endless war on drugs begin in the first place, and
what are our chances of getting out of it? In Webs of Smoke, two scholars,
Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, track the history of the drug trade over
the first 50 years of this century. Their focus is on the entrepreneurial
side of the business. Using more than 200 recently declassified State
Department files of suspected narcotics traffickers as well as other
archives, they also provide detailed portraits of drug smugglers at work.

The leading traffickers portrayed in this book, like many skilled business
people, come across as extremely adaptable to market demands and highly
capable of countering those who would suppress them. They are
internationally minded, able to work with people from all nations. But they
are not part of any international conspiracy. Their alliances are
impermanent. They compete with each other. Their power shifts from group to
group and from country to country.

As Meyer and Parssinen describe it, as far back as the early 1900s the drug
trade involved relatively sophisticated smugglers from many nations. Take
the example of Paul Yip, a South China mid-level gangster who made a smooth
transition from merchant to opium smuggler. By the early 1930s, he was part
of a network spreading from Shanghai throughout China that used a Japanese
ship captain, among others, to import opium into China from Persia. "Paul
Yip had the temperament of a born opium smuggler," write Meyer and
Parssinen. "He was quick to recognize opportunity where others saw only
chaos in the shifting political alliances. He was willing to accommodate
any side, and he was a violent man. Aside from his smuggling activities, he
attracted the authorities' attention in 1935 when he came home one evening
to find one of his mistresses in bed with his gardener. He shot them both."

It was also in the 1930s that America got its first drug czar: Harry J.
Anslinger, a former railroad policeman who, as head of the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics, promised to make "unceasing war" on drug traffickers and on
drug addicts. Manipulating public fears of crime and of a global narcotics
conspiracy, Anslinqer shaped a government approach that for three decades
emphasized enforcement over treatment and rehabilitation. By the time he
retired in 1962, say Meyer and Parssinen, Anslinger appeared to have the
drug problem contained, but he could not have anticipated "the coming storm
of the 1960s, when America's youth rediscovered drugs."

In contrast with the scholarly tone of Web of Smoke, Mike Gray's Drug Crazy
is an angry book. Gray detects a decades-long pattern of officials
manipulating statistics and the public's fears in order to mobilize
billions of dollars in a futile effort to halt the drug trade. In the end,
Gray says, unprecedented penalties have fallen "on the heads of small-time
dealers and users instead of the major traffickers they were intended for."

From the streets of Chicago to the jungles of Peru, Gray vividly describes
the front lines of the drug war. His description of Cook County's night
drug court, more of a grim production line than a court of law, is
particularly disturbing. A policeman can decide whether to prosecute or
not. "This is the arena where the fault lines of American justice are
clearly visible," Gray writes. "Absolute power is inevitably subject to
political pressure and favoritism. The white kid in the Mercedes gets a
pass and the black kid in the car behind him gets five years without parole."

As for the war on drugs, Gray concludes that its failure can be seen on the
streets, where the drugs "are stronger, cheaper, more pure, and more widely
available than at any time in history. Everything from crack cocaine to
Dilaudid is just a phone call away and chances are they'll deliver." Prior
to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, if people wanted drugs "they at
least had to go to a drugstore," says Gray. "Now they can get anything they
want from the neighbor's kid." One consequence of the Harrison Act -- which
brought morphine, heroin and cocaine under federal control -- was to dry up
addicts' legal sources of drugs and make them more dependent on illegal
suppliers. According to Gray, "if Americans are to have any say at all in
what their teenagers are exposed to, they will have to take the drug market
out of the hands" of gangsters and cartels and "put it back in the hands of
doctors and pharmacists where it was before 1914."

At the least, these two books provide persuasive evidence that the war on
drugs has never worked well and that new approaches must be tried.