DRUG CRAZY- How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out; By
Mike Gray; (Random House: 251 pp., $23.95)

Dope, especially the business of dope, and the response it provokes in
various governments, not to mention the breathless response it
provokes in such institutions as the press, is a thrilling spectator
sport, and nothing is more spellbinding than the numbers.

Colombia exports to the United States about a ton of cocaine a day, an
average of 1,000 kilograms. It costs the larger of the cartels about
$4,000 to put a kilo on the street in Los Angeles, about 25% of the
average wholesale price. According to a former accountant for the Cali
cartel, that $4,000 cost-to-market includes raw material, processing,
protection, storage, bribery, pilots, aircraft, airstrip, aircraft
insurance, flight fuel, transportation of the dope through Mexico, and
wholesale distribution in the United States.

Yet, even by the most economical, in-house methods, it costs the same
cartel an additional 25% to launder its money. Handling the proceeds
of the sale, in terms of organizational cost, is just as expensive as
the product. More expensive, in fact. The burden of laundering and
investing profits has now become so onerous that it has spawned an
entire collateral service industry in Colombia, an illegal one, which
has attracted the interest of more than a hundred venture capitalists
there. They're known as money brokers, and many major traffickers
simply subcontract the work to them, paying about 30% after investment.

The late Tom Forcade, founder of High Times magazine, once said that
there are only two kinds of smugglers: those who need fork lifts and
those who don't. That was 20 years ago, in the early days of the
industry's expansion. Today you know you're a major trafficker when
the money is a bigger headache than the dope.

An estimated $25 billion in U.S. dope revenue is repatriated by
Colombian traffickers annually. And that's just the money generated by
cocaine. Of the 13 million regular users of illicit drugs in America,
77% spend (or also spend) their money on marijuana; about a million
buy heroin regularly (or at least frequently) half of whom are
considered addicts. But what we pay in hard currency for the dope we
use--even after adding the $17 billion budgeted annually at the
federal level, and perhaps that much again at combined state and local
levels, to combat its use, a total of about $50,000 a minute--is
dwarfed by the price we have paid over the last two decades in the
erosion of our civil liberties and corruption of our public
institutions to wage what the government promotes as its War on Drugs.

Much has been written about drug policy in the United States, and much
oratory has been expended in support of the current offensive, but
only an animated feature could convey the story of this nation's
disastrous attempt to legislate morality. Only a cartoon could
effectively communicate the slapstick. It was Lord Byron, a man who
could be trusted to misbehave in the absence of drugs, who said: 'And
if I laugh at any mortal thing, / 'Tis that I may not weep.'

'Drug Crazy,' by Mike Gray, is one of the few contributions to the
recent dope literature that displays any sense of humor on the
subject. That is not to say that his book is not serious, merely that
Gray does not let his passion for reason subvert a felicitous and very
entertaining prose style. The sanity he brings to the subject is
refreshing. His is easily the most enjoyable, and arguably the most
instructive, of four new books on drug policy, three of which cover
what is pretty much the same territory. If you pick only one, pick
his.

Stipulating the inarguable, that prohibition as policy has produced
the opposite of what was intended, Gray makes an airtight case for
reform and a very convincing case for legalization, concluding that "a
drug-free America has no more chance of success than an alcohol-free
America." (Page 188) Opening his book in present-day Chicago, and
flashing back from there to the early 1920's, when bootleggers ran the
city, he shows how the failure of the current drug war was inevitable.

Examining modern drug policy without first considering the sordid
history of alcohol prohibition in the United States is like trying to
appreciate Revelation without ever having read Genesis. Gray's
research, among other things, counters the claims of those who argue
that dope use would automatically rise in the absence of criminal
sanctions. The effect of Prohibition, he reports, was a dramatic drop
in the consumption of beer, while the sale of hard liquor doubled. The
equation was reversed by Repeal, and for the next 10 years the total
amount of alcohol consumed remained about the same. "State liquor laws
held down consumption about as well as Prohibition, but without all
the gunplay," he writes.

It is difficult to imagine any circumstance under which cocaine and
heroin might be more accessible than they are today. They travel
virtually unimpeded into the country. Wholesale prices are lower,
street-grade purity levels are higher, and availability is greater
than ever. Interdiction is merely notional, a consoling hypothesis:
It's not substantive; it's a state of mind. Dope of all kinds today,
with the possible exception of cheap marijuana, is just a phone call
away, and anyone can get his hands on as much as he cares to ingest.
As Gray points out, "You can buy it in the schoolyard, in the alley,
and you can buy it in small Indiana farm towns that just a few years
ago had never even heard of the stuff." (Page 189) Not only is it
cheap, but chances are you can have it delivered.

In the 1970s interdiction efforts significantly disrupted the
importation of bulk shipments of Colombian marijuana to the United
States, especially in the Caribbean. And among the more palpable
fruits of that success was the industrialization of cocaine, which
Colombian traffickers found to be far easier to transport and by far
the better bargain profit-wise, pound-for-pound. Spawned by that same
success was a domestic marijuana-growing enterprise of enormous scope
in the United States, the commercial and esthetic iterations of which
parallel those of the California wine industry.

Gray points to a University of Maryland survey of high-school students
who said that the drug most difficult to score today is not marijuana,
but alcohol. Which should not be surprising, he suggests: "Alcohol
distribution is controlled by the government. Drug distribution is
controlled by the mob."

The history of the U.S. drug war is a history driven by various
zealots--office holders, empire-building bureaucrats and others--who
in the main know little about drugs, but who have found a hard line on
their use be an easy position to hold. Discovering a wealth of
emotional rhetoric open to almost effortless manipulation, they have
promoted the drug threat often for no greater reason than to make
political capital.

As a result, the "U.S. Constitution is now so riddled with
drug-emergency exceptions it looks like the flag over Fort Sumter,"
writes Gray. (196) And it is therefore not surprising to find the
forces of reform being led by the nation's libertarians, among them
William F. Buckley, Jr., former Secretary of State George P. Schultz
and economist Milton Friedman, all of whom see in current policy an
eating away of our civil rights. Ours is a republic at least
predicated on the notion that rights are not something the government
grants but something the government cannot take away.

Dirk Chase Eldredge is among those conservative who advocate
legalization. His book, "Ending the War on Drugs," while as incisive
in many ways, is not so sophisticated as Gray's, but that may be one
of its strengths. Square by comparison, in both outlook and
style--there is nothing elegant about the way Eldredge writes--it may
be that much more persuasive to those on the other side of the issue.

Pointing out that 80% of the deaths associated with heroin and cocaine
are the result not of drug use, but of the illegal nature of the
market, Eldredge gives special weight to the crime and corruption of
public officials engendered by current policy. Everybody is on the
take. A further danger of that policy, he notes, is the disrespect for
the law that it breeds: "It is estimated that 63 percent of Americans
born since 1955 have used illegal drugs at one time or another. Each
year, more than 1.1 million of our citizens are arrested for either
possession of or trafficking in illicit drugs."

Criminalizing the behavior of a substantial number of the country's
citizens, at the expense of pursuing truly dangerous felons, has led
to a near collapse of the criminal justice system in the United
States. Courts have become virtually inaccessible. In many
jurisdictions today the typical probation or parole officer had more
than 200 offenders to supervise. What remained a fairly stable prison
population throughout the nation's history has more than tripled since
prosecution of the drug war. The U.S.Bureau of Prisons--the federal
system alone--spends about $2 billion a year to house drug offenders.
Between 1980 and 1990 the number of men and women being held in state
and federal custody more than doubled, to just over a million. In the
next six years it doubled again. By 1992 many facilities were
operating at over 200% capacity. That year the federal system was
holding about 60,000 prisoners, operating at 162% capacity, and half
of them were in for dope.

Eldredge, in delivering the bad news from the front, arrives with
logic, coherence and common sense on his side, but Gray, reporting
from the same battlefield, offers the more rewarding and comprehensive
analysis.

Michael Massing's "The Fix" is executed very professionally, and
written strictly by the numbers. He opens with a picture of drug
addiction on the streets of New York, cuts from there to the making of
policy in Washington, and after that all you need to know is in the
subtitle. A persuasive advocate of increased spending on drug
treatment 7/8 Nixon's policy--Massing offers beyond that little more
than more of the same. His beef is not with the bloated budget itself,
but merely with its priorities. The current budget is weighted 66% on
the supply side (enforcement) and 34% on the demand side (treatment).
He would like to see the percentages reversed. The government's
preoccupation with recreational dope use is a mission he
enthusiastically supports. Massing's enlistment is permanent--choosing
sides among bureaucrats, he is in the drug war to stay.

"Webs of Smoke," by Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, examines the
development of the international narcotics trade, specifically the
traffic in opium, and the relationships that developed between
traffickers and politicians, chiefly from 1907 to 1949. Academic
without being particularly scholarly, the book will appeal to only the
more strung-out dope policy junkies.

It is hard to envision a time when any of the chest heaving will end.
The drug war accounts for the livelihood of thousands of people whose
interests are heavily vested in its structural inability to deliver
any positive results--politicians, traffickers, bureaucrats and
law-enforcement officials employed by the drug enforcement industry,
not to mention everyone on the take--good guys and bad guys on all
sides of the issue and on both sides of the gun. We prosecute the drug
war not because it is effective, but because it is fundable. The DEA,
many of whose agents will admit as much off the record, was budgeted
last year at $1.2 billion. Ask the police chief in your local
community what percentage of his budget is earmarked for drug
enforcement; ask him to explain "equitable sharing," authorized by
Congress in 1985, whereby local law-enforcement agencies share in the
proceeds of assets forfeited in federal drug cases in which they
participate. We are a nation hooked on drug enforcement. Like the
citizens of Colombia and Mexico, we now live in a narcoeconomy. We've
seen this policy in action before. We heard the same government line
from soldiers prosecuting another of our disastrous wars: those GIs
quick to inform us from the jungles of Indochina that in order to save
the village we had to destroy it. - - -

Robert Sabbag Is the Author of "Snowblind: a Brief Career in the
Cocaine Trade"