THE FIX

By Michael Massing

Simon & Schuster. 335 pp. $25

Reviewed by Roberto Suro, a staff writer for The Washington Post and the
author of "Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming
America."

December 1970 turns out to have been an oddly pivotal moment in the
saga of U.S. drug control policies. Already struggling with an
inner-city heroin epidemic, the Nixon administration was stunned to
discover exploding levels of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam. Two
teams of experts were completing reports on the most effective
treatment methods; a government panel favored psychiatric care while a
group of outsiders recommended methadone, a substitute drug that cuts
the craving for opiates. In the midst of it all Elvis Presley showed
up at the White House in velvet pants and cape, volunteering to help
fight drugs. Once in the Oval Office, Presley denounced the Beatles as
"anti-American," posed for a now-famous photograph and asked for a
narcotics officer's badge, which was duly handed over.

Six months later Richard M. Nixon became the first president to
declare war on drugs. As Michael Massing reveals in The Fix, his
captivating account of all the drug wars that followed, Nixon was the
first and only president to wield the treatment of addicts as a
strategic weapon. Massing argues that, just as Nixon was secure enough
about his anti-communist credentials to go to China, he was
law-and-order enough to see hard-core drug use as a public health
challenge rather than as a battle to be won with police and prisons.

Nixon also appears to have been more realistic than any of his
successors about the prospects for halting the flow of drugs from
overseas. In one of the many vignettes that enliven this book, Massing
tells of a briefing by a top narcotics cop who boasts to Nixon that
heroin seizures and arrests are way up and that more are underway.
Nixon replies, "Let me ask you this, are we taking one step forward
and two steps back? Is there any less narcotics coming into the United
States? Are we solving the problem?" The reply, as Massing writes, was
"just silence." The same question might be asked today, and in
Massing's view the answer would be no different despite the vast sums
spent on trying to eradicate crops, cut supply lines and incarcerate
the merchants.

The long subtitle of The Fix on the dust jacket puts Massing's
argument in simple terms: "Under the Nixon Administration, America Had
an Effective Drug Policy. WE SHOULD RESTORE IT. (Nixon Was Right)." In
fact, this oversimplifies. Massing, a veteran magazine writer who was
named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, did not write a mere policy rant.
The Fix offers astute Washington reporting that captures the sweep of
policy, personalities and politics that have driven drug warfare --
without smothering the reader with inside-the-Beltway detail.

Moreover, the Washington chapters are sandwiched between two narrative
sections that tell the story of Raphael Flores, a heroic community
worker in East Harlem, who struggles to run a treatment referral
service in the midst of the crack epidemic. Flores fights hard for
every addict, sometimes spending days to get a single person into a
detoxification program. His one-on-one struggles not only offer a
dramatic contrast to the policy history but also illuminate Massing's
larger point.

The drug debate, he argues, has fallen into a sterile contest between
two equally misguided antagonists: those who would back an escalating
war on drugs and those who favor legalization. And the perennial
preoccupation with recreational use -- such as today's concern with
teenagers and marijuana -- is a distraction. Instead, Massing contends
that hard-core addicts cause most of the crime and other social
problems associated with drugs and that a national network of clinics
offering treatment on demand offers the best alternative to current
policies.

Even as federal drug-control spending has nearly quadrupled in the
past decade to reach $17 billion a year, the priorities have hardly
changed. Year after year about two-thirds of the money goes to attack
supply by arresting and jailing traffickers or interdicting smugglers
on the high seas while only a third goes to reducing demand through
education programs and the treatment of drug abusers. Massing
concludes that by just going to a 50-50 split, much could be
accomplished in reducing the most troublesome forms of addiction.

To support his recommendations, Massing relies heavily on Nixon's
success in using extensive treatment to stem the heroin crisis of the
early 1970s, and indeed it is hard to find other parallels that test
his views. But the world of the streets has changed. Massing readily
admits that the variety and insidiousness of the drugs available today
make treatment, whether psychiatric or chemical or a combination of
the two, much more challenging. And aside from the advent of
widespread crack and methamphetamine use, the number of addicts has
increased tenfold.

But the most sobering caveat to Massing's argument comes from his
hero, Raphael Flores. We see him struggling not just with the shortage
of treatment spaces but also with the manic wreckage of addicts'
lives. Even if each of the nearly 3 million Americans classified as
hard-core users of heroin and cocaine could be matched with the
specific treatment that would benefit them best, and Washington paid
for it all, it would take an army of community workers as selfless and
as intelligent as Flores to make it work.