THE HIGH COSTS OF USER UNFRIENDLINESS

Waging A War On Drugs Has Not Led To Less Demand -- And Has Destroyed
Nations In The Process

ENDING THE WAR ON DRUGS: A Solution for America

By Dirk Chase Eldredge Bridge Works, 224 pp., $22.95

DRUG CRAZY: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out By Mike
Gray Random House, 240 pp., $23

THE FIX By Michael Massing Simon and Schuster, 336 pp.,
$25

IT'S BEEN nearly a decade since incoming president George Bush told
the country that the ``scourge'' of drugs in America would soon stop.
But despite the enormous sums poured into the drug war in the years
since -- now close to $17 billion a year at the federal level alone --
the news on the drug front is mostly bad. Even some of our most
fervent drug warriors are conceding that the scourge will be with us
for quite a while.

In the past few years, teen drug use is up, cocaine-related medical
emergencies have risen, heroin has returned to the cities (and
suburbs) with a vengeance, and a methamphetamine epidemic continues to
ravage the Western states. The drug barons in Latin America are richer
and more powerful than ever; revelations about the extent to which the
political institutions of their countries have been compromised by
drug money appear almost daily. As Michael Massing puts it in his
introduction to ``The Fix,'' ``It would be hard to think of an area of
U.S. social policy that has failed more completely than the war on
drugs.''

It's past time for a new approach, and these three books each claim to
offer one. All, from different perspectives, make a strong case that
what we're doing now cannot work. All three, less convincingly, offer
alternative solutions.

Criticism of the drug war isn't new, but these books -- especially
Massing's -- provide material we haven't seen before. And they should
convince anyone who still needs convincing that the track we've been
on for 25 years and more has been a social disaster. ``The Fix'' is
particularly illuminating on the political history of drug policy
since the 1970s. Massing shows us, in considerable detail, how
successive administrations have subordinated the search for a serious
drug policy to short-term political maneuvering, or ideological
warfare, or both. It's a dreary, often maddening story, but one that
needs telling -- and Massing tells it more thoroughly than anyone else
has so far.

With a sharp journalistic eye, Massing interweaves this history with
vignettes that reveal how national drug policy has affected the lives
of addicts and treatment providers in the real world. The result is a
book that makes very clear how desperately our drug policy has
departed from the realities of substance abuse in America. We've
failed, in Massing's view, by wasting resources on marijuana and
casual drug use, instead of targeting hard-core, chronic abusers of
heroin and cocaine in the inner cities; and, above all, by
shortchanging funding for drug treatment in favor of ``get tough''
posturing and ever-more-outlandish levels of incarceration.

Mike Gray's ``Drug Crazy'' is less detailed than ``The Fix,'' but
provides powerful corroboration of the unintended consequences of the
drug war. Gray takes us to the front lines of the drug war, on the
meaner streets of Chicago and above the jungles of Peru's Upper
Huallaga Valley.

Gray is especially compelling when he describes the truly frightening
state of things today in Colombia and Mexico, where the long reach of
drug money has created a kind of ``narcoparalysis'' that threatens the
most basic institutions of democracy. The level of corruption the drug
barons have engineered in several countries -- penetrating large
segments of the military and the police and reaching to the highest
levels of political office -- has no historical precedent. This is a
terrifying story, and Gray tells it well.

Dirk Chase Eldrege's ``Ending the War on Drugs'' lacks Gray's gritty
journalistic sweep but shares his belief that the unintended
consequences of a ``prohibitionist'' drug policy have been
catastrophic -- swamping the criminal justice system, exacerbating
racial divisions, spreading public corruption, and fostering crime.
Eldredge describes himself as a ``white, conservative Republican who
has passed the Medicare milestone'': His book reminds us that the
critique of American drug policy now spans most of the political spectrum.

ALMOST no one likes the drug war anymore, and these authors help us
understand why. But they are much stronger on criticizing what's gone
before than in telling us what we should do now.

For both Gray and Eldredge, the ``solution'' lies in ``taking the
profit out of the drug trade'' by allowing addicts to buy their drugs
from approved, tightly controlled legal outlets. We should stop trying
to create a ``drug free'' America, acknowledge that some people are
going to use drugs no matter what, and see to it that the supply is
taken out of the hands of brutal and predatory private cartels and
turned over to authorities who will, presumably, oversee the quality
of drugs and use the money from drug sales to fund more research,
treatment and education.

Up to a point, this argument makes considerable sense. We certainly
should explore ways to deal with drug abusers in less punitive ways.
Both books offer useful insights on how we might do that. (Gray
points, for example, to encouraging experiments with controlled
prescription of hard drugs in England and Switzerland.) But both
overstate the impact that kind of approach would have on the nation's
drug problem -- so much so that they undermine their case. Eldredge
even tells us that his proposal is ``as close to perfect as social
policy can be.''

Gray, for example, tells us that turning over control of drug
distribution to government-regulated outlets would abolish the drug
cartels and their power ``at the stroke of a pen.'' But his own
historical evidence suggests otherwise. Alcohol prohibition surely
helped fuel the rise of the Mafia in the Al Capone era, but ending
Prohibition didn't eliminate the Mafia. (And not only because the
Mafia got involved in drugs instead: That didn't happen on a large
scale until considerably later).

Gray and Eldredge insist that government-regulated drugs would
eliminate the black market, and with it the criminality that now
surrounds the drug trade. But unless we're ready to supply everyone --
including adolescents -- with all the drugs they want at a price all
of them, even the poorest, could afford, there will be pressure for a
black market to supply those we wouldn't sell to.

An abundance of research, moreover, tells us that much of the violence
that surrounds the elicit drug trade has little to do with the drug
business itself and everything to do with the culture and
circumstances of the people who tend to get involved in selling drugs.
Getting them out of the drug business, accordingly, doesn't
necessarily mean getting them out of the violence business.

Most important, in the absence of a credible strategy to reduce demand,
there will still be a huge appetite for drugs among a vast number of
Americans; and some of those drugs will continue to cause enormous damage
- -- to individual lives, to families and to entire communities. We don't
have to argue that drug consumption would increase under such a system to
recognize that, at best, it isn't likely to decrease. We didn't solve the
nation's alcohol problem by ending Prohibition: (indeed, as Gray and
Eldredge never tire of telling us, legal alcohol is a much greater problem,
in public health terms, than illegal drugs), and we won't end the drug
problem by ending the drug war.

Both Eldredge and Gray come perilously close to arguing that drug
prohibition is the cause of America's drug problem. But the argument
just doesn't bear scrutiny. Every country ``prohibits'' hard drugs;
but no other country, apart from a few Third World ``source'' nations,
has a drug problem like ours. If, as Eldredge maintains, America has
just 5 per cent of the world's population but consumes 60 percent of
the drugs, that alone tells us that prohibition isn't the only problem
here.

Both authors tend to duck the reality that our unusually high levels
of hard drug abuse in America are closely tied to our extremes of
poverty and social exclusion. Eldredge tends to see drug use as a
constant of human nature. ``The demand for mind-altering substances
has been a part of mankind since its beginning.'' Like most attempts
to blame social problems on a presumed universal human nature, this
idea founders against reality. Surely, when it comes to serious drug
abuse, human nature cannot be so oddly different in the United States
vs. say, Sweden, which is also strongly ``prohibitionist'' but has
nothing remotely resembling our drug problem, or the illegal profits
and violence, that go with it.

Gray and Eldredge, if pressed, would probably complain that they
didn't really mean that their strategy could be a ``solution'' to the
drug problem. But that's what they say, and it weakens their message.
That's unfortunate, because their most general point -- that we need
to seriously explore alternatives to our punitive and ineffective drug
war -- is right, and important. To make a convincing case for those
alternatives, however, we'll have to come up with more careful, and
less vulnerable, arguments.

SOMETHING similar happens with Massing's argument, which rejects any
form of legalization and instead focuses narrowly -- too narrowly --
on expanding treatment. Once again, if it's not taken too far, the
point is undeniable. We do need more treatment in many places, and the
federal government has indeed badly -- even scandalously --
underfunded treatment in favor of punishment. But Massing overstates,
and thereby undermines, his case.

The book's title is the giveaway: Massing wants us to believe that
more treatment is not just an important ingredient in a better mix of
anti-drug policies, but ``The Fix'' for America's drug crisis. In a
short paragraph at the end of the book, he gives quick lip service to
the need to confront other problems -- such as inadequate job
prospects, schooling and housing -- as well. But it's little more than
a throwaway line, and it's overwhelmed by Massing's pervasive tendency
to talk of treatment as if it really were a ``fix,'' and as if all we
really needed was more of it.

Massing's entire discussion of what to do about drugs is woefully
short -- all of four pages, after a quite rich and detailed discussion
of the failures of existing policy. That's not enough. Not only does
it give him no room to develop anything like a comprehensive anti-drug
strategy, but it also renders even his discussion of treatment much
too sketchy to be convincing. In fact, his brief in favor of more
treatment is in some ways at odds with his own research (and that of
others) into the way treatment programs work, and don't work, in the
real world.

Most of the research showing that treatment can be effective, for
example, has come from two of the many varieties of drug treatment:
so-called ``therapeutic communities'' that usually involve long-term
residential stays, and methadone maintenance. But Massing is well
aware that therapeutic communities, while successful with some kinds
of addicts, are shunned by many others and often suffer from very high
dropout rates, and that methadone maintenance only really works for
heroin -- not for cocaine or other hard drugs. Even on the most
optimistic reading, then, simply expanding the number of treatment
``slots'' would hardly amount to a ``fix.'' It would largely bypass a
disturbingly big part of the addict population.

Street research, moreover, makes it clear that many addicts,
especially younger ones, don't want treatment. Sometimes that's
because they regard drugs not as a problem, but as a solution to other
problems in their lives. Sometimes it's because they find the drug
treatment system both unhelpful and punitive. To many careful
researchers in this field -- not to mention a great many addicts --
the existing culture of treatment has been part of the problem, not
part of the solution. We could surely make the system better and thus,
with luck, bring more addicts into treatment, but Massing says far too
little about how we might do so.

Ultimately, the problem with Massing's emphasis on treatment is that
it reflects an uncritical acceptance of what he (and others) call the
``medical model'' of drug abuse. In that view, drug abuse is a disease
pretty much like any other. People get sick, and they look for a
doctor to make them well. To Massing, the problem is simply that there
aren't enough ``doctors.''

While the medical model contains elements of truth, it doesn't
adequately address the realities of drug abuse in the United States.
On one level, drug abuse is indeed a medical problem. But it is also a
social problem; and one that is deeply, inextricably rooted in the
patterns of inequality and deprivation that distinguish the United
States from every other advanced industrial society. That is the main
reason why our drug problem is worse than theirs, and it is a main
reason why the drug war has failed.

It also means that unless we confront those social deficits, we will
continue to suffer a drug problem that is perpetually out of control.
The history of drug policy in America is littered with efforts to find
a ``fix'' that doesn't confront that reality head-on. There isn't one.

Elliott Currie is the author, most recently, of ``Crime and Punishment in
America.'' He notes that Michael Massing earlier reviewed Currie's book,
``Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future.''

Checked-by: Patrick Henry