STONING THE DRUG WAR

The drug war, Mike Gray argues in `Drug Crazy,' makes governments and
law-enforcement people feel good, but it's the most dangerous of
addictions.

Having raged on for more than 80 years now, and with no end in sight, the
federal government's war on drugs has suffered failures and achieved
successes. First, the failures. Prisons the size of international
airports, though far more crowded and markedly less secure. Organized
rub-outs, open-air gunplay, and innocent-bystander-maiming crossfire that
makes Capone's Prohibition-era Chicago seem like Knott92s Berry Farm.
Street gangs whose monthly net exceeds Netscape's, equipped with
communication networks, command structures, and high-tech weaponry that
could take Iraq. Lawmen licensed to seize, without due process, for their
own institutional enrichment, your house, your car, your watch, and the
crumpled twenty in your back pocket. A legal system racially rent asunder.
Banks turned into Laundromats for dirty currency. Precinct houses that
keep alive the spirit of the old Times Square, and tens of millions of
American citizens whose own blood and urine, extracted under duress, can
stand up in court, the Fifth Amendment be damned, and send their own host
organisms straight to jail.

Now for the successes. For anyone of virtually any age who wishes to
obtain them, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and LSD, in ever
more potent and appealing forms, remain abundantly available.

So much for a balanced weighing of an issue that no longer warrants such a
courtesy. According to 93Drug Crazy,94 Mike Gray's compelling rant
against the ruinous, big-budget witch hunt that has unleashed more evils
than it's unearthed and devastated vaster legions of sinners than Jehovah
at his grumpiest, the drug war can end in one of only two ways: a
strongman-on strongman national Ultimate Fighting match lamely refereed by
dirty officials (the 'Blade Runner' scenario) or an orderly conditional
surrender to imperfect human nature (the Benjamin Spock Memorial Peace
Plan). Gray doesn't hide his preference for the second course, and the
evidence he piles up for his case, historical, scientific, and anecdotal,
fills only 200 pages yet still comes off as overkill. Gray knows he's
right from sentence one, and by sentence 100 the thoughtful reader does,
too, which makes for a book that's less an argument than a muted rant. Its
veneer of reason barely hides Gray's apoplexy, and that's 'Drug Crazy's'
strength. The time for fighting stupidity with intelligence (seldom an
effective strategy anyway) is over. Now it's time to pour on the contempt.

'Drug Crazy' begins with a competent reconstruction of the drug war's
turn-of-the-century early stirrings, which Gray writes began 'as a
collision of social reform and religious fundamentalism.' Originally a
stepchild to the temperance movement, the move against opium -- a common
ingredient in over-the-counter cough elixirs, its chronic abusers mostly
white and female -- was part of a domestic anti-Chinese racism and part of
a subtle diplomatic power play aimed at curbing British influence in Asia.
The push against cocaine was more direct: Get those 'drug-crazed niggers.'
With a genius for engineering a quagmire exceeding even LBJ's and
McNamara's, the crusade's boobish point man, one Dr. Hamilton Wright (later
exposed as a heavy-duty boozer), drew up a battle plan that targeted
doctors first. Framed as a tax act, the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act
terrorized thousands of physicians who prescribed drugs to soothe addicted
patients. In the meantime, a quackish cure-all for addiction based on a
TNT- strength laxative absolved the crusaders of guilt for damning
thousands of newly minted 93drug fiends94 to an anguished, cold-turkey
withdrawal. Just flush out their guts and send them on their way.

The next tall white hat top ride into Drug City was no a doofus do-gooder
but an inflamed fanatic. Described by Gray with unstinting derision as
93a law and order evangelist,94 Harry Anslinger headed the Treasury
Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics, but his actual power base was in
the private sector. Crowned a sort of one-man FDA, Anslinger could approve
or veto at will pharmaceutical companies' applications to market
narcotic-based painkillers. The King of Codeine, the Marquis of Morphine,
he was perhaps the grandest example to date of the drug war's metaphysical
ambivalence, its spiritual two-facedness. Whether it's Oliver North
allegedly importing loads of coke in the name of Nicaraguan anti-communism,
the CIA wading hip-deep into the opium trade in the Vietnam-era golden
Triangle, President Bush deforesting Bolivia while posing for handshake
P.R. shots with Noriega, or the local undercover cop cruising with the top
down on his freshly seized Ferrari, the enterprise seems to breed an evil
more rarefied than payoff-style corruption. The good guys create the
scarcity that guarantees the bad guys' profits, the bad guys fan the
instability that secures the good guys' jobs, and all too often both sides
find common cause protecting their synergistic racket from socialist
agitators, zealous legalizers, internal-affairs units, and other
interlopers. They're mutually nourishing parasites, and their hearts may
someday beat as one.

The fiery doomsdays that Gray sees coming if things don't cool off soon (a
war between the producing nations and those that consume their products,
which seems to me far-fetched, or the subversion of U.S. civil society,
which strikes me as already having begun) seem appealingly cathartic
compared with the slow-roast status quo of racist law enforcement,
diminished privacy, and the class of new untouchables who fail to score
A-pluses on their urine tests. Gray's point -- and though he's not the
first to make it, he has honed and hardened it enough to pierce the
thickest skulls -- is that the drug war isn't now and likely never was, an
authentic conflict between enemies but a hysterical splitting of the whole,
dividing blacks from whites, suburbanites from city dwellers, and, most
cruelly and injuriously, doctors from the patients. If 10-year-olds can
take Ritalin, an amphetamine, without dismembering their soccer coaches,
and California cancer patients can smoke dope without raping their nurses,
who put the `fiend' in 91drug fiend' in the first place? The chemicals or
the cops? Grays92 book, justifiably bitter and sarcastic as well as lucid
and informative, tells the drug-war story straight and true.
Criminalization is what makes criminals, not hemp leaves, and demonization
is what makes demons, not processed poppy juice. Drug addiction is hell
for many addicts, and war is hell, too, according to the old saying. What
ever convinced us that two hells make a heaven?

Walter Kirn's 1997-98 reviews are available at newyorkmag.com.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)