Of Human Bondage John Leonard

A Review of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the
Politics of Failure. By Don Baum. Back Bay. 396 pp. Paper $13.95.
This review is excerpted from The Nation, June 16, 1997

" It's a funny war when the "enemy" is entitled to due
process of law and a fair trial. By the way, I'm in favor of due process.
But it kind of slows things down." William Bennett

See the Great Moralizer, fresh from the $700aweek therapeutic
farm to which he'd resorted to kick his daily twopacks habit, cracking
his sunflower seeds, wadding his nicotine gum, blowing out smog
through the holes in his head, before he decides instead to blame
Hollywood and Geraldo for our shortfall from virtue. Bennett didn't
start the "War on Drugs." He just happened to be one in a long line of
loony legionnaires, starting with Richard Nixon and John Mitchell and
not perhaps ending with George Bush, Ed Meese and William Casey,
whose "zero tolerance" of poor people, black people and young people
would eventually conclude in contempt as well for that fussy
inconvenience, the Bill of Rights.
There is no better briefing on this evil burlesque than Don Baum's
richly anecdotal, statisticssaturated and more than occasionally
sarcastic aria of indignant muckraking, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on
Drugs and the Politics of Failure. It's as if Lincoln Steffens and Jonathan
Swift had teamed up for a miniseries featuring every pol who ever
exploited the class and culture wars; every cop ever impatient with
those legal niceties that distinguish this country from Myanmar; every
ninja narc anxious to bust down doors, bust up heads and confiscate a
yacht; every prurient sleuth needing a license to rummage in our
garbage, our mail, our bedrooms, even our excrement; and every star
of a TV cop show for whom the presumption of innocence is such a
narrativeclogging drag. They got what they wanted. And we got
prisons.
First of all, there never was a drug epidemic when the Nixon Justice
Department declared its dirty little war. More Americans1,824
died falling down stairs in 1969 than perished from every illegal drug
combined, and twice as many choked to death on food. As many died
from gun accidents in 1971, while ten times more committed suicide.
Not to mention a 1972 body count of 33,000 cirrhosed livers and
55,000 highway accidents, mostly alcoholrelated, and not even to
think about cigaretteswhich, in 1989 when Bill B. was trying to kick
his habit, killed 395,000, whereas coke killed 3,618 (or not as many
as anterior horn cell disease). Nobody dies from smoking marijuana.
Nor is there any evidence that it's a "gateway" drug to stronger stuff.
And if it weren't criminal to toke up, there wouldn't be 11 million
"regular" (monthly) users of illegal drugs in the United States; there
would be 2 million, about 350,000 of them cokeheads.
But declaring war on drugs was Nixon's way of retreating from the
L.B.J. War on Poverty. By 1982 the Reaganaut abandonment was full
throttle: budgeting for child nutrition, down 34 percent; urban
development grants, down 35; education block grants, down 38;
school milk programs, down 78. By the end of Reagan's second term,
spending on prisons and police had increased 600 percent, and even
local county governments lavished $2 billion more each year on
criminal justice than on schoolsastonishing, since counties don't pay
for imprisonment but finance virtually all K12 education. Our prison
population had doubled, and the proportion of those inside for drugs
rose from 1 in 15 to 1 in 3, 85 percent of them for mere possession.
And this skewed priority is far from the worst of the Drug War's
residue. The Constitution has been battered. Step by angry step, Baum
takes us through the manifold abuses, most approved by a Supreme
Court still pretending to be strictconstructionist: "loose" warrants, a
weakened Miranda and wiretaps on traditionally privileged
conversations with doctors, lawyers and clergy. Forfeiture proceedings
that allow prosecutors to confiscate the homes and bank accounts of
purported potheads, without due process, just compensation or a
conviction, and are a license to loot for bountyhunting cops. RICO
prosecutions that send college students to prison for conspiring to
introduce two people later caught peddling drugs. Legalized noknocks
and preventive detention. Warrantless searches of cars at roadblocks
and schoolchildren's lockers. Random urine tests of federal employees
and workers in "sensitive" jobs like transportation and pro football.
Permission to open suitcases and firstclass mail, on the sayso of
barking dogs. "Courier profiles" targeting Latinos and Nigerians. Forced
defecation, into airport wastepaper baskets, by anybody remotely
resembling such a profile. The end of the "exclusionary rule" on
evidence gathered by heretofore illegal searches and seizures, based on
anonymous tips or a hunch. Revoking passports of U.S. citizens caught
with as much as a joint. Kicking firsttime possession offenders and their
families out of public housing. Unleashing on dope fiends and
pedestrians the military, the Coast Guard and our own homegrown
narcoparamilitares, the C.I.A. Shall I go on? Baum does, indefatigably.
From Baum, you will learn more than you want to about G.
Gordon Liddy and Operation Intercept; Nelson Rockefeller and life
imprisonment; heroin addiction in Vietnam and how to make it worse;
total war on defense attorneys; paraquat and synthetic THC; Ross Perot
as Texas drug czar; the invasion of Humboldt County by black
helicopters right out of Thomas Pynchon; the "crack baby" fraud;
Procter & Gamble's exclusive rights to the "Just Say No" slogan; and
D.E.A. raids on criminal florists who sell indoor gardening equipment
that can be used to grow either pot or orchidswhich florists dared to
advertise, next to the bongs and roach clips, in magazines like High
Times. More than a million Americans were arrested in 1990,
264,000 for pot possession, as if no one ever told them that marijuana
makes you impotent or gay, depending.
Does it surprise you to learn that, with the help of Operation
Hammer, the L.A.P.D. managed at one time or another by the end of
the last decade to arrest threequarters of all young black men in Los
Angeles? That, between 1985 and 1987, the percentage of drug
trafficking defendants nationwide who just happened to be African
American was 99? That perhaps the huge discrepancy in sentences for
dealing crack versus dealing powder cocaine can be accounted for by
the fact that 90 percent of crack dealers are black, retailing small hits,
while dealers in powder tend to be white wholesalers? That one out of
every four young black men is in prison, on parole or on probation?
That even as 1,500 people a week went to jail in the first six months of
1994, there were more drugs than ever before on the streets? That in
this country capable of accustoming itself "to everything, good and
bad" or even paranormal so long as it's fat free, the average number of
prisoners per prison guard is three, whereas the average number of
pupils per public school teacher is thirty? That, as the RAND
Corporation explained last month, spending $1 million on long
mandatory prison sentences reduces coke consumption by 29 pounds a
year, whereas that same $1 million used to treat heavy users would cut
consumption 220 pounds? That what Bill Clinton proposes to do to
these cartels is freeze their assets off? I am reminded of a passage in
The Autumn of the Patriarch, when the wretched children who were
"disappeared" because they picked a winning lottery number are
suddenly discovered, and even Gabo's thuggish Caligula experiences a
qualm:

" In spite of it all, he did not measure the true depth of the
abyss until he saw the children like cattle in a slaughterhouse in the
inner courtyard of the harbor fort, he saw them come out of the
dungeons like a stampede of goats blinded by the brilliance of the sun
after so many months of nocturnal terror, they were confused in the
light, there were so many at the same time that he didn't see them as
two thousand separate children but as a huge shapeless
animal that was giving off an impersonal stench of sunbaked skin and
making a noise of deep waters and its multiple nature saved it from
destruction, because it was impossible to do away with such a quantity
of life without leaving a trace of horror that would travel around the
world...."

So, too, in the Drug Wars, are our Fourth, Fifth and Eighth
Amendments desaparecidos. And thus, as well, contemptibly, has our
black manhood been kidnapped.

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