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

contact: nation@igc.org (I believe there is a more recent address,
but can't find it at the moment).

"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 concl