HOW AMERICA LOST THE WAR ON DRUGS

Twenty-five years ago, my then 27-year-old wife, Cathy, was terminally ill.
Marijuana would have helped to improve her appetite, and heroin would have
eased her pain, but, as one doctor told us, "You're living in the wrong
country."

The stated fear was that she would become "addicted."

It galls me that this attitude still prevails a quarter of a century after
her death, a fact well established in the new compilation Busted: Stone
Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington's War on Drugs. The book does a
thorough job of delineating the particulars of the failure of the "war on
drugs."

Gray has selected a variety of essays and articles that delve into various
aspects of our society's love affair with "good" drugs, e.g., Viagra,
Prozac, etc., and the nearly pathological hatred of "bad" drugs, including
marijuana. While most of the pieces illuminate the topic well, the book is
occasionally marred by redundancies and one essay that seems out of place.

A great deal of time is devoted to discussing the heavy price society pays
in terms of lost lives and dollars by adhering to the policies first
promulgated during Prohibition.

As Gray points out early on, this is not solely an inner city problem: "The
village of Darlington is on the Indiana film board's list of movie
locations if you happen to be looking for Small Town America. On the bluffs
above Sugar Creek, surrounded by some of the country's most fertile
farmland, its white clapboard houses and brick sidewalks seem so timeless
and unassailable that the citizens still leave their doors unlocked. So I
was surprised last spring when my cousin told me that the sheriff had just
found a meth lab across the road from the high school.

"Some time earlier, she said, they had arrested a couple of the locals for
dealing cocaine.

"For a town of 740 people in the middle of the Indiana corn fields to be
supporting a meth lab and a couple of coke dealers is impressive. It's
clearly not what the government intended when drug prohibition was launched
in 1914, but 90 years and $1 trillion later, this is the tragic payoff in
the tree-lined Midwestern sanctuary where I grew up."

For the most part, Gray has chosen his contributors wisely; a roundtable
article from the National Review is particularly interesting. "The War On
Drugs Is Lost" features observations by William F. Buckley Jr., Kurt
Schmoke, Joseph McNamara, and Robert W. Sweet. (An editor's note explains
that the original discussion included Ethan A. Nadelman, Thomas Szasz and
Steven B. Duke. They were eliminated due to space restraints. Had Gray
refrained from running a sophomoric piece by P.J. O'Rourke, there would
have been room to complete one of the better articles in the collection.)

Busted raises many valid issues, including the cost to society of this
unwinnable war. And far from simply touting legalization across the board,
it explores the value of combining decriminalization with creating
medical-grade drugs to help people who, like my late wife, aren't helped by
standard prescription medicines.

That day may be a long time coming. Speaking about the DEA's being wedded
to the idea of prohibition, Gray writes: "Unfortunately, they're still
insisting that the only answer is full steam ahead. Defending the drug war
record, DEA chief Asa Hutchinson told ABC's John Stossel, 'Overall drug use
in the United States has been reduced by 50 percent over the last 20
years.' When Stossel reminded him that the major drop was years ago, with
no improvement in the last decade, Hutchinson admitted, 'We have
flat-lined. I believe we lost our focus to a certain extent.'"

Gray wonders how Hutchinson might make any further strides. Given the fact
that the annual drug war budget is already more than $40 billion, nearly a
million people are arrested each year, and the prisons are packed - this
war has been operating full force, with little gain.

Gray can't resist underscoring the ultimate irony of it all: "Despite these
fairly staggering social costs, you can now buy high quality cocaine and
methamphetamine in small Indiana farm towns."

Ed Halloran is a Denver-based author, academic, actor and freelance
journalist.