Drugs, Guns, and Money

BUSTED, A NEW ANTHOLOGY, AND THE CASE FOR LEGALIZATION

JUST ABOUT EVERYONE HATES THE WAR ON Drugs. Public officials and pundits at
every point along the political spectrum, from the governors of New Mexico
and Minnesota to the former mayor of Baltimore, have railed against its
wastefulness; Detroit Police Chief Jerry Oliver blames it for exacerbating
inner-city crime. William F. Buckley calls it a "plague that consumes an
estimated $75 billion per year in public money"; Christopher Hitchens has
labeled it "grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering." According to a poll
conducted by the Pew Research Center last year, three-quarters of the
country believes the drug war is failing. Enter the words "end the war on
drugs" into Google, and you'll get some 2,400 links, leading to the Web
sites of religious groups, corporate-media sources and drug-legalization
advocacy groups.

You might also get a couple of "sponsored links" -- paid advertisements
Google coughs up when you search for certain keywords. One evening I got
two: an ad for Questia.com, where you can "research the War on Drugs at the
world's largest online library," and another for www.mymeds.org ,
advertising "Xanax, Valium, Lortab, etc. (Import a 90-day personal supply)."
The irony is obvious, and clichéd enough to be comical: As Mike Gray points
out in the introduction to his new anthology, Busted: Stone Cowboys,
Narco-Lords and Washington's War on Drugs, the U.S. government spends over
$40 billion annually to promote the cause of a drug-free America, while Bob
Dole appears on national television shilling for Viagra. Marijuana is
non-lethal and non-addictive, but you can't talk about it on the phone;
Xanax is known to be dangerously addictive and Valium is responsible for
thousands of deaths by overdose every year, but both are readily available
with the click of a mouse.

"There has never been a drug-free society anywhere," argues Gray, also
author of the 1998 Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get
Out, "least of all in the United States where the dividing line between
legal and illegal seems almost whimsical."

This deep societal muddle-mindedness finds a parallel in public attitudes
toward the control of illegal substances. Despite a majority vote of
non-confidence for the drug war, the Pew study found that most Americans
still defend its tactics. Over half of the people interviewed believed that
arresting and locking up both drug users and dealers were the best solutions
to our drug problems, even while our prisons fill to bursting with
nonviolent offenders. Just as many poll participants agreed that more needed
to be done to halt the importation of illegal substances, even though
attempts to shut down the international market have only contributed to a
more sophisticated network of international criminals willing to risk their
lives to satisfy the lucrative American market. And so the drug war
continues unabated, with the Bush administration -- for which legalization
proponents once held out hope -- amping up spending on interdiction and
enforcement and aiming to expand punishable offenses to include driving
while under the influence of yesterday's marijuana. The DEA, in an effort to
make wayward states comply with the federal ban on any kind of marijuana
use, has stooped so low that it's raiding California hospices and carting
away the terminally ill. "The War on Drugs," says Ethan Nadelmann of the
Drug Policy Alliance, a think tank advocating drug-law reform, "just keeps
getting bigger and meaner."

BUSTED BEGINS WITH AN ESSAY BY T.D. ALLMAN called "Blow Back," an earlier
version of which ran in Rolling Stone last spring, just as the
billion-dollar defoliation and harassment effort known as "Plan Colombia"
was found to have resulted in a 25 percent increase in coca production. It's
an apt beginning: Allman uses the blunders of Colombia as a metaphor for
U.S. drug policy, which "trundles along, divorced from reality." The War on
Drugs has become, he argues, an institutionalized arm of the federal
government, "much like the Department of the Interior." Among the salaried
careerists who stroll the manicured lawns of Arlington, Virginia, where the
DEA is headquartered, Allman detected "no real sense that the War on Drugs
was something that might actually be lost or won, and end someday."

Most of the articles that follow in Busted, such as Joshua Wolf Shenk's 1999
Harper's magazine piece "America's Altered States: When Does Legal Relief of
Pain Become Illegal Pursuit of Pleasure?," will be familiar to anyone who's
been casually tracking U.S. drug policy. Oliver Stone's legendary,
heartbreaking interview with the seemingly gracious Manuel Noriega ("I
understand that the nature of your profession is sensationalist . . .," the
general tells the director, "but I want to tell you there is another truth
in this situation"), which ran in The Nation in 1994, is reprinted here. So
is New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal's coffee-klatch phone call with
Clinton's drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, which was picked up by Harper's after
California voters approved the distribution of medical marijuana with
Proposition 215. ("Where do we go from now?" pleads the perplexed and
sympathetic journalist.) Gray's genius is not that he's dug up much new
material, but that he's spliced the familiar information with lesser-known
texts in a way that puts the issues in a persuasive context.

Cast in the light of Allman's "Blow Back," for example, it's much easier to
absorb Craig Reinarman's argument, from a 1998 issue of Het Parool, that the
U.S. fears Dutch drug policy because the Dutch have demonstrated, with
significant drops in both drug-related crime and drug use, that legalization
works. After reading the accounts of European countries that treat heroin
addiction as a health issue in Adam J. Smith's "America's Lonely Drug War,"
from Mother Jones magazine, the "Commonsense Drug Policy" of Ethan
Nadelmann, with its calls for clean needles and methadone clinics, seems
altogether moderate and wholesome. In the shadow of Shenk's treatise on the
politics of pharmaceuticals, Dr. Charles Grob's "Politics of Ecstasy,"
written by one of the bravest and most outspoken proponents of clinical MDMA
in the medical establishment, rings axiomatically true.

In fact, by the end of Busted, which concludes with Lester Grinspoon, M.D.,
reminding us that, among other things, if cannabis could be patented and
profited from, it would be legal by now, it seems clear that the solution to
both the drug war and our national drug problem is, ironically, to legalize
all drugs -- from heroin to methamphetamine to LSD. Let injection-drug users
shoot up in clinics until they're ready to quit; let coffeehouses sell hash
and therapists treat their posttraumatic stress survivors with MDMA-guided
sessions. We could not be worse off than we are now, with the highest rates
of drug abuse, drug-related violence and incarcerated drug offenders in the
world -- not to mention severely abridged civil liberties. As Buckley
himself once sagely observed, "Marijuana has never kicked down anyone's door
in the middle of the night."

And so Busted does what more political anthologies should -- it builds an
implicit and convincing argument, not simply and straightforwardly, but by
layering case after case until the evidence is irrefutable. It may not have
a profound impact on government policy -- Busted is, after all, a book aimed
at the believers. It's not likely that someone like Senator Orrin Hatch, who
gets a half a million dollars every campaign season from the same
pharmaceutical industry that bankrolled the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America, is going to pick up Busted and experience some sort of
lightning-bolt flash of sagacity that will induce him to stop sponsoring
bills that extend the draconian provisions of the crack-house law to raves.
But as a source of ammunition for opponents of the drug war, a manifesto of
reason, and a document of where our drug policy stands now, Gray has
compiled an invaluable and comprehensive reference.

BUSTED: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington's War on Drugs, Edited by
Mike Gray, Thunder's Mouth Press/ Nation Books, 350 pages, $18 paperback

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