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Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, by Dan Baum
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For sheer government absurdity, the War on Drugs is hard to beat. After three decades of increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are more easily available, drug potencies are greater, drug killings are more common, and drug barons are richer than ever. The War on Drugs costs Washington more than the Commerce, Interior, and State departments combined - and it's the one budget item whose growth is never questioned. A strangled court system, exploding prisons, and wasted lives push the cost beyond measure. What began as a flourish of campaign rhetoric in 1968 has grown into a monster. And while nobody claims that the War on Drugs is a success, nobody suggests an alternative. Because to do so, as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders learned, is political suicide. Dan Baum interviewed more than 175 people - from John Ehrlichman to Janet Reno - to tell the story of how Drug War fever has been escalated; who has benefited along the way; and how the mounting price in dollars, lives, and liberties has been willfully ignored. Smoke and Mirrors takes you right into the offices where each new stage was planned and executed, then takes you to the streets where policies have produced bloody warfare. This is a tale of the nation run amok - in a way the American people are not yet ready to confront.
- Sales Rank: #757889 in Books
- Published on: 1997-05-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.13" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, 1.23 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
- ISBN13: 9780316084468
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Amazon.com Review
In a retrospective look at the war on drugs in the United States, journalist Dan Baum calls the nation's drug policy "as expensive, ineffective, delusional and destructive as government gets." He examines the Nixon White House's effort to turn the drug war to political advantage and the Carter Administration's brief flirtation with decriminalizing marijuana. He also details the cover-ups and blunders of some of the biggest drug busts in the country's history. Yet despite the policy's ineffectiveness, at least 85 percent of Americans oppose legalization. Baum sheds light on the reasons for this issue and calls for radical compromise.
From Publishers Weekly
Many sensible analysts have argued the folly of our contradictory and damaging drug policies, but Baum manages to make his argument fresh by tracing what he sees as the escalating missteps and ironies that led us into the "war on drugs."A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Baum weaves a brisk, episodic tale, beginning in the Vietnam era, when the media conflated widespread use of less dangerous marijuana and small-scale use of heroin into a "drug problem" that Richard Nixon exploited. Meanwhile, he contends, the fusion of contradictory schemes-such as the idea of prison sentences that are both long and mandatory-has led to "a prison-filling monster" denounced even by conservatives. According to Baum, Jimmy Carter's drug strategists were the last to offer nuanced policy, but they lost the political fight, and White House drug policy moved from the province of public health to law enforcement. Fighting drugs has made the executive branch look good, and under Ronald Reagan, federal prosecutors expanded hungrily into drug cases. Reagan, taking a page from Nixon and abetted by wife Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign, Baum says, positioned government's role as primarily crime fighting, not attacking the social problems that might underlie drug abuse. The author chillingly portrays how the 1980s Supreme Court, caught up in the hysteria over drugs, weakened the Fourth Amendment's protections against police excesses; equally disturbing to him is how the media accepted the myth of the "crack baby," while prenatal care may mean much more to a baby's health than maternal drug use. Though Baum had hoped the Clinton presidency might adopt a different drug policy, he laments that the law enforcement approach continues. Still, he maintains, a shift from prosecuting pot smokers and "generally peaceful growers" to treating desperate drug dependents "would be an act of medical logic and fiscal genius." The author reminds us of an H.L. Mencken thought: sooner or later, a democracy tells the truth about itself. This book should help it do that.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Since 1968 the federal government has been bent on waging an all-out "War on Drugs." Journalist Baum provides a thorough journalistic examination of the public policy, pointing out the false premises behind Richard Nixon's decision to declare such a war, how vested interests used "smoke and mirrors" to keep the money flowing, how the Supreme Court has weakened Fourth Amendment protections in drug cases, and the policy's ultimate failure. Baum interviewed over 200 individuals who spoke on the record?no anonymous sources are quoted. Using numerous case studies, he shows the negative constitutional and social aspects of the criminal justice system's effort to stem drug abuse in America. While not arguing for legalization, Baum hopes his study will motivate decision makers to devise a more humane and cost-effective drug policy. Highly recommended for most libaries.
-?Gary D. Barber, SUNY at Fredonia Lib., Silver Creek, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
39 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Exhaustively researched and engaging.
By KEVIN M. OCONNOR
Dan Baum, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, starts his history of the Drug War with the Nixon administration, which, in 1968 declared marijuana public enemy #1. That same year, more people died from falling down stairs than from drug overdoses.
From a strictly political point of view, this was a sensible move. It created a threatening enemy out of whole cloth, and this phantom menace allowed Nixon to run a strong "Law and Order" campaign and push the race buttons of white voters. Nothing galvanizes support like the specter of an invasion, and in this case, the invasion would be of middle class, white, America by anti-establishment youth and black culture. The Drug War behemoth was empowered and allowed to run completely out of control when federal and local law enforcement agencies gained the power to seize the property and assets of drug "suspects" without those suspects ever being charged with, much less convicted of, any crime.
Dan Baum's book is thoroughly researched and documented, and he doesn't hide behind smoke screen of feigned objectivity.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent history on the War on Drugs
By S. Bowman
The book Smoke and Mirrors is a history of the War on Drugs launched by Richard Nixon and that continues to this day. It is very critical of the War and shows the faults of the War and its negative consequences on American society.
The book does not bash just Republicans and the right wing. In fact Baum makes it clear that Nixon's drug-policy was actually not that bad and certainly better than what was to come. Baum also makes it clear that Democrats jumped on the bandwagon and supported the War on Drugs just as much as the Republicans.
I was for legalization of marijuana before reading Smoke and Mirrors and now I have even more faith in legalizing marijuana. While I was aware of many things Baum mentions, I did not realize how much the Supreme Court has eroded our civil liberities via the War on Drugs. If you want an engrossing read while learning something useful, this is certainly a book to read.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Baum Shines a Spotlight on Shadow War that Remains Shrouded
By A Customer
Smoke & Mirrors has less to do with drugs than it does with the true casualties of the long-fought War on Drugs -- the many civil liberties that all of us have lost, especially in the last decade, as federal policy has amassed greater and greater powers in the hands of police and prosecutors to conduct their skirmishes and campaigns and the human consequences of these changes.
Dan Baum deliberately and meticulously delineates each law, court challenge, or policy change that strips away protections that were rightfully placed there by the Constitution and the courts. Baum points out the many rulings and precedents that have taken away rights for individuals only suspected of criminal conduct. Many readers will be shocked to learn that they no longer enjoy some of these rights that we have long taken for granted.
This not a dry book about legal precedence and maneuvers, however; each new onslaught is placed in context by how it affects the people most harmed by them. The names, faces, lives, and families of the persons we have been taught to see as faceless moral failures filling our prisons for such heinous crimes as selling hydroponic equipment to someone who then used it to grow marijuana.
For instance, Baum tells about an African American landscaper named Willie Jones traveling from Nashville to Houston to buy shrubs who made the mistake of buying a plane ticket with cash. That bumped him into a drug courier profile and the ticket agent received a reward for reporting the person to authorities who confiscated his cash. Travelers, fitting drug courier profiles, mostly people of color, can be required with impunity now to undergo X-ray examinations, full cavity searches, and to defecate in buckets upon demand before they are allowed to continue on their journey.
Mandatory federal sentences for drug crimes place minor non-violent criminals in crowded federal prisons for longer sentences than armed robbers, rapists, and murderers. Federal attorneys are encouraged by policy to re-prosecute criminals who have already served time on the same charges in state prisons. Search warrants can be obtained for drug searches based on hearsay from unnamed informants. School children no longer have rights against search and seizure while in schools. Warrantless searches are allowed now without the permission of the suspected individual. Spot checks to search vehicles are allowed and are becoming more common on our highways.
The most odious of these recent infringements however involve civil and criminal forfeiture laws that now make it legal to arbitrarily confiscate the property of someone only suspected of a drug crime. These laws have turned drug investigations into money-making ventures for law enforcement departments around the country. Some even have budgets that rely heavily on property confiscations -- cash, cars, land, homes -- from those suspected of drug crimes -- even if they are not convicted. Drug defendants have their assets frozen and confiscated before their trials.
Baum relays the tragic tale of Donald Scott, a man who owned a ranch in Ventura County in California. An L.A. County detective, Gary Spencer, who probably coveted the land for confiscation, obtained a search warrant based on false statements that he had spotted 50 marijuana plants growing on the property during aerial surveillance. The ranch owner was shot to death by Spencer during the raid. The ensuing search uncovered nothing illegal, let alone any evidence of marijuana. No-knock provisions of recent laws that allow police to enter without knocking or identifying themselves for that matter have created this deadly scenario too often in recent years.
Mandatory sentences for crack cocaine have turned the War on Drugs into a de facto race war that imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens, especially African American men, than any other country in the world.
Drug use and its prohibition was pressure cooked from a health issue handled by medical and social professionals into a law enforcement issue where policymakers became obsessed with punishment and little else. Over time, the issue of drug use was transformed by policymakers from a social ill with root causes into a failure of character among an increasing percentage of the populace.
The onslaught of detail delivered by Dan Baum in Smoke and Mirrors has a chilling effect for readers who may never have had a drug-induced experience in their life and may not have paid any attention as the rhetoric that was cooked up as a sexy political issue in the Nixon years became rehashed and heated up through the Reagan and Bush years to a fever pitch. But as Baum clearly explains, the blame is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans alike have climbed over themselves to enact harsher laws and regulations and the fervor has not abated in recent years just because a Democrat was elected President.
This documentation may be Baum's greatest accomplishment as he parades each federal infringement on individual rights that have been whittled away to prosecute a war on drugs.
Baum has raised questions that for too long many were too afraid to articulate. He has asked them well, he has asked them of the right people, and he has elicited candid and clarifying answers. This book contains the results of 175 conversations with policy makers who through the years have set these forces into motion and with many innocent victims of those policies. In fact the only person who declined to be interviewed for the book was William Bennett, the drug czar who now makes his fortune in print and as a speaker charging hefty fees as the arbiter of moral virtue.
As with any truth telling that draws a sword against the dragons of popular myth, this book obviously took great courage to research and to write. There is an overwhelming sense upon completing this book that there should be those among us with courage enough to seriously question the direction and damages of national drug policies.
We have lost too much already, as this misguided domestic policy disguised as a jihad has pilfered public coffers, diverted attention and resources from serious violent crimes, destroyed careers, reputations, and property, and taken a precious toll of innocent lives on both sides of the law.
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