The FIX: SOLVING THE NATION'S DRUG PROBLEM [Hardcover]

Michael Massing (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 1998

In America's twenty-five-year war against drugs, only one national policy achieved some success. That was the Nixon Administration's program for treating heroin addicts, which was dismantled by the Reagan Administration. In The Fix, Michael Massing exposes the political and ideological narrow-mindedness that have made national drug policy a failure, and demonstrates convincingly why we should reinstate the policy that worked.

Drawing on scores of interviews with federal officials charged with directing the drug war and on years of on-the-street reporting, Massing offers a fresh new way of looking at the drug problem. The heart of that problem lies not with recreational users of marijuana, as many politicians and journalists maintain, but with hard-core users of heroin, crack, and cocaine. Numbering about three million, these addicts are concentrated in the nation's inner cities and account for most of the demand for drugs and most of the crime associated with their use.

Given the number of addicts and the tenacity of their habit, putting them in jail is not an affordable or effective longterm solution. And, given the tendency of addicts to engage in destructive behavior, legalization would simply encourage more of it. A far more effective policy, Massing argues, would be to recognize that drug use is a public health problem, and to use the government's resources to create a national network of clinics offering addicts treatment on demand.

Massing shows that drug treatment works by describing the success that street workers have had in reaching out to addicts in Spanish Harlem and placing them in the few treatment programs now available. Further evidence that treatment can reduce the demand for drugs comes from the Nixon years. Confronted with a raging heroin epidemic in the early 1970s, President Nixon responded by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a nationwide network of methadone clinics and other drugtreatment facilities. The program was a striking success, and, if revived today, it could go a long way toward reducing the rate of drug-related crime in the United States.
Among Massing's findings:

Even as Nancy Reagan was traveling around the country urging people to "just say no" to drugs, her husband was sharply cutting the federal drug-treatment budget. When the crack epidemic hit in the mid-1980s, those treatment facilities that remained were completely overwhelmed, and many addicts who wanted help were forced back onto the street. The Reagan Administration's policies made the crack epidemic far worse than it need have been.

The greatest influence on drug policy in the last twenty years has been the "parent movement," a little-known network of strong-willed mothers and fathers that sprang up in suburbs across the country in the late 1970s. Panicked over their kids' use of marijuana, these parents pioneered such concepts as zero tolerance and a drug-free America, while at the same time stymieing all efforts to help innercity addicts.

The only federal official in recent years to make a genuine bid to revive the Nixon model and treat addicts in a humane fashion was Lee Brown, the former New York City police chief who became President Clinton's first drug czar. But Clinton, despite promises to support Brown, eventually abandoned him out of fear that he would look soft on crime. Clinton's drug policy is no less hawkish than that of his Republican predecessors, and every bit as ineffective. Instead of relying on foreign governments to hunt down drug lords, or on building more prisons to warehouse addicts -- approaches that are expensive, wasteful, and ineffective -- we should restore our once and only successful program of treatment for hard-core addicts. It's our only hope for winning the war against drugs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"When, back in 1988, the New York Review of Books sent me to Columbia to write about the Latin American cocaine trade," notes Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and 1992 recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, "I had little notion that the issue of drugs would engross me for so many years." The "War on Drugs," arguably, has been the United States' most futile and expensive social campaign. In 1998, the federal drug budget was more than $17 billion--over ten times its 1981 allocation--and yet the corresponding population of drug offenders in the nation's state and federal prisons has increased tenfold within that same period. What to do?

The Fix makes a case for the return of the community-based drug treatment clinic model that was a cornerstone of U.S. drug policy under Richard Nixon. While Nixon's personal distaste for illegal drugs may have been most evident in his decision to ignore evidence indicating that marijuana use did not lead irreparably to harder drugs, his pragmatism helped him recognize that the problem of narcotics was far more cost-effectively approached as a health issue rather than one strictly of law enforcement. In a narrative that alternates between descriptions of a drug-ridden neighborhood in Harlem and policy makers in the nation's capital, Massing compellingly argues that the most effective battle against addiction is the creation and maintenance of a comprehensive national treatment system. --Patrizia DiLucchio

From Publishers Weekly

The tabloidy, haranguing tone of the curious subtitle doesn't do justice to this book's careful research and well-written narrative. Far from being a love letter to Richard Nixon's drug policy, it discusses America's war on drugs in the context of real people suffering with addiction. Massing, a New York City-based reporter, has written about the drug trade for 10 years, so he has the knowledge and eye for detail that give this work its best moments. Believing that "the policies being formulated in Washington today bear little relation to what is taking place on the street," Massing starts his story in Spanish Harlem, following the lives of Raphael Flores, who runs a struggling drop-in center for addicts, and Yvonne Hamilton, a crack addict trying to get her life together. The middle third of the book shifts dramatically in tone as Massing chronicles the evolution of the war on drugs in Washington. During Nixon's tenure, the government spent more money on treatment (the "demand" side) than on stopping drug trafficking (the "supply" side), which led to declines in both drug overdoses and crime rates. As successive presidents felt pressure to emphasize the "war" rather than treatment, the number of chronic addicts skyrocketed. In the last section Massing returns to Harlem, where Hamilton's struggle to remain drug-free makes for gripping reading. The Washington section works as political history, but the bios of various bureaucrats can't compete with the slices of Harlem street life. While Massing may think Nixon's strategy would work again today, Hamilton's story demonstrates that the drug problem is much more complicated than any government strategy.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (October 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684809605
• ISBN-13: 978-0684809601
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,034,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Must" reading for those serious about the drug problem, March 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The FIX: SOLVING THE NATION'S DRUG PROBLEM (Hardcover)

I suppose that I don't really have the objectivity necessary to adequately review this book. Drug abuse has had a devastating affect on people close to me, and I have born personal witness to both the magnitude of the problem and the inefficacy of our leaders in responding to it. In The Fix, Massing combines reporting, storytelling and advocacy journalism to give us a serious look at the problem, the people affected by it, the people trying to solve it, and the people our government puts in charge of solving it. The most telling point of the book is that those latter two categories have only rarely coincided.

Only once, during the first Nixon administration, did our government have a drug program that emphasized making multiple modalities of treatment immediately available to the addict who seeks help. Coincidentally, only once was the incidence of hard core drug abuse, and the criminal and public health problems associated with it significantly diminished. But, since offering treatment to addicts doesn't make nearly the political sound bite that "Death to Drug Kingpins", "Just Say No" or "Three Strikes and You're Out" does, the approach, and the concomitant success it brought was short lived. Our leaders were quite willing to sacrifice an approach with proven success in favor of one which, though unsuccessful, resonated with the prejudices of the electorate.

If you think that our government has had a consistent or effective policy towards drugs, read this book. If you think that there is no effective treatment for drug abuse, read this book. If you believe that any of our leaders for the past thirty years has had a clue about the nature or scope of the drug problem in America, read this book. And if you think that William Bennet has any shred credibility as a spokesman for morality, read this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking and a spur to new directions in policy, September 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The FIX: SOLVING THE NATION'S DRUG PROBLEM (Hardcover)

Michael Massing's book is an engrossing account of the evolution of drug policy in the past 30 years. He traces the ineffective twists and turns of the government's approaches, ironically beginning with the promising work of Dr. Jerome Jaffe, the first drug czar in Nixon's first term. His narrative shifts between the policymakers in Washington and the efforts of an outreach worker in Spanish Harlem to help others with virtually no resources. Massing concludes that a lot more resources need to be applied to the treatment of hard core addicts with less for interdiction. He maintains that treatment does work, we know what to do, but have been influenced by fadism all along the way. An obvious example is "Just Say No" but a less obvious one is the effort that suburban parents began in the late '70s to move resources to treat kids for pot smoking. Policy makers in the drug arena will find this book valuable in presenting a case for the enhancement of resources for those most in need.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, March 14, 2001

By 

Tom Munro "tomfrombrunswick" (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Fix (Paperback)

This book is about drug policy in America. It is a celebration of the Drug policy enacted by Nixon and a criticism of the drug war. The book is two layered, the author follows around a worker who deals with drug addicts and talks about his life running a poor under funded agency while at the same time talking about the broader issues.

All drugs cause society some problems. Probably the most costly drugs for society are alcohol and tobacco. Heroin and Crack however have a very visible cost in an increase in criminality. Drug dependant people often drift into various forms of crime to support their habits. Other drugs such as cannabis also have side effects and there is evidence that long term use can cause a range of problems.

The book suggests that the policy developed by Nixon was in fact the correct policy. That is by making provision for rehabilitation centres for treatment of drug addicts. Rehab centres are cheap by comparison with jails and significantly cut drug use and criminality. The author of the book refers to studies carried out by the RAND Corporation into the cost benefits of such programs to support his case.

During the Reagan years the direction of drug policy changed. A number of parents groups had sprung up suggesting that teenage use of cannabis was responsible for a range of adolescent social problems. Money was taken from rehab centres to fund Nancy Reagan's "say not to drugs campaign".

In reality the "say no to drugs campaign has been successful." Cannabis and other drug use in American is far lower for adolescents than for other comparable countries. The basic problem was that as resources were taken from rehab centres hard drug use skyrocketed. This in turn led to the substitution of imprisonment as the main response to drug dependant criminality. The cost has been significant with a tremendous social cost of prison construction lessening funds for other government programs such as eduction. The arrest of drug dependant people also has led to massive increases in the imprisonment of Afro American people.

This book is one of the more impressive written on one of the significant issues facing American society,