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Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure

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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.

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.

Through over 200 personal interviews with 175 people connected with the "War On Drugs" Dan Baum has created the most informative and correct account of the drug war that is availible to man. Nowhere else will you find how the government has targeted drugs as a cheap way to stay elected. Never has the government caused such a false sense of fear then with drugs.

"Smoke And Mirrors" is one of the best books I have ever read. No matter how you feel about the drug war, it is worth your time to review this text. You will be outraged at how much injustice has been dealt, and how the "War" as been often racially biased.

Even if you see drugs as the ultimate evil that plagues our society and is the root of all our problems, it may be because the true facts have never been given until now. By reading this book, you might discover what has been hidden for so long, and see why the government has been so eager to cover up any positive drug notion (ex. Nixon commissions study to find effects of marijuana. They find no significant health detriments, see medicinal value, and reccommend legalization. Nixon discredits study and brushes it under the rug. Later gets reelected on anti-drug platform. $16 billion spent on the war last year.) Please think, and then read this book. I guarantee that it will be time well spent.

In this book Baum traces the great American anti-drug crusade back to 1969, the first year of the Nixon administration. In that year more Americans died of choking on food than from the effects of illegal drugs. But drugs, which were a relatively minor public health problem, became the object of a massive legal, political and cultural offensive against the phenomena known as "The Sixties" - and this offensive has gone on ever since.

Many of the voters who supported Nixon - and later Reagan - were outraged by the high crime rate among blacks and equally outraged by black political and social activism in the sixties (even though the activists were not the sort of blacks who were likely to commit crimes.) These voters were unwilling to spend more tax money to lower the black crime rate by ending poverty. They wanted something that would, in their minds, punish blacks collectively.

The federal government could not attack the sort of crimes that were the object of realistic fears, such as burglary, since these were purely a local matter. However the federal government could go after drugs since they were shipped across state lines.

White House staffers looked over a sociological study that showed that a high proportion of heroin addicts committed theft. They came to the conclusion that heroin addiction caused theft - for money to maintain the habit. The author of the study protested that this was not indicated by the data. But the government anti-drug wizards insisted - by attacking heroin, we will lower crime in general and (unspoken but understood) since a high proportion of heroin users are black, we will punish all blacks symbolically.

Voters for Nixon and Reagan were also often outraged by white youth who grew their hair long and protested the Vietnam war (these two actions were often seen as identical). To attack these youth symbolically the government went after Marijuana, which many of them smoked. Marijuana, which has not been shown to cause a single death, was lumped with the far more dangerous heroin and cocaine. All of them were to be considered simply as "drugs", equally bad. The "drug problem" was seen as so severe that it was worth doing away with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution which prohibits searches and seizures without a warrant. Baum's book gives many examples of bizarre injustices in drug law enforcement.

Baum says that the heroin and cocaine problems by themselves would not be enough to justify the huge increase in police powers.

"Marijuana," he writes, "...is politically the most important illegal drug...without the Marijuana ban, the country's "drug problem" would be tiny. There wouldn't be 10 million regular users of illegal drugs in the United States, there would be 2 million."

In the fall of 1996, not long after Baum's book was published, the voters of California approved a referendum legalizing marijuana for medical purposes. Baum wrote in the Rolling Stone that this was the biggest victory that the forces opposing the drug war have had so far.

However, Baum's book is not yet out of date. Under the Democrat Clinton, more people have gone to prison for drugs than under the Republicans Reagan and Bush. Baum's book provides many eloquent quotes and statistics for activists against America's ferocious drug laws.

This extremely well-written journalistic book sheds new light on the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs begins as a campaign ploy and ends up a national hysteria. Although it is harder on Republicans and Conservatives in general, the Democrats become equally complicit in their run to "look tough." The Democrats sell out to the national hysteria and cause as much damage as the Republicans. It depicts a nation gone crazy, which even now is just beginning to recover.

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.

Excellent review of major events and social issues that have shaped the "War in Drugs." While Baum is openly critical of our nation's policy, he backs his points with facts, rather than anecdotes. Unlike other authors in this genre, Baum does not portray the nation's leaders as purposely perpetrating evil on its citizens, knowingly perpetuating the War for their own benefit. Rather, he shows that underneath the utter failure of our drug control policy lies errors in judgement and poor political choices--foremost among them the choice to view drug addiction as a moral evil rather than a neuropsychiatric disease. Furthermore, Baum's scholarly, analytical tone prevents this book from seeming like most others: a bitter, indignant plea for marijuana legalization. An excellent excellent history and summary.

I first heard the author describing how he conducted his research for this book: he went and talked to the actual people who designed and implemented the various policies that make up the WoD. It sounded like a relatively balanced view of how we got here. Well, it is. I just find the conceptions and motivations of the drug warriors incredibly frustrating (and evil). Then only negative about the book is that its span ended in 93-94ish, leaving out some the egregious violations of our civil liberties. Read the book, and become active in the fight for sanity and freedom!

Factual book. Baum is a journalist. This book is a collection of 20 years of DOCUMENTED interviews. I always pondered why lawyers were in charge of the list of drugs that are controlled instead of doctors or chemists. In all this is not the book of a radical- this is a book of fact. It is scary, funny and terribly sad. It made me learn to ask of our government the question, "What motivates the other side, the evils, that you protest?"

This book draws in a compelling, readable, fact-based way the history of America's War on Drugs. It show how the drug war became the pretence for an assault on civil liberties (specifically, the 4th and 5th amendments) and a broad expansion of federal criminal prosecutions.

The book is extremely readable, though the story is seldom linear. The history consists of a series of short pieces, connected only by the chronology. Certain "characters" recur in this story -- mostly villains and victims ... not a lot of heroes here!

If you're interested in this topic, it's a great place to start.