Dan Baum's hard-charging Smoke and Mirrors documents a modern tragedy of epic proportion — the war on drugs. History sets the stage for the actors — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, Bill Bennett, Rudy Giuliani — truly an all-star cast. One by one, the heavyweights step up to the plate; each aiming for the bleachers, each striking a blow at our civil liberties.

Smoke and Mirrors chronicles the last thirty years of American drug policy. It weaves through a web of Washington politics like an undercover agent — hundreds of interviews are interspersed with historical facts in fast-paced, concurrent storylines. A scholarly forty pages of footnotes are given at the end of the book.

Are we winning the war on drugs? Smoke and Mirrors makes it painfully clear that the "war on drugs" has been the domestic Vietnam of the eighties and nineties, a monster made to serve almost everybody at one time or another.

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"[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

—H R Haldeman to his diary

The war on drugs began as Nixon's response to the anti-war and civil rights movements of the late 1960's. Although the use of marijuana, opium, and other psychoactive drugs had been restricted since the Harrison Act of 1937, it was not until television cameras brought images of hippies and civil unrest into the living room that the use of illegal drugs, particularly marijuana, was seen as a national crisis. Smoking marijuana became associated with anti-social behavior, and a symbol of protest.

Nixon can be credited with many "firsts." Richard Nixon gave birth to the DEA, appointed the first "drug czar" to coordinate an alphabet soup of enforcement agencies, and commissioned the first study on drug abuse (which recommended decriminalizing marijuana, much to his dismay). Random urine testing for drugs was first introduced as an instrument of public policy, to combat the widespread heroin addiction of soldiers in Vietnam. The CIA's guns-for-drugs scheme in Laos forshadowed Ollie North's scandal in Nicaragua twenty years later.

Hippies, yippies, and students across the country were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam, and Nixon wanted to put a stop to it. Surprisingly enough, the connection between marijuana and anti-war activism was not great — a poll in 1969 showed that only 25% of college students had even tried marijuana. He wrote privately that "They aren't as radical as most assume." But the connection was strong enough for Nixon to use his new DEA agents to raid the demonstrations and break them up. Consider this conversation between the president of the United States and the King of Rock and Roll:

"You know," Nixon said, " those who use drugs are the protesters. You know, the ones who get caught up in dissent and violence. They're the same group of people."

"Mr. President," Elvis said, "I'm on your side. I want to be helpful. And I want to help get people to respect the flag because that's getting lost." Then Elvis got to the point. "Mr. President, can you get me a badge from the Narcotics Bureau?"

Presley was a collector of police badges. And he was a dopehound of legendary excess. ... And so it came to pass that on the day Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in 1977, he was a credentialed Special Assistant in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

With the election of Jimmy Carter, Nixon's cold war rhetoric fizzled out. So too with his war on drugs. Keith Stroup's National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws was campaigning to legalize pot, and had convinced eleven states to decriminalize the possession of it. Stroup even wrote part of one of President Carter's speeches, calling for a reduction in the penalties for marijuana possession. At one time, the president, his drug czar, the head of NIDA, and the American Bar Association all advocated decriminalizing marijuana. Truely the kingdom of heaven was at hand for the legalizers; or so it seemed.

Carter would be disgraced by his staff. His drug czar, Peter Bourne, made an appearance at a NORML Christmas party in 1978, and was seen using cocaine. Dr. Bourne further embarrassed Carter when he was caught writing a prescription for sleeping pills for one of his staff under a fraudulent name. White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan allegedly snorted coke at the chic Studio 54 club in New York. Then another story broke that Bourne had prescribed an "obesity drug" for Jordan two years before. It looked like the government was being run by a bunch of dopers.

At the same time, parents around the country were becoming alarmed by the drug paraphrenalia marketed to their kids in record stores—bongs, roach clips, even spoons and scales for cocaine. Another Keith—Marsha "Keith" Schuchard, developed her Nosy Parents Association into a lobby of over a thousand organizations, and from this point on, parental fear would take center stage.

"Let's go around the table," Reagan would say, pointing to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. "Cap? What are you doing for the war on drugs? And Malcolm?"—Labor Secretary Malcolm Baldridge—"what about you?" Soon every cabinet secretary—John Block at Agriculture, Andrew Lewis at Transportation, even the star-crossed James Watt at Interior—knew he had to have an answer ready when the president of the United States asked about his and his wife's national crusade against drugs.

The Reagans' powerful rhetoric propelled the country into an all-out crusade. The mantra became Just Say No. Zero Tolerance was the golden rule. The ideal state: a drug-free America. No more was the problem either heroin, cocaine, or marijuana—the problem was "drugs." More than one official urged libraries to purge themselves of "outdated" books about drugs—for example, books which distinguished drug use from drug abuse, or books that used the word "social" in reference to the use of illegal drugs. Drug abuse was wrong.

Meanwhile, the "epidemic" of drug addiction remained at roughly the same level it had all along. Baum puts the numbers on the table for us: in 1969, 1601 Americans died from legal and illegal drugs. However, 1824 people died falling down stairs, and 2641 people choked to death on food.

In 1985, a new horror captured the imagination of America—"crack." This sensational new description of smokable cocaine was irresistable -- crack was said to be instantly addictive. Television crews filmed infants suffering from heroin withdrawal, and called them "crack babies." America forgot about the white potheads, and became absorbed with black "crackheads."

Until now, the typical coke user had been white, rich, attractive, and ultimately tragic. Now, almost all of those shown snorting or smoking cocaine were either black or Hispanic. Cocaine users were no longer tragic, but menacing, and their neighborhoods were 'like a domestic Vietnam.' No dispatch from the 'front lines of the Drug War' was complete without a picture of a white cop arresting a dark-skinned crackhead.

While Nixon had gone after the drug users, Reagan's war was waged on the dealers. He needed more federal police power for that. Reagan was able to press the FBI into service after the death of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover, who would have no part of it. And J Edgar Hoover was the father of American domestic counterintelligence—against the Black Liberation Movement, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the American Indian Movement, and many other political organizations of the sixties and seventies.

Congress took the ball and ran. Politicians "piled on" to try to outdo each other in their anti-drug extremism, like sharks in a feeding frenzy, culminating in the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984. This bill appropriated vast sums of money and instituted emergency measures—mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, preventive detention without bail for drug suspects, and a market-driven approach to law enforcement through confiscation of assets.

Just as Reagan and his Congress were turning the drug war into an inquisition, the Supreme Court was blessing its crusaders with extraordinary new powers. First among them was the broad application of RICO—the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—to drug dealing cases, and the blurring of civil and criminal forfeiture into a single method by which law enforcement agencies could take away someone's home without even filing any charges against them. Police departments were allowed to sell these assets and keep the proceeds. The forfeiture business became so lucrative that law enforcement agencies dropped practically everything else to go scrambling after boats, cars, and homes.

The hundred-year-old Possee Comitatus Act, which had forbid the use of the military in civilian law enforcement, was suspended. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger warned that, "Reliance on military forces to accomplish civilian tasks is detrimental to both military readiness and democratic process." Others would would use stronger words; that using the military for civilian law enforcement constitutes martial law.

A drug exception was made for the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees us freedom from unwarranted search. Customs instituted "involuntary indefinite incommunicado detentions." International travelers could be made to defecate into a bag upon demand. The exclusionary rule, requiring that evidence be obtained by legal means, no longer applied as long as the police acted in "good faith" to solve a crime. Probable cause was no longer needed to search people; drug courier profiles, such as "belonging to a minority group associated with the drug trade," were sufficient. Anonymous informants and tips could now be used to obtain search warrants, inviting people to use law enforcement as a weapon against their enemies.

"This is a Class A Search," the captain in charge told his men. "That means carpets up, drywall down. Level it. Make it uninhabitable." The policemen followed orders, smashing furniture and walls with sledgehammers, ripping an outside stairway away from the building, and spray-painting "LAPD Rules" on the walls. ... No gang members, guns, or crack caches were found.

George Bush advanced the front even further when he hired William Bennett, the self-described philosopher of virtue. Bill Bennett saw drug use as symptomatic of a wider decay in social values, values which were universal. It was the duty of government to define, promote, and finally enforce these values. Dissenting opinions were dismissed as "moral relativism."

"Marijuana, heroin, and cocaine are immoral because they are illegal. Why are they illegal? Because they are immoral." Bennett denied there could be root causes for crime and poverty—that theory was just weak-kneed socialism from the sixties. You are the master of your fate, the captain of your soul, and you have only yourself to blame for your pathetic state of being. One more thing—if you break the law, you deserve what you get.

And hundreds of thousands got just what Bennett said they deserved. The new powers granted to law enforcement agencies were filling our jails and overloading our courts. Night courts were hastily set up. Pleas were bargained. Special preventive detention centers were built. And some people were not even entitled to a trial.

Although not a new practice, "civil commitment" was being used to incarcerate drug users without trial. Since drug abuse was classified as a disease, users were ill and incompetent to make their own decisions. They could be committed to treatment programs, much as the mentally ill are committed to mental institutions. No medical diagnosis was required, only evidence of drug use. Civil commitment was said to be compassionate; sometimes love had to be "tough."

They drove to an unmarked warehouse in an industrial part of town. Karen had no idea where she was. "You are in a Straight, Incorporated, drug rehab," said one of the four girls who joined her in a windowless room. Karen was amazed.

Karen's daily routine at Straight went like this: beginning at six o'clock in the morning, Karen and the others spent twelve to eighteen hours sitting erect on the hard chairs in the windowless warehouse. Children who used the back of a chair for support would be "restrained"—others would grab them and hold them against the floor. Children were forbidden to speak to each other or even to make eye contact. They wrote countless "moral inventories" and then stood in turn to denounce themselves and each other for drug abuse and whatever other depravities they could conjure up.

Karen wasn't allowed to go anywhere, even to the bathroom, without "oldcomers" holding on to her belt loop. For three months, Karen told the court, she was unable to move her bowels because she was never left alone ... [and] being unable to move her bowels in others' presence, she had all but stopped eating. Most nights, Karen got only a few hours sleep. Eventually, Karen was allowed to attend the nearby high school, but was always in the company of an "oldcomer," even in the bathroom, an arrangement the high school accommodated.

Finally, six months after her eighteenth birthday, Karen slipped out of school and made it to a payphone. She called the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) and was connected with someone who believed her. An HRS official picked Karen up at school, drove her to Straight, and witnessed her sign herself out. Eighteen months after being imprisoned for a drug problem she didn't agree she had, Karen Norton was free.

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Today, the war on drugs is waged by a real general, and even local police departments have paramilitary units. Yet no matter how many people we send to prison, no matter what drastic measures we take, the drug trade marches on. Are we winning the war on drugs? After reading Smoke and Mirrors, I think we're losing more than we'll admit.