America's Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs

A look at the failed "war on drugs" asks and answers such questions as why are we fighting this war? Is it winnable? Can we make America a drug-free society? Is drug prohibition the cause of crime? and other questions.

The first part of this worthy book by Yale law professor Duke and California lawyer Gross reiterates powerful evidence about the abuse of legal drugs like alcohol, the failure of attempts at prohibition and the links between illegal drugs and our current crime wave. Adding a new layer of argument, the authors detail the costs to our criminal justice system, in which, they maintain, due process is regularly ignored. Duke and Gross make an intriguing case that the cost to individual autonomy posed by the prohibition of drugs is too high and they point out that "almost any common activity produces abusers." Suggesting that reducing the drug supply is impossible and that eliminating demand through treatment and education, though a laudable goal, is equally impossible, the authors offer a sober assessment of the costs and benefits of legalization. Their proposal to legalize selected drugs, including cocaine and heroin, is based on an ultimate aim of "responsible use" akin to the country's policy toward alcohol. Only in the final page, however, do Duke and Gross acknowledge the importance of long-term solutions to the poverty and anomie that make the drug abuse problem in the cities so intractable.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A harshly critical but trenchant look at the war on drugs, the ``failure'' of which leads the authors to propose realistic, achievable solutions that go beyond mere legalization. Duke (Law/Yale) and Gross, a California attorney, urge that drug abuse be viewed as a health problem, not a criminal one. While $50 billion is spent annually on the drug war, criminal sanctions, it seems, only increase the profits for the dealers. By Duke and Gross's reckoning, the ``enormous costs of criminalization''--in money, resources, lives, social well-being, and the growing curtailment of civil liberties--``are not remotely justified.'' Examining the history of drug use in the US, and citing proponents of legalization from conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., to the Libertarian Party, the authors conclude that ``regulated legalization'' should be federally mandated, in stages, beginning with marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. They believe use should be permitted not only in the privacy of the home but in a number of public places to avoid concentrated neighborhood impact. Juvenile access would be curbed, they contend, by strong enforcement of the alcohol and tobacco laws already in place. Commercially licensed, drug distribution and manufacture would be regulated much as liquor sales and gambling are now. Meanwhile, advertising would be banned from the airwaves, and packaging would be generic, without alluring claims. Drugs, then, could be dispensed without the attendant dangers and suffering now associated with their use. There would still be abuse, but addicts who now take to the streets and become involved in a wide range of criminal activity would have alternatives for safe sources and treatments. Buy it all, or a portion: a humane, common-sense approach ``designed to minimize the harm'' of inevitable drug usage. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Arguing that many of the social and economic costs popularly attributed to drug use are in fact consequences of drug criminalization, Duke and Gross urge a policy of regulated legalization as the best way to minimize the harm drugs cause. Some of this material is familiar, but Duke and Gross marshal statistics and clinical studies effectively, moving from studies of the effects of specific legal and illegal drugs through a review of the historical approaches to drug use and an examination of the cost of prohibiting drugs--in terms of crime, freedom, autonomy, constitutional rights, health, and safety--to an explanation of reasons why the drug war can't succeed ("A `drug-free' society is no more attainable than a `sex-free' society") and a discussion of different forms of legalization. The harm-minimization approach Duke and Gross support emphasizes prevention and education, easy access to treatment, research and use of therapeutic drugs, public health programs to reduce the death and disease, and--like Elliott Currie's Reckoning --recognition that, among the poorest Americans, drug use will remain commonplace until the nation addresses basic issues of poverty, employment, housing, and health care. A clear, heavily documented statement of the argument for declaring peace in the war against drugs. Mary Carroll