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Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, by Dan Baum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.
Nearly as pervasive as the business of illegal drugs is the business of research and writing about drug use, drug treatment, and drug policy. Even the most voracious reader will find it difficult to keep up with the many books on the subject; even the most optimistic will soon be discouraged by the monotonous similarity of so much of the material.
Periodically, however, a distinctive book emerges: a book that adds to our knowledge but also makes us pause to think about what we already know. Smoke and Mirrors is a fascinating look at the emergence and change in federal drug policy between 1967 and 1994, which also increases our understanding of the dynamics of federal crime policy in general.
The author is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal who interviewed more than 200 people, each of whom has played some role in shaping federal drug policy. One of the book's strengths is the style in which it is written. Baum emphasizes people-what they did and what decisions they made-using short anecdotes to give the human side of the potentially dry topic of policy development. He uses no pseudonyms or composite characters; all interviews are on the record. Even the best-read drug researcher will be astonished at some of the book's revelations.
The author also was clever in deciding to write the book in 22 chapters, with most chapters covering only one year. The chapters are short; each contains a series of short stories or anecdotes telling how a policy decision was made or how that decision shaped events on the streets. In the hands of a less skilled writer, amusing anecdotes and short chapters could easily have yielded pabulum. Here, however, the combined effect of personal incidents and relatively short chapters is the literary counterpart to the mosaic: each piece is colorful in itself but contributes as well to a much larger story when the reader steps back and views the individual elements in combination. Like a mosaic, the sum of Smoke and Mirrors is much more than the total of its chapters or anecdotes.
Because Baum takes this approach, he touches on...