Baum, Dan. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. Boston, MA: Little Brown & Co (Pap). June 1, 1997, 396 pages.
 For sheer government absurdity, the War on Drugs is hard to beat. After three decades of increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are more easily available, drug potencies are greater, drug killings are more common, and drug barons are richer than ever. The War on Drugs costs Washington more than the Commerce, Interior, and State departments combined - and it's the one budget item whose growth is never questioned. A strangled court system, exploding prisons, and wasted lives push the cost beyond measure. What began as a flourish of campaign rhetoric in 1968 has grown into a monster. And while nobody claims that the War on Drugs is a success, nobody suggests an alternative. Because to do so, as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders learned, is political suicide.
How did we reach such a ghastly impasse? With great enthusiasm. At one time or another, the War on Drugs has been made to serve almost everybody: parents appalled by their teen's behavior, police starved for evenue, conservative polticians pandering to their consituents' moral dudgeon, liberal polticians needing a chance to look "tough," presidents looking for distractions from scandal, whites - and blacks - striving to "explain" the ghetto, television news producers and newspaper editors enlivening the screen and page one, spies and colonels needing an enemy to replace communism...The War on Drugs is about a lot of things, but only rarely is it really about drugs.
Dan Baum interviewed more than 175 people - from Joh Ehrlichman to Janet Reno - to tell the story of how Drug War fever has been escalated; who has benefited along the way; and how the mounting price in dollars, lives, and liberties has been willfully ignored. Smoke and Mirrors takes you right into the offices where each new stage was planned and executed, then takes you to the streets where policies have produced bloddy warfare. This is a tale of the nation run amok - in a way the American people are not yet ready to confront.
"Whatever you think about the war on drugs orwhether drugs should be legalized, this is a book you should read. It's important - and it's an easy read because it's so well written."
-- Steven Brill, Chairman and CEO of Court TV and Editor-in-Chief of The American Lawyer.
"Dan Baum's Smoke and Mirrors makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how we slipped into and then mindlessly escalated one of the the nation's most destructive social experiments. It also helps us grasp why our leaders continue to repeat the mistakes of the past (e.g., Prohibition)."
-- Steven Duke, Yale Law School, Coauthor of America's Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs.
"Smoke and Mirrors is a must-read. It's an awesome reporting job, and a story well told. What Danny Baum has managed to do here is prove beyond a doubt what some white Americans and most black folks have instinctively known for some time: that this country's so-called war on drugs is a political hoax; it's a multibillion-dollar ploy set up to win political offices, often at the expense of America's most convenient scapegoats - blacks."
-- Nathan McCall, author of Makes Me Wanna Holler; A Young Black Man in America.
"Smoke and Mirrors kept me spellbound, as the inside history of our failed drug olicy unrolled on the pates before me. I thought I knew how we got into our current mess, but the reality was even worse. If anyone still believes that our nation's drug policy has been shaped by a rational examination of the problems of drug abuse and the means to prevent them, they will be disabused of that belief by reading this book. Every citizen should read this book before voting in another election."
-- David F. Duncan, Dr.P.H., Chairman of the Council on Illicit Drugs, National Association for Public Health Policy.
About the Author
Dan Baum is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, and has worked as a journalist on four continents and now lives with his wife and daughter in Missoula, Montana, and can be reached at DanBaum@aol.com.
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