Volume 36, Number 5 · March 30, 1989
Desperate Over Drugs
By Michael Massing
The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Money, Drugs, Mafia
by Shana Alexander
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 442 pp., $19.95
The Cocaine Wars
by Paul Eddy, with Hugo Sabogal, by Sara Walden
Norton, 399 pp., $18.95
Sealing the Borders: The Effects of Increased Military Participation in Drug Interdiction
by Peter Reuter, by Gordon Crawford, by Jonathan Cave
The RAND Corporation, 155 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellín Cartel—An Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money and International Corruption
by Guy Gugliotta, by Jeff Leen
Simon and Schuster, 352 pp., $18.95
Desperadoes: Latin Drug Lords, US Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win
by Elaine Shannon
Viking, 499 pp., $21.95
White Rabbit: A Doctor's Story of Her Addiction and Recovery
by Martha Morrison MD.
Crown, 240 pp., $17.95
Drug Abuse Prevention: Further Efforts Needed to Identify Programs That Work
US General Accounting Office, GAO/HRD-88-26, 62 pp., Free (paper)
The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control
by David F. Musto MD.
Oxford University Press, 384 pp., $11.95
The title 'drug czar,' which George Bush recently conferred on William Bennett, nicely suggests the nature of the American drug bureaucracy; like prerevolutionary Russia, it is backward-looking, unmanageable, and feudal. Active in the 'war on drugs' are eleven departments and thirty-seven federal agencies, ranging from the Pentagon and the FBI to the IRS and the Secret Service. In Congress, seventy-four committees and subcommittees have jurisdiction over narcotics matters. Their latest handiwork, the 264-page Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1988, contains hundreds of programs addressing everything from herbicides to runaway youth. US drug agents are scattered across four continents, monitoring, investigating, tracking, and training.
Review, 6044 words
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