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A collective denial of reality has gripped America throughout the 20th
century and led to a drugs policy that does more harm than good. That is the
basis of Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe and Peter Andreas’s lucid
analysis Drug War Politics (University of California Press,
£13.95/$17.95, ISBN 0 520 20598 7). The “War on Drugs” consumes
$8 billion a year, but fails. The authors argue for a public health model
in which drugs users are seen as sick and in need of help, rather than
criminals. How to achieve this shift is less clear.