Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out.

By Mike Gray Random House, $23.95

In the same strange way that pet owners resemble their animals, advocates of the war on drugs bear an uncanny likeness to the drug users they deplore. If yon have ever seen William Bennett, slumped into a chair on the set of "Nightline" or "Charlie Rose," his body weary from too many cigarettes and his eyes gleaming with venom, you'll understand this intuitively. He and his compatriots are forever tired because they are seeking a nirvana that will forever elude them. The compulsive drug user is locked into the same sad cycle.

And so, it pains me to say, are those of us who study drug policy and advocate its reform. It's clear to me that the drug war does more harm than good: locking up addicts without decreasing their number, handing the drug trade to criminals without denting its size, and wasting prison space on users whose crimes have no victims other than themselves. I also think that if Americans could look past the distortions of people like Bennett (who use drug-related violence, a creation of prohibition's black market, as a reason to escalate the war) and could see drug users for what they are (deserving of understanding and help rather than punishment), they'd agree with me.

But the question I think about most these days is not how to create a better system but why that's so unlikely to happen. It is pretty silly to talk about dismantling prohibition when there is such stasis on measures far less bold and so desperately necessary as, say, medical marijuana and needle exchange. These two issues prove that officials will tolerate any amount of suffering in the name of "protecting the children."

You might expect that drug policy reformers would be cynical, and they are. But the cynicism is always laced with hope, as Mike Gray shows in the conclusion of Drug Crazy.

What makes people like Gray optimistic? He cites the blessing of medical marijuana use by voters in California and Arizona and the advent of the Internet, which allows for widespread dissemination of modern day versions of the 1972 Shafer report. That study, commissioned by Richard Nixon to document the dangers of marijuana, instead concluded that it didn't cause crime, was less dangerous than alcohol, and ought to be decriminalized for personal use. Nixon promptly buried it.

It's telling that this is the best Gray can come up with. True, the Internet is a terrific tool for organizers. But I don't expect it will be long before the Partnership for a Drug Free America has a presence a thousand times more widespread than the Lindesmith Center or the Drug Reform Coordination Network. And the referenda in Arizona and California, to my mind, aren't a sign of hope but of gloom: It turns out that the drug czar and Justice Department can override state law by fiat anytime they believe the citizens of that state made a bad decision.

The error that Gray makes -- and I'm sympathetic because I make it often -- is in believing the correct position will eventually win the day. The truth is that we are not just galaxies away from real reform; we're moving in the wrong direction. The most recent argument in Washington over drug policy is illustrative. House Speaker Newt Gingrich angrily denounced President Clinton's drug policy as "the definition of failure" The reason? Clinton has promised to cut drug use in half by 2007. Gingrich's promise: to do the job in four years. "Once America got involved," he says, "it took our country just four years to win the Second World War -- the greatest military effort the world has ever seen. In the Civil War, it took just four years to save the Union and abolish slavery."

Both the president and the Speaker, of course, are down Alice's rabbit hole in believing they can cut drug use so dramatically. But with a midterm election near, expect to see something close to the package Gingrich is proposing -- doubling interdiction budgets, eliminating school loans for convicted drug users and dealers, coaxing states to drug test kids who apply for driver's licenses, and so on -- adopted by the end of the summer.

How did we get to this point anti why am I so pessimistic about the chances for change? The first reason is that warriors believe they're helping the people they're hurting. Violent drug gangs are a creation of the black market, specifically of the spectacular profits of the illegal drug trade. (Estimates are that Americans spend between $40 and $50 billion a year on illegal drugs.) To counter this trade, police stalk poor areas like an occupying army. Second, drug prohibition weighs on a group of people whose lives, sadly, mean very little to the powers that be. I'm talking here not just about addicts, low-level dealers, or innocent bystanders in the inner city, but also about a group of people who can never vote because they aren't even Americans. Gray's book is an excellent primer on the consequences of the American drug war on countries like Colombia and Mexico. The violence and corruption there is breathtaking, and if you've become inured to the constant reports, consider the work of a single individual named Pablo Escobar. As head of the Medellin cartel, Escobar engineered the assassination of 11 Colombian Supreme Court justices and a leading candidate for the presidency, as well as an all-out war that included the dynamiting of nine banks in a single day and the slaughter of the wives of police and army officers as they shopped for groceries.

Escobar was eventually killed and the demise of his cartel was considered a major coup in the international drug war. He was quickly replaced. Moreover, the Americans' pressure on Colombia ended up shifting much of the drug trade to Mexico, which is now enduring similar terror.

The final reason for pessimism is the most obvious one: The drug war makes great politics. It would be nice to think that we've progressed way beyond the beginning of the century when arguments such as, "Cocaine is often the direct incentive in the crime of rape by the Negro" convinced a country to make the substance illegal and similar warnings about the Mexicans and the Chinese led to bans on marijuana and opium. Racial animosity was just a stand-in for the real impulse of the drug crackdown, which is fear of the Other. Of course there was a rational impulse too, as people can do themselves real harm with all sorts of mind-altering substances. But the drug war has never been primarily rational. Mike Gray shows as much in Drug Crazy, which is passionate, thoughtful, and unsettling. I hope that the book makes a difference but, because of the very forces described therein, I don't suspect it will.

JOSHUA WOLF SHENK, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a writer living in New York City.