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Current Events
Title: Smoke and Mirrors Author: Dan Baum Rating:  Must Read!
Publisher: Little Brown and Company Reviewed by: Richard Warren Field |
 
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Based on interviews with many participants and eye-witnesses, Dan Baum has chronicled the misguided "war on drugs" from its beginnings with Richard Nixon to its escalations in the 1980's. Baum writes about peopleùwhat involved parties thought and didùand this also makes SMOKE AND MIRRORS compelling as story-telling. One of my favorite episodes chronicled by Baum is Nixon's disregard of his own commission's recommendation to legalize marijuana, because Nixon felt it was the drug of the counter-culture, the hippie protesters. (When he made that decision, Richard Nixon assured that the "war on drugs" would be a cultural war, maybe even a generational war.) Another episode involves President Bush. As his term got started, he needed an issue to define what his Presidency would be about. But polls showed no issue getting more than nine percent as "most important." Luckily for Bush, the polls became more defined by the midsummer of 1989, and he settled on an escalation of the "war on drugs" as he made his "Our Biggest Problem" speech. Apparently this was not our "biggest problem" until after the polls said it was.
By presenting facts, not arguments, Baum ironically makes a
persuasive argument establishing the absurdity of the "war
on drugs." He also presents this material in a readable,
entertaining style, worthy of best-selling novelists.
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