Pubdate: Sun, 10 Nov 1998 Source: Washington Post (DC) Section: Book Review Contact: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Copyright: 1998 The Washington Post Company Author: Roberto Suro THE FIX By Michael Massing Simon & Schuster. 335 pp. $25 Reviewed by Roberto Suro, a staff writer for The Washington Post and the author of "Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America." December 1970 turns out to have been an oddly pivotal moment in the saga of U.S. drug control policies. Already struggling with an inner-city heroin epidemic, the Nixon administration was stunned to discover exploding levels of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam. Two teams of experts were completing reports on the most effective treatment methods; a government panel favored psychiatric care while a group of outsiders recommended methadone, a substitute drug that cuts the craving for opiates. In the midst of it all Elvis Presley showed up at the White House in velvet pants and cape, volunteering to help fight drugs. Once in the Oval Office, Presley denounced the Beatles as "anti-American," posed for a now-famous photograph and asked for a narcotics officer's badge, which was duly handed over. Six months later Richard M. Nixon became the first president to declare war on drugs. As Michael Massing reveals in The Fix, his captivating account of all the drug wars that followed, Nixon was the first and only president to wield the treatment of addicts as a strategic weapon. Massing argues that, just as Nixon was secure enough about his anti-communist credentials to go to China, he was law-and-order enough to see hard-core drug use as a public health challenge rather than as a battle to be won with police and prisons. Nixon also appears to have been more realistic than any of his successors about the prospects for halting the flow of drugs from overseas. In one of the many vignettes that enliven this book, Massing tells of a briefing by a top narcotics cop who boasts to Nixon that heroin seizures and arrests are way up and that more are underway. Nixon replies, "Let me ask you this, are we taking one step forward and two steps back? Is there any less narcotics coming into the United States? Are we solving the problem?" The reply, as Massing writes, was "just silence." The same question might be asked today, and in Massing's view the answer would be no different despite the vast sums spent on trying to eradicate crops, cut supply lines and incarcerate the merchants. The long subtitle of The Fix on the dust jacket puts Massing's argument in simple terms: "Under the Nixon Administration, America Had an Effective Drug Policy. WE SHOULD RESTORE IT. (Nixon Was Right)." In fact, this oversimplifies. Massing, a veteran magazine writer who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, did not write a mere policy rant. The Fix offers astute Washington reporting that captures the sweep of policy, personalities and politics that have driven drug warfare -- without smothering the reader with inside-the-Beltway detail. Moreover, the Washington chapters are sandwiched between two narrative sections that tell the story of Raphael Flores, a heroic community worker in East Harlem, who struggles to run a treatment referral service in the midst of the crack epidemic. Flores fights hard for every addict, sometimes spending days to get a single person into a detoxification program. His one-on-one struggles not only offer a dramatic contrast to the policy history but also illuminate Massing's larger point. The drug debate, he argues, has fallen into a sterile contest between two equally misguided antagonists: those who would back an escalating war on drugs and those who favor legalization. And the perennial preoccupation with recreational use -- such as today's concern with teenagers and marijuana -- is a distraction. Instead, Massing contends that hard-core addicts cause most of the crime and other social problems associated with drugs and that a national network of clinics offering treatment on demand offers the best alternative to current policies. Even as federal drug-control spending has nearly quadrupled in the past decade to reach $17 billion a year, the priorities have hardly changed. Year after year about two-thirds of the money goes to attack supply by arresting and jailing traffickers or interdicting smugglers on the high seas while only a third goes to reducing demand through education programs and the treatment of drug abusers. Massing concludes that by just going to a 50-50 split, much could be accomplished in reducing the most troublesome forms of addiction. To support his recommendations, Massing relies heavily on Nixon's success in using extensive treatment to stem the heroin crisis of the early 1970s, and indeed it is hard to find other parallels that test his views. But the world of the streets has changed. Massing readily admits that the variety and insidiousness of the drugs available today make treatment, whether psychiatric or chemical or a combination of the two, much more challenging. And aside from the advent of widespread crack and methamphetamine use, the number of addicts has increased tenfold. But the most sobering caveat to Massing's argument comes from his hero, Raphael Flores. We see him struggling not just with the shortage of treatment spaces but also with the manic wreckage of addicts' lives. Even if each of the nearly 3 million Americans classified as hard-core users of heroin and cocaine could be matched with the specific treatment that would benefit them best, and Washington paid for it all, it would take an army of community workers as selfless and as intelligent as Flores to make it work. - ---