Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results.

• Author: Wice, Nathaniel

Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results. Mark A.R. Kleiman. Basic, $26. The War on Drugs is forgotten, but not gone. The subject, having been taken for a joy-ride by politicians, is back in the sober hands of policy analysts and economists. Like the War on Poverty-our last example of a social gospel propagated in martial rhetoric -the drug war has revealed the flip side of our can-do positivism, turning from a crusade into an unsolvable problem. Thus the detailed logic of Kleiman's drug policy tome is not as remarkable or controversial as it would have been in the late eighties when the Republicans were playing the latest version of reefer madness and demon rum.

As the title suggests, Against Excess is a critique of both legalization and prohibition, of drug freaks and control freaks. For Kleiman, legalizers understate the problems of addiction, mistaking drugs for innocent, ordinary consumer goods; conversely, drug warriors wage an unrealistic, expensive, and doomed cultural holy war against certain kinds of intoxication. Like any good liberal (he uses feminine personal pronouns), Kleiman charts a middle course, exhaustively working through the permutations that result from the simple premise that "either we have the problems associated with drug abuse, or we have the problems associated with trying to control it-or we can choose some of each."

Kleiman convincingly shows that the current prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin is not cheap. He discusses the burden on the police, courts, and prisons; the inefficiencies, violent crime, and lost tax revenue of the black market; and the winnowing of both civil liberties and respect for the law. Kleiman codifies these social costs with a complexity rarely displayed in public discussion, favoring the wisdom one would expect of an effective policeman or treatment counselor to the rhetoric of a "DrugFree America."

The style is that of the economist or the game theorist, concerned with costs, side effects, and ironies. With sections called "Cross-subsidy and Risk-sharing," the book at times reads as though its subject could have just as easily been insurance reform. In order to focus on fairly narrow questions about controlling drug use, Kleiman limits himself as much as possible to measurable effects. Second-order questions, such as marijuana's supposed gateway effect or needle-sharing's relationship to AIDS, are well treated and footnoted. In a point typical of the hundreds he makes, he...