Drug war heretic.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Soundbite - Chatting with Peter Reuter, writer - Brief Article - Interview

Few topics generate more bad trips than drug policy, with prohibitionists often acting like the wigged-out PCP users who still haunt drug-czar-approved TV scripts. For their part, legalizers sometimes substitute outrage for command of the relevant facts. Into such a trippy arena comes Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places (Cambridge University Press).

Written by Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter--professors of public policy at the University of California and the University of Maryland--the book is a detailed and dispassionate discussion of how the U.S. might best decide the legal status of drugs. Whether drug warriors will respect the authors' conclusion that current drug policies need to be rethought--and whether legalizers will applaud the relatively modest reforms supported by MacCoun and Reuter--is anybody's guess. But both camps would do well to come to terms with the wealth of information and analysis in Drug War Heresies.

reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie spoke with Peter Reuter in December.

Q: What other vices, times, and places are most relevant to current U.S. drug policy?

A: Vices include alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and prostitution. Times include America when cocaine was legal. And places include Western Europe, where over the past two decades there has been a shift from very tough prohibition to some notably different regimes.

The question with all of these is, What can we learn from these different experiences? There are different tradeoffs with all...