Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Review

by Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan, New York: Lindesmith Center, 241 pages, $13.95 paper

Toward the end of Drug Crazy, Mike Gray takes us to the port of Los Angeles, where shipping containers from all over the world, carrying car parts, compact disc players, rattan furniture, and who knows what else, are transferred from enormous vessels to trucks. This is one of more than 300 ports of entry into the United States. "Los Angeles alone will land 130,000 containers this month," Gray writes. "Customs inspectors will examine 400. The other 129,600 will pass through without so much as a tip of the hat.... The entire annual cocaine supply for the United States would fit in just thirteen of those steel boxes. A year's supply of heroin could be shipped in a single container."

The image is worth remembering the next time a politician talks about "cutting off the flow of drugs," as if the only obstacle were a lack of resolve. The chief virtue of Gray's book, which includes some firsthand reporting but relies heavily on secondary material and does not offer much in the way of fresh analysis, is his ability to succinctly and vividly communicate the futility of prohibition. A screenwriter and director by trade, Gray has an eye for dramatic juxtapositions and telling details, along with a smooth narrative style that is rarely found in books about drug policy. As a result, Drug Crazy is more accessible, though less rigorous and thorough, than the scholarly work on which Gray draws. For a general audience, it is probably also much more persuasive.

Say you want to convince someone that "source control" - a euphemism for destroying drug crops and encouraging farmers to grow something else - will never have a substantial or lasting impact on the supply of cocaine. You could cite reports from the RAND Corporation, the General Accounting Office, and congressional subcommittees. Or you could recommend Gray's sixth chapter, "The River of Money," where he observes: "The coca plant...is almost indestructible. It will grow anywhere, including the sheer face of a cliff, and it will flourish in soil too poor to support anything else. It has built-in resistance to local bugs, and unlike tomatoes, rice, or beans - which have to be reseeded each season - a single coca plant can last forty years. Instead of one or two crops a year, you can harvest coca leaves every ninety days. As a farmer-friendly shrub, about the only thing that could beat Erythroxylon coca would be a money tree."

Similarly, Gray drives home the enormous profits created by prohibition: "From farm to lab, it takes about 250 pounds of leaves, worth say $150, to make a pound of cocaine you can sell in the provincial capital for $1,500. But it is in the next step - getting it from the jungle to the streets of Cleveland - that the price takes a spectacular leap from $1,500...