Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.

• Author: Boire, Richard Glen
• Position: Book Review

Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use By Jacob Sullum Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 2003 Pp. 340. $25.95 cloth.

I seldom read books about drug policy. After just a little exposure to the genre, one finds again and again the same dates, the same key people, the same arguments from the government, and the same arguments from the policy-reform camp. The government tells its grand narrative ("drugs are bad"), and the reformers tell their counternarrative ("drug prohibition is worse"). Nothing changes.

Yet when I heard that Jacob Sullum was working on a book about drugs and drug policy, my expectations rose for something new. As a senior editor for Reason magazine, a publication devoted to intelligent discussions of how best to allocate power between the government and the individual, Sullum had written a number of unorthodox essays about drugs. I looked forward to getting more of his thoughts on a topic that, though always in motion, rarely seems to advance.

Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use is the fruit of Sullum's thinking about drugs and drug policy. Compared to most books in this genre, it is refreshing and insightful, and it might well produce some of the traction needed to advance beyond the "Just Say No" policy--an infantile policy equivalent to "Don't Put That in Your Mouth."

Saying Yes deflates much of the exaggeration about illegal drugs, leading the reader to conclude that this or that illegal drug is not nearly as harmful as the government has led us to believe. The book is anchored in a particular level of discourse about drugs--the fact-based, medical, scientific, analytical, reporter level. Sullum's arguments tend to conclude at the point where he has taken the government's thumb off the harm scale. Although he sometimes takes the government to task for trying to rig the scale, he seldom explores the government's fundamental motivations for playing unfairly in the first place. Rarely does he discuss drugs or drug policy from a deeper philosophical or principled perspective. Although the book's grounding in rationality is its strength, it is also its weakness. Empiricism will get one only so far when the terrain consists of irrational forces, deep-seated fears, religion, power, and money.

An ever-present theme in Sullum's book is what he calls "voodoo pharmacology'--the idea, promoted in large part by the government, that certain drugs have the power to hijack people and enslave them in an inescapable prison of craving and compulsion...