A Splendid Little Drug War: Tragedy, farce, and fake brass cojones south of the border.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Culture & Reviews - Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw - Shooting the Moon: The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other, Ever

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw, by Mark Bowden, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 295 pages, $25

Shooting the Moon: The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other, Ever, by David Harris, Boston: Little, Brown, 394 pages, $26.95

STAY AWAY FROM DRUGS, kids.

They'll suck every filament of moral fiber from your soul and set your brain afire with insane delusions. In the end you'll be murdering, kidnapping, and torturing, and you'll be rationalizing it all for the sake of the drugs. Don't believe me? Just look at what drugs have done to the U.S. government.

George Bush I invaded Panama, burning down entire neighborhoods of the capital and killing hundreds of people, to collar a single two-bit narcotrafficker. The Clinton administration embarked on a nutty $1.5 billion intervention in Colombia's civil war-not because the guerrillas there are Stalinist butchers, but because they sell cocaine. And when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) mistook a plane full of American missionaries for drug runners and helped the Peruvian air force shoot it down, George Bush II administration officials, sounding eerily like Soviet apparatchiks explaining how that damn Korean airliner had only itself to blame, snapped that the missionaries should have filed a better flight plan.

In some ways, this reefer madness is not exactly news. Drug policy has been inducing dementia in U.S. social policies for nearly a century (though Clinton's drug czar Barry McCaffrey plumbed new depths when he argued that letting dying cancer patients smoke marijuana would just turn them into addicts). But it was only recently, after the end of the Cold War, that we began letting the vice squad run foreign policy. Faster and faster, the national security state is evolving into the narcosecurity state, which promises to be even more ruthless.

Two new books illuminate the growing ugliness of a War on Drugs that is rapidly losing its metaphorical status. Alas, the main revelation of David Harris' account of Washington's confrontation with Manuel Noriega's Panamanian mafiacracy is that the '60s left's alleged anti-imperialism was strictly situational. As long as no communists get killed, old New Lefties can be the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for unleashing the U.S. military against foreign narcotraffickers. (The fact that their own butts are no longer in danger of getting shot off, I suspect, is also relevant.)

Harris was among the most famous members of the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era, and he paid the price for it. At Stanford, fraternity boys jumped him and shaved his head; after graduation, he went to prison for refusing to register for the draft. (Admittedly there were compensations; Harris became a Hippie Chick Magnet and even got to boink Joan Baez.) That makes his loud applause for the fanatic cops and prosecutors who goaded the Bush...