How we got
into this mess

Anyone interested in how we got into our current drug prohibition mess should immediately grab up his or her checkbook and order "The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend," by Thomas Metzger, in paperback at $15 ($18.50 postpaid) from Loompanics Unlimited, P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, Wash. 98368.
This is no plodding academic treatise. Opening this book (OK, the cover is a bit garish) is like opening your cartoon umbrella and leaping off an hallucinogenic cliff with Mr. Metzger, into the kaleidoscopic nightmare of early 20th century racism and puritan

zealotry which gave us first alcohol Prohibition, and then -- slower to develop, but in the long term far more destructive of both our common sense and the fabric of our liberties -- our full-fledged modern "War on Drugs."
(Did you know the German chemists at Bayer held off for a full year -- till 1899 -- introducing one of their pain-relieving discoveries, aspirin, because they feared the known side effects would limit its appeal? Instead, the firm's managers decided to concentrate their public relations efforts on the 1898 introduction of a product they considered far safer and more effective: diacetylmorphine, to which they gave the trade name "heroin.")
Join with us now as Mr. Metzger leads us on a whirlwind tour of turn-of-the-century American newspapers like Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, which warned readers of

 
the "300 million obscene yellow rascals" who proposed to use opium as their means to deflower otherwise pure white women in order to promote their hideous race-mixing schemes, and of New York show biz entrepreneur Chuck Connors (no relation to "The Rifleman," I presume) who made his living in the 1890s as a "lobby gow," or tour guide, escorting groups of well-heeled white folks into exotic Chinatown:
"Novelists, royalty, and theatrical people, as well as run-of-the-mill wealthy gawkers, paid handsomely for an in-depth look at this 'Chinese Hell.' There, Connors would spin tales of depravity and sin, identifying random passersby as 'notorious Tong hatchet men,' and women seen in upper story windows as 'slave wives.' Contributing much to the popular notion of the Chinese narcotic threat, he'd finally bring his charges to a fake opium den tricked out in the utmost of squalid Chinese decor.
"A man, named Georgia Yee, posed with a white woman as hopeless addicts. As a titillating climax to the tour, Yee would begin gibbering and jigging around the 'den' -- Connors explaining to his goggle-eyed guests that Yee's insanity was a direct result of the 'demon opium.' Lulu -- Yee's consort -- lounged lasciviously,

as a potent reminder of how far white women could fall when they meddle with opium. The fact that the entire episode was fabricated for tourists did not diminish its impact. The guests would flee back to their safe white enclaves and tell everyone they knew that they'd seen with their own eyes the effects of the demon flower."
Just as blacks and Mexicans were soon to be linked in the public imagination with the supposed moral decline of the nation -- and their intoxicants of choice, cocaine and Indian hemp (systematically renamed "marijuana" by newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst) sacrificed as scapegoats in a depraved alchemist's scheme to return the base metal of a mixed-race nation back to the gold standard of Aryan purity -- so was the Chinese "dope fiend" part and parcel of the campaign to demonize and ban the patented German analgesic heroin, and the other opiates from which it was derived.
Mr. Metzger's book is picaresque -- it dips a toe here and there into the appalling stream of racism (and bizarre moral confusion of racial with sanitary "cleanliness") which gave birth to the Drug War, but hardly replaces the unified field philosophy of medical liberty expressed

 
in the books of Dr. Thomas Szasz ("Ceremonial Chemistry" and "Our Right to Drugs" -- both available from Laissez Faire Books at 415-541-9780), which Mr. Metzger duly credits in his notes.
Nor is this the first work to document the racist roots of our current (highly selective) drug prohibitions -- see Jack Herer's works, including "Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy," for example (Hemp Publishing, 1985.)
But at 215 pages, this is a powerful introduction to the subject, in a charmingly illustrated and user-friendly package.
Buy it wholesale. Give free samples to the kids. Spread a little truth to answer the antiquated and groundless "dope fiend" paranoia which underlies the schizophrenic bobbing and weaving of the other side.
(For those ordering multiple copies of this same volume, I'm told Loompanics offers a 20 percent discount on five to nine copies, and a 40 percent discount on orders of 10 to 49 copies.)

Thus, I can't testify whether Mr. Gray's proposed remedy is sufficiently radical.
(To propose a gradual retreat from tyranny is, of course, to endorse a continuation of tyranny. And I hope we don't need to get into "treating drug use as a disease, instead of a crime." If we authorize locking people up for unlimited terms and dosing them with drool-drugs against their will for exercising their NINTH Amendment right to medical self-treatment, why should the government long stop short of doing the same to those who exercise inconvenient FIRST Amendment rights, like writing anti-government books, or attending non-ATF-approved churches?)
However, I have seen excerpts from Mr. Gray's recent writings, and they are powerful stuff, detailing cases like that of 16-year-old Texan Jonathan Kollman, who had been clean for several months when he ran into a "babe in a red sports car" who offered to buy him a fix. Ten minutes later, he was "back in the jaws of the heroin dragon."
And who was this Dragon Lady with the ready supply of white? "Turns out she was an undercover narcotics officer from the Plano, Texas police department who needed an informant. Playing on the kid's vulnerability, she reintroduced him to his habit, and was then able to use him for a half dozen