OVER the past several years, a gap has opened up between common and elite opinion about drug policy. While the overwhelming majority of Americans (along with their representatives in Washington) continue to support a prohibitionary approach to drugs that is among the harshest in the Western world, a growing contingent of journalists and intellectuals on both sides of the ideological spectrum have begun to advocate a more liberal stance. Many, including such conservative writers as Richard Lowry, editor of National Review, and Andrew Sullivan, have come out in favor of legalizing marijuana, while a few, such as the hard-core libertarians at Reason magazine and the Cato Institute, go even further, advocating the legalization of virtually all drugs currently prohibited. For both groups of reformers the decisive consideration is the issue of relative harm. Whatever the negative consequences of drug use for individuals or society as a whole, the harms that supposedly result from prohibition—harms that range from depriving individuals of their right to pursue pleasure as they see fit to fostering a black market and the criminal subculture it breeds—far outweigh them.

In Drug War Heresies: Learning front Other Vices, Times, and Places, Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter inject much needed clarity and moderation into the dispute between the prohibitionists and their critics. Intent on bringing the rigor of scientific analysis to bear on the question of drug prohibition and legalization, they sift through data and evidence from numerous periods in American history and various places around the globe. The result is social science of a very high order.

The book begins with lengthy introductory sections in which the authors examine the leading issues and arguments in the prohibition-legalization debate, comparing the effects of current policies to several alternatives.They look for parallels between theway the United States regulates a number of drugs on the one hand and prostitution, gambling, alcohol, and cigarettes on the other. Theyconsider the strengths and weaknesses of the current American approach to cocaine and heroin, measured against both past practice in the United States and contemporary policies in European countries, some of which have begun to support "depenalization" as a "third way" between prohibition and outright legalization. Lastly, they look closely at how the Netherlands has fared in its experiment with depenalizing marijuana.

HAVING examined this broad range of policy options, the authors then evaluate them for possible implementation in the United States. Rather than advocating a course of action derived from a single abstract principle—as, for example, libertarians do when they defend legalization by appealing to an absolute right to privacy—MacCoun and Reuter establish a supple measure of what they dub "total harm." Using this measure, they weigh the pros and cons of numerous possible policy changes. For example, they predict that if cocaine and heroin were legalized, "use and addiction would substantially increase." And those harms have to be balanced against likely decreases in various other harms that currently plague us, such as high criminal justice costs, high rates of criminality, and AIDS transmission. In contrast, methadone maintenance for registered heroin addicts would, they claim, produce little social harm, along with considerable potential benefits, both to the addicts themselves as well as to society as a whole.

Equally informative is the authors' discussion of marijuana. Stopping short of advocating legalization of the drug, MacCoun and Reuter instead endorse the more moderate path of depenalization, since the European experience shows that removing criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of the drug has little effect on the number of its users but significantly reduces "criminal justice costs and infringements on liberty and privacy." To go further—to legalize marijuana outright—would clearly lead to numerous detrimental effects, at least in the United States. In addition to the fact that legalization would remove such "informal sanctions" as the "embarrassment and threat to relationships and opportunities that can result from being arrested," full legalization would also allow marijuana to become commercialized. Americans would be confronted by advertisements that encourage use of the drug. And since, in the United States, "the combination of First Amendment protections on commercial free speech and the political economy of taxation ... help generate low excise taxes and loose regulation," that advertising would likely be aggressive. In other words, America's considerable freedoms would likely make the legalization of marijuana more harmful in the United States than it would be in other countries.

And so, though MacCoun and Reuter side with the liberalizers, they do so with caution. The reason for their moderation is the lack of evidence that changes in policy one way or another would lead to a measurable decrease in overall harm. In truth, public policy possesses considerably less power to effect great social change than policy experts typically believe. Much more powerful is the influence of culture. In comparison to Europe, the United States tends to be "characterized by greater hedonism, weaker informal social controls, a higher propensity for risk taking, and a higher level of criminal violence generally." We thus have reason to believe that Europe's bolder experiments with depenalization would have much more harmful effects if tried in the United States.

In place of a radical overhaul of policy, then, the authors propose a series of moderate changes, most of which are designed to diminish the negative consequences of current practices, especially what they see as the "cruel" disregard for those harms caused by the overzealous pursuit of an impossible goal (a "drug-free society"). While they support expansions of needle-exchange programs in order to lower rates of AIDS transmission among addicts, and methadone-maintenance programs to make it possible for heroin addicts to lead more productive lives, they also endorse "doing less"—that is, crafting "less intrusive, divisive, and expensive policies." These might include "locking up drug offenders for shorter terms, worrying more about the racial disparities in sentencing policies, and giving up fewer civil liberties for unlikely reductions in drug problems." According to MacCoun and Reuter, these changes would lead to "little demonstrable risk of increased drug use," and would lessen many of the harms associated with current approaches to drug policy.

DRUG War Heresies is undeniably an impressive work of social science. The authors' reasonableness, their deft handling of various notions of individual and social harm, and their sensitivity to the cultural dimensions of public policy all contribute to the book's success. Whether it should be treated as the high-water mark of thinking about drug policy is another matter, however.

MacCoun and Reuter's conclusion—that there is no complete "solution" to the drug problem and that we should therefore focus on implementing minor reforms that will increase individual liberty while continuing to discourage drug use—is fine, as far as it goes. No doubt the euphemistic rhetoric of a war" on drugs is as inappropriate as was the notion of a 'war" on poverty a generation ago. Both epithets misleadingly suggest that public policy can bring about a decisive victory against a social malady that is in all likelihood intractable.

Yet it is far from clear that the moderate approaches MacCoun and Reuter would substitute for the absolute prohibitions of the present should be enacted. Even if we assume that the reforms the authors advocate would lead to improvements in all of the categories they identify—including physical health, social and economic functioning, safety and public order, criminal justice, and such "symbolic/intangible" elements as individual liberty and privacy—we would still have reason to be skeptical about their proposals. The harms that the authors emphasize are real and important, but they are not the only, or even the most pressing, ones. More fundamental is the considerable harm that drugs inflict on the souls of citizens, and in the end, the common good of the political community.

Drug use is a vice—as MacCoun and Renter themselves acknowledge it to be in the subtitle of their book—because it arises out of and, in turn, encourages some of the basest of human inclinations. The drug user craves complete control of the intensity and duration of the experience of happiness, whicl1 he defines solely in terms of pleasure. The user seeks this state of mind above all else, and wants to enjoy it without having to engage in those praiseworthy actions and activities that, under normal conditions, are our only means of (fleetingly) securing it. Drug users thus tend to be selfish and slothful, unproductive and unconcerned with anything beyond their own self-satisfaction. Even if they continue to be economically productive, holding down jobs and earning salaries, they tend to direct their energies entirely toward the pursuit of their own private pleasures. To libertarians who deny the need for public-spiritedness and even portray it as a form of collusion with the unholy forces of government coercion, this might not appear to be a problem. But for those of us concerned about the common good of our country—however difficult or even impossible it may be to quantify such a good—the problem is a very real one. As anyone who has spent time in Amsterdam is well aware, sleaziness is no less significant than crime in determining a society's overall quality of life, even if the former cannot be measured as easily as the latter.

THE soul, public-spiritedness, the common good, quality of life—these are subjects rarely incorporated into social-science research today, and so their absence from MacCoun and Reuter's study will not likely be missed by many of their colleagues, who will justly praise the book as the meticulously executed piece of scholarship it is. But a public policy that ignores these larger questions is bound to fail, and hence for all of its insight and practical suggestions, Drug War Heresies offers surprisingly little to justify significant drug-policy reform in the United States.