Drug War Deadlock

Caught this press release about a new book coming out from Hoover Institution Press:

Drug War Deadlock: The Policy Battle Continues (Hoover Institution Press, 2005), edited by Hoover research fellow Laura E. Huggins

It’s a collection of articles, OpEds, letters and such by major players on both sides of the drug war debate.

Contributors include Howard Abadinsky, St. John’s University; Scott Barbour, Greenhaven Press; Ronald Bayer, Columbia University; William J. Bennett, Heritage Foundation; Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato Institute; Lou Dobbs, CNN; David Duncan, Duncan and Associates; Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution; Bruce D. Glasscock, Plano, Texas, police department; Asa Hutchinson, former administrator of Drug Enforcement Agency; James A. Inciardi, University of Delaware; Bruce D. Johnson, Special Populations Research; Charles Levinthal, Hofstra University; Robert J. MacCoun, University of California, Berkeley; Duane McBride, Andrews University; Joseph D. McNamara, Hoover Institution; Ethan A. Nadelmann, Drug Policy Alliance; Robert Peterson, attorney; Peter Reuter, University of Maryland; John Jay Rouse, Sacred Heart University, retired; Thomas Szasz, State University of New York Health Science Center; John Stossel, ABC News; Yvonne Terry, University of Michigan; John P. Walters, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy; and James Q. Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles.

That’s quite a group.
What’s really incredible is that you can download all the chapters of the book for free as pdf files at the Hoover Press website.
And there are some classics in there. Milton Friedman rips apart Bennett’s Don’t Surrender: The drug war worked once. It can again. thesis. And who can forget Lou Dobbs’ August 2003 OpEd: A War Worth Fighting [which Ethan Straffin and I enjoyed trashing back then]?
I haven’t read it all yet. But it sure seems to have a delightful range of writings from differing viewpoints (and seeing such things side-by-side always seems to highlight the pathetically weak structure of the prohibition arguments).