The Fix

the long version

In America's twenty-five-year war against drugs, only one national policy achieved some success. That was the Nixon Administration's program for treating heroin addicts, which was dismantled by the Reagan Administration. In The Fix, Michael Massing exposes the political and ideological narrow-mindedness that have made national drug policy a failure, and demonstrates convincingly why we should reinstate the policy that worked. Massing shows that drug treatment works by describing the success that street workers have had in reaching out to addicts in Spanish Harlem and placing them in the few treatment programs now available. Further evidence that treatment can reduce the demand for drugs comes from the Nixon years. Confronted with a raging heroin epidemic in the early 1970s, President Nixon responded by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a nationwide network of methadone clinics and other drug-treatment facilities. The program was a striking success, and, if revived today, it could go a long way toward reducing the rate of drug-related crime in the United States.