All right, joining us now is Mike Gray, a writer and filmmaker. He authored the film, "China Syndrome," among others. His latest book is entitled, "Drug Crazy, How We Got Into this Mess and How We Can Get Out."

Mike, welcome to the show. Let me ask you, first of all, how you even got into this topic. I mean, how did this book even come about?

MIKE GRAY, DRUG WAR CRITIC: Well, I’ve been aware of the fact, as I think 75 percent of the American people are aware of the fact, that the drug war is a failure. And so six years ago, I decided to start digging into this. And the deeper I got, the more horrified I became. And this book was the result of that.

I tried to cover the entire drug war and then shrink it down to 200 pages. So it’s basically a two subway ride read, and you can get through the whole thing and understand what went wrong and why.

BATTISTA: Well, tell us if you can in a capsule.

GRAY: Well, in capsule, we didn’t have a drug problem in this country prior to 1914. These wounds are totally self-inflicted. And the terrible tragedy that happened to Mrs. Barr and her daughter and the stories that Larry is talking about, the emergency room heroin overdoses, this all occurred during the most stringent prohibition this planet has ever seen. We enacted it in 1914. At that time, we did not have a drug problem. There were a couple of hundred thousand addicts in the country, and there was no teenage addiction. The teenage addicts were absolutely unheard of.

Prior to 1914, for all practical purposes, children didn’t have access to drugs. Now, of course, they can get anything they want from the neighbor’s kid.

BATTISTA: What do you think of this new ad campaign, Mike?

GRAY: Well, I’m strongly in favor of prevention messages going out to teenagers. The problem with this ad campaign, like the previous ad campaigns, is it’s based upon very flawed premises.

Let me tell you, about three years ago when I was in the middle of the research for my book, "Drug Crazy," I got a call from one of my son’s former high school buddies. And he said, "I understand you’re working on a book about drugs. I need help. I’m a heroin addict." Well, I was blown away. And I couldn’t understand what had happened to this kid who was, you know, had a scholarship to college and was on the way to a brilliant career as an artist. And I asked him, "How did you stumble into this hole?" And he said, "Well, they lied to us about marijuana, and I figured they were lying to us about this stuff as well."

Well, it turns out we weren’t lying about heroin. We were telling the truth. But how is this kid supposed to know? And that’s the underlying flaw that permeates this campaign and others is in the attempt to rope marijuana in with these hard drugs: heroin and cocaine.

BATTISTA: So you’re worried the kids won’t take these ads seriously?

GRAY: Well, the problem is in attempting to equate marijuana with the evil of heroin, the message that we send them is that heroin is no more dangerous than marijuana. And that’s a terrible message to send to these kids, and we are now reaping the message—the harvest that that message sowed.

MCCAFFREY: Bobbie, I wonder if I could add something.

BATTISTA: Yeah, go ahead, General.

MCCAFFREY: I think Mike actually has a lot of good points, one of which I would certainly underscore is that we’ve got to read history. And Professor Dave Musto up at Yale University is a good place to start, probably our prominent historian about drug abuse in America.

GRAY: That’s where I started.

MCCAFFREY: We’ve had a terrible drug problem in America during the early part of this century. Cocaine and opiate use was widespread. We had a terrible drug use problem in the 1870s. We’ve been here before. And what happens when we get energized and reject this substance abuse, it goes down. So, you know, to some extent, Mike and I may agree on it.

And Bobbie, the reason we say that is that when we look at this Columbia University data, Joe Califano and his associates, a 12-year- old smoking pot is 79 times more likely to end up as a chronic drug abuser than one who isn’t. So gateway behavior is a threat.

BATTISTA: And Mike Gray, I read in the research also that you were expounding a bit on how they do things overseas, certainly places in Europe.

GRAY: Well, Bobbie, the Dutch don’t have this problem. I mean, the Dutch realized a long time ago that a certain small segment of the youths are going to experiment with drugs regardless of what we do. And they felt that it was better for them to experiment with marijuana than with heroin and cocaine. So they erected a barrier between these drugs. They made marijuana available in coffee shops to anyone over 18. And as a consequence, they have an aging heroin population. In other words, the number of the heroin users in Holland are getting older and older, which means that they are not getting new recruits.

The Dutch have a much more tolerant policy, and their results are better than ours across the board.

MCCAFFREY: Mike, if I may, let me say again, I think we ought to agree to disagree on the facts. The Dutch experience is not something I would suggest we want to model. It’s been an unmitigated disaster...

GRAY: General, General, General, let me...

MCCAFFREY: Let me finish, if I may, Mike.

GRAY: OK, all right.

MCCAFFREY: I would argue instead... Let me just take the title of your book, "Drug Crazy." It seems to me you’ve got to be crazy to use drugs or to make it easier for young people to do that. And that’s essentially what some of us argue the Dutch have tried to do.

GRAY: General, let me caution you that your deputy, Jim McDunna (ph), told me that the situation in the Netherlands was a disaster during one of our recent debates. So yesterday, I checked with the Dutch embassy in Washington. And hopefully, they are monitoring this broadcast, and you may get a diplomatic protest from the Dutch embassy because they are quite concerned...

MCCAFFREY: They’ve done them from the French, also, I might add, diplomatic protests, and the Germans and others who are concerned about their example in Europe.

GRAY: General, let me finish. The French have a higher addiction rate than the Dutch. We have a higher addiction rate than the Dutch. And the worse thing that we have is a decreasing age among the heroin users.

MCCAFFREY: Actually, you know, I probably would again dispute you on the facts. The rates of drug abuse among young people in Holland have tended to go up dramatically during this period of time, while ours were going down. So I really don’t agree with what you’re saying.

GRAY: Bobbie, I hope for the sake of settling this argument once and for all you will check with the Dutch embassy, because the Dutch embassy is going to issue a formal protest against this...

BATTISTA: Mike, unfortunately, hold on to that thought and others. We do have to hit a break very quickly here. We’ll be back.

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