There is a timely plot to this mystery thriller about a Republican US senator from Pennsylvania who introduces a bill to legalize drugs. His daughter has died of an apparent overdose of heroin. He receives death threats. He is commandeered for a special meeting with the President, who opposes his legalization bill. However, the President does offer the services of the now-cabinet-level Secretary of National Drug Control to help solve the mystery of his daughter’s death.

The senator is contacted by elements of organized crime who wish a meeting to discuss his bill. One of the more interesting characters in the novel, a ‘drug dealer’ who quotes Freud and economic theories, also offers help with solving his daughter’s death. The senator discusses this contact with the Secretary of Drug Control, who feels such a meeting might be of interest to narcotics police. At this secret meeting, assassins attempt to kill the senator and the drug lord.

The votes he needs to get his bill out of committee onto the floor of the Senate for the public debate seem solid. He desires this open democratic forum as an alternative to the ‘zero tolerance’ for debate that characterizes the drug war. Then he starts losing votes. Who is getting to his support? Where’s the pressure coming from? At the heart of this mystery is the question of who has the most to gain from continuing the drug prohibition, the cops or the criminals? Prohibition has been good for both. Criminal justice budgets are booming and thousands of lucrative careers have been made on the drug war. Corruption among law enforcement is rampant. An honest small-town chief of police confides to the senator that he supports legalization because the corruption is worse than the drugs, but he asks not to be quoted. To speak out against such failure would be career ending. Only the senator has the integrity to speak the heretical truth.

The criminal cartels would seem to have just as little reason to oppose prohibition as the narcotics officers and prison guards. They rake in billions in untaxed profits yearly, $100 billion from the United States alone. They never touch the drugs, just the profits. They lose a large number of their cheap work force (children and addicts mainly) to prisons, juvenile halls and death, but there are millions to replace them. So drug enforcement bureaucrats are happy with millions of meaningless arrests of minority drug users, the cartels are happy with bigger profits each year, and the politicians are happy with empty anti-drug posturing.

What could possibly break up such a powerful and harmonious arrangement? Where does the senator’s clandestine support come from? Is there some recognition that the costs are finally breaking both federal and local community banks, that prohibition-related disease and violence are becoming intolerable? Perhaps more interest groups beyond criminal justice are realizing that the drug war represents an enormous waste of precious resources that are being stolen from schools, public health, the elderly, and the taxpayers (the ones who vote). Furthermore, there is the potential for some of the billions in illegal profits to become legal, taxable profits. The senator from South Carolina is getting pressure from the tobacco cartels that look to marijuana to offset losses in tobacco revenue. This same process —cashing in on the repeal of Prohibition — made millionaires of Budweiser and Coors. Today, out of economic necessity, the country of Columbia is legitimizing the profits of cocaine dealers.

The novel has a fascinating and plausible conclusion that weaves all these forces together in a dramatic, made-for-a-movie ending. So, perhaps the story of "the crooked men" who benefit from prohibition might reach the wide audience it deserves. Beyond this, the novel contains what is perhaps the most fitting symbol of prohibition I’ve seen: the use of dead bodies to move cocaine and drug profits around. Anti-drug warriors (and some doctors) who think only of the potential medical harms from drugs, ignoring prohibition-related harms, should be forced to come to grips with the deranged creation of prohibition, symbolic as it is of the real evil we have unleashed upon society.