This book tells, in as few pages as possible, the story of the War against Drugs. The American people don't know this story. The British and the rest of the world don't know it either. Although the media discuss substance-abuse from time to time, and although political candidates are constantly beating drums about the need for a War against Drugs, the public has never been told the truth about the Drug War. As a result, the American people have little idea of the danger they are in.

All across the nation, judges and senior attorneys, law enforcement and corrections officers, are desperately worried about what is happening to America's legal system. These people are not alarmists or extremists, but mainstream Americans who are in a position to see what is happening. What they see is a legal system which is so over-burdened by drugs it is starting to collapse under the strain. Many judges say as much as fifty per cent of their time is taken up with drug-related criminal cases, and everybody involved in the judicial system says drugs take up over half of the available time of all America's courts. After drunk driving, which topped the list for arrests in 1994, came no less than a million arrests for alleged drug offenses – more arrests than for any other crime. In America, more prisons than hospitals are being built, and the United States – the country with 'Liberty' on all its coinage – already has more people behind bars than any other civilized country in the world. Half of them are there because of drug law violations.

Because the public knows hardly any of the truth about the War against Drugs, America's very special tools for protecting the freedom of the individual citizen, tools which make America so different from everywhere else in the world, are beginning to disintegrate.

How this rot can be stopped is a matter for urgent and intelligent debate among thoughtful Americans, and the good news is that with the USA's unique legal and democratic set-up, the American people are still equipped to save the sum of things. Yet no-one can even get started on any rescue mission until they know what the facts are, and that is why this book had to be written.

What books and magazines there are on the subject have, on the whole, been produced either by rather dry academics or by legalize-the-lot-activists. It is important to emphasize that this writer is neither of these, but a rather concerned lawyer and father who wants to know what to tell his kids about the 'drug problem'. The trigger which got this book researched in the first place is this very real anxiety among judges and lawyers which can be found all across America. In particular, there was a significant event which happened in Cleveland, Ohio, in the fall of 1993.

About three hundred judges and attorneys came together for what is called a 'judicial conference'. Conferences like this take place all over the United States. The state's Chief Justice is usually there, along with the appeal court justices and trial judges, and they invite to join them an equal number of senior attorneys from their neighborhood. Judicial conferences are get-togethers of responsible, often distinguished, legal thinkers, and what made the Cleveland conference unusual was a topic that was proposed for discussion and debate. The motion for debate suggested that, in Ohio anyway, all laws relating to the use or abuse of drugs should be completely abolished. Legalize the lot, the proposal suggested. Call off the War against Drugs and use some of the money you save to educate and inform the population. Tell the American people what these criminalized substances really are, teach them what effect they can have on the body and on the mind, tell them honestly what the extent of the problem really is and warn them of the dangers. But then let them decide for themselves whether to play around with drugs or not.

This was strong stuff, revolutionary stuff indeed, coming from such a responsible body as a judicial conference. But the motion for debate in Cleveland brought many of the people involved face to face with the blank realisation that they didn't have very much factual information about the War against Drugs. They didn't have enough actual facts at their fingertips even to be able to think about it intelligently. And if this is true of the average American judge and of the above-average American lawyer, it is even more true of the average American citizen. The public's ignorance about the War against Drugs is amazing – as well as being completely understandable, and this is as true of the European countries as it is of the US.

But when the subject is researched – and it's all there, buried in the libraries and in the congressional record – a quite disturbing story comes to light. The first thing a researcher discovers is that the War against Drugs was a purely American invention, entirely home-made. The United States, single-handedly, started this war in the first place, then foisted it on the rest of the world. The War against Drugs did not begin, as most people imagine, some time in the 1960s, but as long ago as the year 1875. This makes it, statistically, one of the longest-lasting wars in recorded history, and the reason why it started in the first place was some quite naked racism and prejudice on the part of some of the American public. Perhaps the most troublesome thing a researcher discovers is that, almost all the way along over the last hundred and more years, when it comes to 'drugs', the American people have been consistently lied to, led by the nose and made fools of.

The War Against Drugs cost the American taxpayer, in the 1990s, approximately twelve thousand million dollars a year, and there is no reason to believe that things changed after the turn of the millennium. It is a war with casualties but no decisive victories. Nor is there any end to it in sight. Worse, when one knows even a little bit about the story, it quickly becomes obvious that this is a war that cannot be won, and that the damage it is doing to the most effective legal system that the world has ever known is turning out to be nothing short of disastrous.

What follows, then, is the short story of how America's law got tangled up with drugs, what this entanglement led to, and how the war was carried outward from America to the rest of the civilized world. We could go straight into this story, but since one of the truly dangerous side-effects of the Drug War is the damage it is doing to America's law and America's respect for what is called 'the Rule of Law', it is important that we pause before we begin on the story and pay just a few moments' attention to the very different, the very unusual law that exists in the United States.

Although Americans seem to be quickly losing confidence in their legal system – particularly in their lawyers – and although the workings of American law often seem strange and excessive, it is, despite its many faults – and it's got them – a more useful and more effective system of law than any other in the world. In most cases it is probably more enlightened, and more effective, than any other system of law in recorded history. Without America's very special law and legal system, there could never have been such a thing as the American Dream, and the United States could never have become the most successful nation in history. I want to take a moment, here, to say something about America’s relationship with the law, because indirectly we are all affected by it. If you want to get straight into the story, though, you can skip this, and see how the war broke out in the first place.

This very different kind of legal system, that the United States is lucky enough to have, is something few Americans are consciously aware of. When you are born into a system that works, you are almost bound to take it for granted. You don't marvel, every time you take a shower, that the turn of a knob can give you water at the right temperature any more than you pause to think about what a technological miracle a tape-recorder is. Because they were part of the world you grew up in, you tend not to notice them until they go wrong. So it is with America's law. Because schoolchildren are taught virtually nothing about the way the law works, it's not surprising that most Americans are unaware of how very different their law is. Or how vitally important it is to American society.

But it is different, and it makes everything else possible. Consider. Americans are the only members of the human race who grow up knowing and using the words 'constitutional' and 'unconstitutional'. Out of all the world's inhabitants, Americans are the only people who know for sure that the last word on almost everything comes not from a king or some kind of political boss – nor even from a president or a legislature – but from a court of law: The Supreme Court. Americans take it for granted that the law is there to protect them and to protect America's own brand of personal freedoms. In particular, the law is available, accessible, if it is needed. When rights have been trampled on, it is the individual American's habit to find an attorney and, if necessary, to follow through and have his or her day in court. Of course we've all heard the chorus of complaint that there is too much litigation in America, but we are hardly ever told that in every thriving democracy the courts have always been in constant use. When you go back in history to those few places where real democracy existed – ancient Athens, the early Roman republic, England during its better days – you invariably find these democracies were all awash with litigation. And so it has been in America, all the way through its history. Even the pioneers, on their way out to the far West with their ox-drawn wagons, used to stop and wait for the next wagon train if it became necessary for people among their number to have a jury trial.

One of the results of having an easily accessible system of law is this: if you grow up in a country surrounded by people who make a habit of standing up individually for their individual rights, you stand a good chance of becoming self-reliant yourself. Instead of just grumbling when you hit a bad patch, your habit is more probably to set about trying to fix things. You come to see problems more as challenges than obstacles. This frame of mind is the centre of what the rest of the world recognizes as 'the American character', and this recognizably different, can-do, character could not exist without America's vigorous, accessible, law. This is one of the basic reasons why the legal system is so important, and why any serious threat to it is a threat to America as we know it. Without continued respect for, and without easy access to the law, Americans would quite quickly become as individually powerless as the rest of the world's inhabitants, and the entire energy of the nation would change.

Even more important, this question about the continued health of America's law and legal system involves our children. At the turn of the millennium, the young people of America seem to be at least as keen on experimenting with drugs as their elders were during the Sixties. It is taken for granted by American teenagers that they have drug pushers as classmates, and that they can get whatever drugs they can afford to pay for. What is alarming for the health of the Rule of Law is that these drug-dealing schoolchildren are not disapproved of by their schoolmates. They don't seem to be disapproved of at all, and this suggests (and there is a lot of other evidence to support it) that the children of America are growing up with an attitude of almost complete disinterest in obeying the law. And that is frightening. That is the kind of trend which alarms judges and thoughtful attorneys across the nation. A widespread public disinterest in obeying the law spells disaster for a country like the United States. If the overall American habit of law abidingness decays, this will be a seriously dangerous place to live. The same is true of any country: we are all threatened when the people around us give up on feeling that the law is there to be obeyed. But it is in America that the problem is most serious.

Yet it bears repeating: the good news is that it's not too late to do something about all this. When the American people know the true story of how drugs came to be such a big issue, and realize how stupidly and dishonestly the whole thing has been handled by the politicians and special interest groups, then it will be possible to solve the problem. But in all kinds of ways, time is running out and it is high time the story was told.